A few days before George Cottrell found his face splashed across the front page of the Sunday Times, the baby-faced friend of Nigel Farage attended a lunch at the Boisdale in London’s Belgravia, a restaurant beloved by the Reform UK leader. The lunch was for supporters of Forest, the tobacco lobbying firm, and Cottrell was in good spirits, though he was agitated by the slow service and complained to his fellow guests that the waitress really should have known his drinks order, given that he is a regular. When she returned, he told her to bring his next drink in precisely seven minutes, the request made by the ruthless banker played by Matthew McConaughey at the start of The Wolf of Wall Street, as one guest noted with amusement.
Cottrell, otherwise known as “Posh George”, has been by Farage’s side for a decade, and Farage has been by his, including when Cottrell was arrested a decade ago. He served eight months in US prison for wire fraud and then returned to Farage’s side, the relationship between them never entirely clear. Until, that is, the Sunday Times revealed Cottrell has been providing benefits including staff, security and housing to the Reform leader for years. Farage was already in political trouble over the £5m he received, and didn’t disclose, from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne. The Cottrell revelations simply poured fuel on the fire.
But the problem for Farage isn’t just, or primarily, about which rules he might have broken and how, or even whether characters with criminal pasts or crypto links have undue influence over him. It is that his “man of the people” image is now being challenged by every fresh bit of detail about the company he keeps or the money he earns. It isn’t a crime to have a friend with a criminal past, or one who flaunts his wealth in brash ways in expensive restaurants, or one who, according to a Polymarket gambling account in his name, appears to have lost more than $100,000 betting on when Keir Starmer would resign. Farage has always been a flashy character who enjoys a PFL (“proper fucking lunch”) in some of Mayfair’s brashest private members’ clubs, who lives a life clearly and demonstrably different to those of the voters he manages to connect with. He has been friends with this convicted criminal for years, in plain sight. Yet somehow, following the revelations about the financial assistance he received from Harborne and Cottrell, and to the amazement of political opponents who have been banging on about this for years, the idea that Farage isn’t on the side of ordinary people is, his opponents believe, only now starting to stick.
This is felt inside Reform, too. The party has been rattled by the donations furore, the Makerfield by-election loss, the threat of Restore to its right, and by internal divisions over the influx of former Tories – about whom its home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf has been a vocal critic. Farage has been revered inside Reform since its founding, yet in recent days the odds – on the very sorts of platforms where Cottrell regularly bets – on his resignation have shortened.
So Farage took a gamble of his own and risked a big move to scramble the narrative. Borrowing from the Donald Trump playbook of all-out attack, he announced he would resign as an MP and force a by-election in Clacton, hoping to go over the heads of the parliamentary standards commissioner investigating him and the journalists scrutinising him, to the voters – or, to be more precise, to the selectorate in Clacton, which is much better disposed towards him than the rest of the country. He said it would be a “people vs the establishment” vote. “It’s a chance to stick two fingers up to the entire establishment,” he told voters in the constituency. “If I win, you win, if I lose they win.”
Farage hopes that this will put him on the right side of a populist battle against the media – or, more precisely, the “mainstream media” – so he can reclaim his mantle as the man of the people. He didn’t break the law, he says. It’s all a fuss over technicalities. The real story is that the establishment is out to stop him at all costs.
He did what he could to reclaim the narrative, but within hours the other parties declined to stand candidates against him. Farage can have his moment to stick it to the man, but the man isn’t really playing. It could well be a by-election of one. He remains a formidable force in politics, and he has shown he is willing to take risks to defend his dominance of the political landscape. But he is weakened by every fresh detail linking him to people who are seen by Reform voters as out of touch, arrogant, Wolf of Wall Street wannabes. And that’s before the cold, hard questions of what Farage should have declared and when are delved into. If – or, more likely, when – he returns to parliament, the investigation into the Harborne donation will resume. Even some of his close supporters are concerned that the pressure will not relent, whatever happens in Clacton. The press is now following the money, wherever it leads.
In the meantime, Andy Burnham’s closest advisers are looking at an opponent who seems increasingly tired, flustered and out of touch, up against a new, younger, fresher opponent – one who has built his reputation on staying as close as he can to the lives of ordinary people. Burnham faces his own challenges, too, but Reform insiders are already resigned to Labour overtaking their party in the polls for a few months. They just hope it won’t be permanent. For the first time in years, it is Labour aides who are more likely to be reaching for a celebratory cocktail than Farage and his band of curious friends.
[Further reading: You can’t blame Brexit anymore]
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This article appears in the 08 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Great Con
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Subscribe here to commentWe shouldn’t underestimate Count Binface in a two-horse race with Farage. He represents an opportunity to end Farage’s career in the most humiliating way possible, and many people will be keen to take that. Just having to spend weeks in Clacton campaigning against Binface is a humiliation. The chances are the turnout will be very low. It could happen.