The banal truth about the Posh George ‘scandal’

An insurgent populist politician. A young, wayward aristocrat with a criminal past. Undeclared donations. A setting that includes the Adriatic coastline, the Carribean, Westminster and America. The Sunday Times’ recent investigation into the relationship between Nigel Farage and George Cottrell might have formed the plot of a Jeffrey Archer novel. But is the truth quite so interesting?

The story’s ramifications have certainly been profound. Alongside the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards inquiry into the £5million gift Farage received from billionaire Christopher Harborne, the George Cottrell story also formed the backdrop this week to the Reform UK leader resigning his seat of Clacton, which he will now re-contest at a by-election. He wants voters to decide his fate. Farage insists that he has done nothing wrong, and that he is the subject of a hit-job from the mainstream media and the political establishment. He might have a point.

Let’s take a closer look at the Cottrell ‘scandal’. According to The Sunday Times, in 2024, before he had decided to run for the seat of Clacton as a candidate for Reform UK, Farage was provided with security, three paid social-media experts and occasional accommodation in London by George ‘Posh George’ Cottrell. The article posits that, because this gift was made to Farage within 12 months of the General Election, his failure to declare it as a donation ‘appears’ to have breached transparency guidelines.

That is a pretty tepid conclusion to what was published as a front-page scoop. There is no suggestion in the piece that Farage broke the law, or misused public funds or otherwise benefitted from fraudulently obtained money. And it seems that the editors of The Sunday Times didn’t find the ‘transparency’ angle that riveting either. This is why most of the article is in fact a biography of Cottrell. No doubt, it is also why the piece’s accompanying podcast is titled ‘Posh George: the Criminal Behind Farage’.

Posh George is the kind of figure journalists find irresistible. He is a relic of the British aristocracy, with little to recommend him beyond a supposedly distinguished surname. We are told by The Sunday Times that his mother inherited a ‘soap empire’, briefly dated then Prince Charles in the 1970s, and once posed nude for Penthouse. His father, apparently, is a ‘Gatsby-esque’ figure. Cottrell grew up on the Caribbean island of Mustique, before attending boarding school in Worcestershire.

Cottrell, now 32, comes across as a work-shy and possibly not the sharpest tool in the shed. In his early twenties, the then deputy treasurer of
UKIP was staying in Las Vegas. There he tried to launder money for people he thought were drug dealers, but who were in fact US federal agents. He was arrested in 2016, having just attended the Republican National Convention with UKIP leader Farage. Cottrell immediately ratted on the criminal connections he had made, and spent eight months in an Arizona prison for wire fraud.

He is a disreputable figure. Yet Farage seemed to like him. Posh George is said to have an innate understanding of the now Reform leader. He knows intuitively when Nige needs a pint, a cigarette or a ‘proper fucking lunch’. Once Cottrell had re-made himself as (you guessed it) a cryptocurrency guru in Montenegro after his prison stint, he re-entered the fold at Reform. And Farage, foolishly, was all too happy to accept his help.

Unsurprisingly, The Sunday Times’ story was enthusiastically jumped on by other mainstream media outlets. Farage accused Sky News of ‘hounding’ his daughter by sending reporters and cameras to her house (Sky insists it was the property Farage was registered to vote at at the last election). In any event, things reached a head on Tuesday, when Farage delivered a combative speech at Reform’s London headquarters.

It is worth paying close attention to Farage’s defence – for the majority of it has been largely ignored by the media who provoked it. Farage said the £5million donation made to him by Christopher Harborne, like Cottrell’s donations, did not need to be declared because it was made before Farage was an MP. Farage also said it was necessary to pay for his security, the cost of which he claimed to have been cut by Labour by as much as 70 per cent.

Farage is right to be angry. He is right to assert the simple point that appears to have been missed by The Sunday Times and much of the media – that he has not, as far as anyone can tell, broken the law ‘in any way’. Not only has he not misused public money, he also hasn’t made a single claim for expenses in his first two years as an MP.

But far more revealing is how the political establishment has responded to Farage’s decision to fight a by-election in Clacton. Every mainstream party has refused to stand a candidate against him. They have described the upcoming ballot as a ‘circus’ and a ‘stunt’.

Those words might be far better applied to their own actions. After all, if Farage is ‘up to his neck in sleaze’, as Keir Starmer has said, then surely Labour should seize the chance to defeat him in a by-election as soon as possible. Both Labour and the Tories insist that Farage should face ‘scrutiny’ and ‘consequences’ for his actions – yet they’re shying away from a clear opportunity to do precisely that. For all their self-righteous hyperbole, for all their talk of how ‘scandalous’ and ‘immoral’ the donations supposedly are, they are cynically backing away from a chance to challenge Farage in the court of public opinion.

No politician should be beyond scrutiny. Farage’s links to Cottrell and Harborne certainly deserve attention. But to present the Reform leader as uniquely crooked, despite no suggestions he has engaged in serious wrongdoing, is farcical. This is an attempt to do with scandal-mongering what the establishment seems unable, perhaps even hesitant, to do at the ballot box.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.