The Undercover Reform Investigation

0:00This BBC Podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. BABYC PODCAST Get more with BBC Podcasts, wherever you listen. Be the first to listen to your favourite shows, like Evil Genius, Good Bad Billionaire, and Your Dead To Me, with a subscription to BBC Podcasts Premium on Apple Podcasts. You can also enjoy a range of our podcasts, Add Free, with an Amazon Music subscription. Hello, on Thursday night, reform activists and party members, and the spokespeople were all heading to Birmingham for the start of their conference. And then there was some news, and it happened on Channel 4 News, and it was an investigation done by a separate organisation called verbatim investigations, doing lots of undercover filming. And it led to two very, very senior figures in reform, standing down, and then being suspended from the party, pending an investigation. And this undercover filming, this investigation, was all about money. And we will give you all the details and everything that's happened since

1:00on this episode of newscast. Newscast. Newscast from the BBC. Humanity's next great voyage begin. You know what I like my boss? I'll come onto the impression that he was, I guess, the mayor of a town. All I know, thinking about it like a panter helped. Do we play music now? What do we do? And what will you do? Stir it all. Hello, it's Adam in the Newscast studio. And it is Chris at conference number one of the autumn term at Reform UK's conference at the NEC in Birmingham. And just Chris, give us some audio context where are you standing, what's happening around you? Why is there so much noise? So I am standing in the middle of the main exhibition centre. And to my left, there is a fringe event against the backdrop of the first 100 days, which is kind of the non-slogen slogan of this conference. It's all about reform, talking about what they would do in their first three months or so of government, where they to win the German election. Over the way, there is Jeremy Kyle on the stage. I grew up listening to him on the radio.

2:02He's upon the main stage within the exhibition centre, talking to various folks, got a gaggle of reform activists listening in. And then you've got around here the kind of stands and stalls that you get at the big party conferences. So you get various big organisations in the public and private sector seeking to show off their wares and try and lobby and influence and bend the year of influential politicians. And an increasing number of folks think that reform fit that definition. They want to get to know them and they want to talk to them. An excellent sit-rep, as I would expect. Right, let's talk about this big story that broke on Thursday evening on channel four news. And we'll talk about all the details and all the potential implications. But I wonder if we just do some groundwork for us, Chris, and just explain where this story actually came from, because it wasn't just channel four news. It wasn't just channel four news. It involved some undercover filming involving an entirely separate organisation called the Baton Investigations.

3:02And the Baton Investigations was set up by some journalists from the centre for climate reporting, so just to explain their background. Yeah, so they then shared this material with channel four news and channel four news say that they sought to verify it and then they packaged it up if you like and broadcast it at length on Thursday evening, best part of half an hour on channel four news. The two central characters at the heart of this investigation are not figures that will be widely known, I suspect, by lots of folks. But they are senior and influential figures within reform UK. So firstly, Dan Joukes, very senior aide to Nigel Farage, very often seen at his side, something of a point man for journalists and others seeking to find out what Nigel Farage is doing or find out what his opinion is about this, that are the other or requesting the interview with him or whatever kind of chap who someone like me has a lot of dealings with. The other guy is James Orr, who is an academic

4:04and indeed lawyer by background, but he's reforms head of policy. And right at the heart of this investigation and this sting operation, if you like, was an examination around reforms attitudes to money and seeking donations. And the crooks of all of this, particularly as far as Dan Joukes is concerned, is a suggestion that he was willing to point to ways in which a prospective donor might be able to skirt around electoral law. Let's just quickly set out what electoral law says in the UK, that if you are going to be a permissible donor to a UK political party, you have to be a UK registered voter or a business. And the essence of the story that these undercover reporters and an actor assembled was that there was a British-based son, I.e. somebody who would be permissible,

5:05would a rich American father, I.e. who wouldn't be. And whether or not there would be a mechanism by which money could be passed from father to son in order to present what looked like a permissible donation. That was the essence of it. Now we should say, reforms say they haven't broken any rules. They say, look, we never received any money, particularly as far as this prospective half a million pound donation was concerned. There's separate and slightly complicated aspects of this. Around the payment for some opinion polls, which was money that was paid for, that element of it, principally, as far as the filmy suggested, involving James Orr as something of a go-between. And we can talk about the polling thing in a second, but just zooming in on the allegation about the potential donation. So the way that it plays out in the half an hour film on Channel 4 is that James Orr meets this guy posing as the son of the American and there are various hotel bars and cafes and restaurants.

6:07And they're talking about this as a potential mechanism. Then Dan Jukes, there's a scene where they're having a cigarette outside the pub and Dan Jukes is talking about this mechanism as well. And then it culminates with Dan Jukes and Nigel Farage, meeting the fake son and the fake American dad who's played by an actor in a pub garden in Clackton where they're drinking the Guinness and ordering oysters and having a conversation about that we're just getting to know each other. Exactly that, exactly that. So this was a piece of a look of an investigative journalism seeking to find out where privately, so they thought, reform were sort of in their minds in terms of the whole business of donations and the law. And what have we seen? Well, we've seen responses from Mr Jukes and Mr Orr saying that they don't really did anything wrong. They have both been suspended pending an internal investigation.

7:07Something of a disagreement, publicly between senior figures and reformers, whether or not they are ever likely to return to their previous roles. The Anderson, the chairman of the party, suggesting not, Richard Ties, the deputy leader of the party, saying, well, hang on a minute, let there be an investigation. And they are making an argument that says that these undercover journalists were left-wing climates activists and that there was an entrapment as they see it going on in the techniques that they used to gather this material. And then let's talk about the second string of this story, which is the stuff around the polling. And so basically what it seems like from the filming is that James Orr was saying, right, we reform have commissioned this poll. You have to pay the pollsters to do the polling. Wouldn't it be good if the the the Sun and the American Father could fund that that opinion polling? And then there's a separate thing where then that opinion polling was passed to various newspapers, but it wasn't clear that the polling had been commissioned by reform and paid for by

8:12somebody who was kind of helping reform out. Exactly. So there's two strands of the polling elements of this story. So the money involved is much less than the suggested half a million pound donation. All be it, it was money that was actually paid, as opposed to a donation that never actually happened. So there's a money element to it. And therefore the potential need for a declaration and for that money to be from a permissible source. The other thing is that what came across in the film was a suggestion that reform felt it would be more useful to them if this polling didn't have their fingerprints on it. Now they didn't pay for it reform. It was paid for by this supposed donor. So there's then questions, if you like, ethical questions around the transparency of where this poll originally came from. And one of the polls was about trade union members, quite liking the idea of reform

9:16being the next government. And I remember that was on the front page of the Times. Remember it really, really clearly. And yeah, there was no sense that had come from reform at all. But now we know that it was one of three polls costing a total of 32,500 pounds that were paid for by these pretending to be donors. And in terms of what's happened there. So the company, the polling companies, JL partners, their spokesman has said, despite there being no concern about the accuracy of our work, the report did reveal weaknesses in our procedures. For that reason, JL partners is reviewing those procedures in order to eliminate possible gray areas and ambiguities and strengthen our safeguards for the future. And then the telegraph have said, we're reviewing our future relationship with this polling company. As we believe we've been misled as a matter of precaution, we have suspended the relevant articles while the British polling council conducts a review. And the Times said it was not made aware of reforms involvement in commissioning and arranging payment of the poll. There's a process now, isn't there? Because the electoral commission

10:18is put out a statement saying that they're in touch with the metropolitan police, not exactly clear what that means in terms of an investigation or a process. But what's your take on what might happen next, Chris? Well, so a couple of things, you know, let's see how Nigel Farage and the party choose to react in the coming days. I think that's going to be key. So what extent do they feel that they can move on? It seems inevitable that there's been a whole slew of questions for Nigel Farage around all of this. And then, as you say, what do kind of crucial agencies in the arc of this story, if you like, have to say on what do they do next? Not least the electoral commission and the metropolitan police, both of them, as you say, they put out statements, but they're relatively holding position statements. Where does this go beyond where we are now? Now, we've got this internal investigation going on at some point. They're going to have to say something about that. There'll have to be a line drawn about the future one way or the other, or James or Dan Dune. But I think, in essence, Adam, you know, the backdrop coming into this

11:23conference that was a big challenge for the party was all of these questions about money. And now that's just embolded and it's underlined and it's in italics. That's the reality of it. It's much harder for them to move on when this has landed in the way that it has on the eve of the big day at the conference today. Yeah. And Nigel Farage was on LBC on Friday morning and he said, the recordings don't look good. And that's why we've taken the action we have. I'm intrigued about how a reformer actually handling this, Chris, because okay, on the one hand, they've suspended two very senior people. So they're obviously taking it seriously as allegations. But then on the other hand, reform spokespeople are being very competitive about all of this in interviews. And you were sat, you were sandwiched in between Nick Robinson and Richard Tyson, the deputy leader on the today program at 810. And he kind of came out really swinging. Absolutely. Yeah. So I think what they'll do, I suspect the essence of it, will be exactly that.

12:24Coming out swinging, acknowledging as Nigel Farage already had, has that this stuff doesn't look good. Look, when people find themselves on the wrong end of undercover filming, it's always awkward, it's always squeamish, irrespective of them saying very much or not, because it would be wouldn't it. I think Nigel, the essence of Nigel Farage's argument, you saw an element of this in the undercover filming, will be to try and project a sense of distance between him and what we saw on the television and you have seen flying around on social media. As I say, these are two people who are close to him, but I think he will make an argument around an element of distance. I think there will be an element of the argument that he was articulating to me the other day when I sat down with Nigel Farage for an interview, which is this sense as he sees it of, you know, folk being out to get them. So on a brotherman there, education spokesman has been out and about saying that she feels that the nature of a party like reform means you'll be subject to what she calls hit jobs.

13:29Now others might see it as legitimate indesity, but that's how they perceive a sense that they are newbies on the block and lots of people are asking probe inquisions. Now, scrutiny comes when you are a prospective alternative government. As I say, through the prism of their perceptions, they feel like it's a whole load of, as they see it, establishment institutions ganging up against them. I think we'll get an element of that in the rhetoric and the tone from Nigel Farage, but I also know he is determined to try and move on to sound more positive, to talk about what they would do in government. It is also true from the conversations I've had, just how hurt he has been and many in his family have been by some of the stuff in recent months. He talked to me the other day about other members of his family being debanks, this thing that happened to Nigel Farage a few years ago, we're a bank refuses to deal with you. With some of the hassle he feels some of his family have had from journalists and from cameras. I think that's authentic. It was

14:33an authentic anger there. He thinks that in the fullness of time stuff will come out where people might be willing to sympathise a bit with some of that for him. But he's also conscious, I think, that if you are constantly looking and sounding agreed, that might limit the scope and potential of your support. So I think they are trying to change gear a bit after what's happened in the last few months, but it's all that harder with this, with this shallow for new stuff swirling out. In terms of what happens next at the conference where you are, so Nigel Farage is on stage later today doing a quite unscripted speech by the sound of things and also they've got a foreign celebrity guest who's Jordan Bardela who's head of the National Rally, the Rassemblemore National in France. And also it sounds like things are already massively delayed because the cues are so long to get into the hole. The cues are absolutely colossal and it tells you two things I think. It tells you about how much this party is scaling up and scaling up fast. I mean I've not seen as big a cue to get into a conference as the one here. It probably also tells you something about

15:38an underlying challenge to the party faces, perhaps some of which played out in that channel for news investigation, which is how do you scale up and professionalise quickly to match the scale of your support. Now whether that's something as mundane or be it as important as it is today, like sorting out the printing of your passes when you're sort of at a conference or your back office functions that means you are rigorous around talking to potential donors, etc, etc. Perhaps that cue is sort of symptomatic of that. But yeah he's got this event with Jordan Bardela seen as this sort of rising style of French politics in broadly similar political places in many instances to Nigel Farage. Then the speech and then there's a whole load of stuff tomorrow there's another speech from Nigel Farage on Saturday as well as hearing from Robert Generick, their treasury spokesman, what they call their shadow chancellor. I think we can expect some sort of tax announcement coming from them tomorrow as far as that is concerned. So yeah that's kind of how

16:40it shakes out here. An interesting fact about Jordan Bardela I discovered the other day there. At the French media say he is dating Princess Maria Carolina of Bourbon Two Sicilies, which sounds like a result in a football match. That's got a hello magazine photo shoot written all over it I think. Yes maybe they'll be doing it at reform conference with the beautiful backdrop you have of the various stalls from stakeholders across society. And Chris have an interesting weekend at reform. Taa I will talk to you soon cheers! And Laura and Joe Pike and other members of the newscast family will be bringing you

17:47coverage of the reform conference over the weekend. Let's see what develops in Birmingham. Right we've got a message from Ella who is originally from North Wales but now in Nottingham and she's WhatsApp-tuss saying, love the podcast so I thought I would say my Andy Burnham's 100 days challenge. I've been elected as president for NU Dance, the dance society at the University of Nottingham. So my challenge is organising the 10 weekly classes, 8 weekly rehearsals, 9 competition teams and 13 other committee members in time for our freshers week so our 300 plus members can continue to dance. Good luck with all of that Ella you've got your hands full. And she also says maybe the more sensible challenge would have been doing the 10 readings from my politics dissertation. Can't wait to listen to the next episode. Ella thank you so much for getting in touch. I was going to say break a leg with your 100 days challenge and all those numbers related to running the dancing society but that's probably not the best wish I'll just say good luck. And if you're doing a challenge for Andy Burnham's first 100 days like my 500K in 100 days,

18:48let us know newscast at BBC.co.uk or you can WhatsApp us like Ella did on 03001239480. Laura will be back with the next newscast very soon. Bye bye. On plus 4403301239480. Be assured I promise we listen to everyone.

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