Nige tells Reform's supporters 'I can't be bought' – whatever it looks like

Nigel Farage Keeps Drawing Scrutiny Over Questionable Donations

You could almost feel Nigel Farage's frustration. Why was it always him? Surely it was about time someone gave him a break. There he was trying to earn some money from a Thai crypto billionaire and a gold bullion dealer, and yet still Reform kept getting linked to suspicious cash.

It was almost as if a pattern was emerging. First there was the £5m gift, then the donations via Richard Tice, and now Channel 4 News had done a sting on him and two of his most trusted aides in which it looked as if they were happy to break the law on political donations. Life can be so unfair at times.

The headlines from Reform's party conference in Birmingham were meant to be all about Farage declaring a national emergency the moment he got into No 10. Instead he was dealing with a rather more pressing crisis. Every time he tries to persuade the country he is running a serious party and that it is not a one-man band, something seems to happen to make it look like a low-grade clown show.

Operation Failed Clean-up was initially left in the hands of Richard Tice and Lee Anderson. Tice is one of the least plausible politicians you can hope to find, so he did not even appreciate the irony of claiming it was all an establishment plot run by leftwing eco activists.

As for Lee, he was adamant that the two Reform members involved — James Orr, a Cambridge associate professor, and Dan Jukes, Farage's trusted right-hand aide for more than a decade — had been out of line and suspended from the party. He could not say more as an investigation had been started. When asked who was leading it, he replied: "I don't know because the investigation hasn't started."

Others were equally confused. Danny Kruger thought there might be some way back for Orr and Jukes once the investigation had exonerated them. Nadine Dorries speculated that maybe they had not known they would be breaking the law, though the undercover footage rather indicated they had known exactly what they were doing.

Farage was baffled. He claimed Orr and Jukes were just contractors he barely knew, even though both had been the closest of mates with him.

At a lunchtime press conference, he announced a spontaneous statement that sounded carefully worded by his lawyers. It was a hoax, he said. No laws had been broken, no money had been taken — except Reform had allegedly taken £35,000 to pay for the opinion poll, and the film suggested they would have taken £500,000 if it had been genuine.

It was all a misunderstanding, he insisted. And he could not believe he had been caught on film having a champagne and oysters lunch in Clacton, because he had only ever been there once in his life. "It was just some jack-the-laddery," he said. "Pub talk."

Still, some things about the conference were business as usual. Queues formed when 8,000 people turned up at once for 8,000 tickets, surprising the organisers. One member arrived dressed as Richard I.

With the conference running an hour late, Jeremy Kyle was left to fill in. He interviewed one attendee who said all woke people should be hung. The guest speaker was Jordan Bardella, president of the far-right National Rally party in France. He congratulated Farage on his brilliant win against the establishment in Clacton, then praised the Brits for standing up to Hitler — a comment considered rich from a man whose party was founded by Nazi collaborators.

Eventually Farage took the stage, preceded by tacky smoke and pyrotechnic effects. "I can't be bought," he declared. Except it rather looks as if he can.