Every now and then, I appear on national television and declare that I own an asset worth the best part of a million pounds, when in fact it isn’t mine at all. We’ve all done it! It’s such an easy mistake to make: there you are, in front of the cameras, and – quite by accident – you confidently assert your ownership of a very expensive thing that doesn’t belong to you.
This is what happened to Nigel Farage, the MP for Clacton, in November last year when he accidentally announced on Sky News: “I have bought a house in Clacton.” It’s such an easy mistake to make that Farage repeated it in January of this year. A listener to Nick Ferrari’s LBC show wanted to know if Farage had “bought somewhere to live in Clacton”. “I have,” he replied, quite by accident. Farage has since explained that he simply misspoke: the house in which he lives when he is resident in Clacton does not belong to him, but to his partner, the French politician Laure Ferrari.
A quick tour of the government’s stamp duty calculator explains why this verbal stumble could, to a desperate cynic, appear controversial. If the house, which reportedly cost around £900,000, had been bought by Farage as a second home – as he unintentionally told the nation, twice – he would have been liable for stamp duty of £77,500. The high figure is due to the fact that Farage owns a few properties already and stamp duty is higher for second homes. If Ferrari bought the house as her only property, or her main residence, she would have been liable for stamp duty of £32,500. The question of whether Farage owns the house in which he lives in Clacton therefore has an implication of something around £45,000 for tax collection. Farage has since said that any insinuation this arrangement was a decision taken to reduce the tax payable on the property is “a disgusting allegation, unfair and untrue”.
More importantly, it doesn’t matter. The Reform leader’s voters do not care how much money he has, or how he got it. The same is true of Donald Trump: a decade of reporting on the US president’s myriad conflicts of interest and business failures have been of no interest to his voter base. So why is Farage’s stamp duty bill of little consequence, when Angela Rayner’s stamp duty bill was a resigning matter?
The first thing to say is that Rayner did underpay stamp duty on her property. Farage could not have underpaid, because, contrary to claims in the mainstream media (claims made repeatedly by one Nigel Farage) he didn’t actually buy a house in Clacton. Rayner’s case was complex, involving divorce, disability and arrangements that require a specialist tax lawyer to fully understand. But her voters are obviously right to care more about her situation, because she was second in command of running the country. Specialist tax lawyers were not exactly out of her reach. Having already been the subject of an investigation by HMRC over whether she should have paid capital gains tax on the sale of another house in 2015, it is frankly unbelievable that she failed to consult them.
This is only the latest in a long series of forehead-smiting bungles by a government that promised, in its election manifesto, “a clean-up that ensures the highest standards of integrity and honesty”. Almost as soon as Labour was elected, the party was embarrassed by revelations about gifts from the Labour peer and party donor Waheed Alli. The Labour MP Jas Athwal was found to be the landlord of 15 rental flats, some of which were infested with insects and had black mould and broken electrical fittings.
The then transport secretary, Louise Haigh, resigned after having failed to report that she had pleaded guilty to fraud in 2014. Tulip Siddiq resigned after it emerged she had been insufficiently curious about who paid for the offshore trust that owned the flat in which she had lived for years. The former homelessness minister, Rushanara Ali, resigned after having evicted tenants from her London property, which she had planned to sell, before renting it out again at a significantly increased rate.
For the populist right, such revelations would not mean embarrassment and resignation. Research by two experts on behavioural economics, Stephen Martin and Joseph Marks, has shown that in some cases, polling of Trump’s voters has revealed that they trust him more after he has been shown to be dishonest. As Martin and Marks explain in their 2019 book Messengers, this is because there are two kinds of trust. There is trust in a person’s integrity, and trust in a person’s competence. Boris Johnson’s electoral magic was not, in this reading of voters’ thinking, because they didn’t realise he was a charlatan; it was because they trusted that he meant what he said about Brexit. Reform voters may not trust Nigel Farage’s personal integrity, but they do trust he will give them the changes they want to immigration.
Without a clear offer of that kind, all Labour had to offer was integrity-based trust. It is therefore right for voters to hold them to a different standard – one that the government has so far failed to meet.
[See also: Who will be Labour’s next Deputy Leader?]
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This article appears in the 10 Sep 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Fight Back
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