John Crace returns with an extra dose of his digested week, covering everything from Nigel Farage’s financial entanglements to David Beckham’s silence over FIFA’s scandals.
Farage’s financial fog
It must be tricky for Farage to remember what’s what. It’s so hideously complicated. There’s the £5m from Thai crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne that was first a gift to spend on Ferraris, then to pay for his security, and now could be a downpayment on the £1m per year Farage said he would need to make it worth his while to return to full-time politics.
Then there are funds travelling from various offshore bank accounts from George Cottrell – the boy who liked to call Farage “Daddy” – to his mum, Fiona, and then on to Dicky Tice. Some of which – no one is quite sure which – seemed to end up in Reform’s bank accounts. Nor can Farage even quite remember when he did decide he was politically active despite owning a majority share in Reform.
British Museum’s embarrassing exhibition
An exhibition to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence at the British Museum was a disappointment. The darkened room featured just four items: a peace medal made by Paul Revere, a tomahawk that doubled as a peace pipe, a wampum belt made by Native Americans, and a facsimile of a declaration of independence, with a notice saying the original would be on display in September.
It looked like the items had been dug out of storage as an afterthought. Anyone coming to my house to see the ceramics I have collected would have had a better time.
Cambridge’s Arday controversy
Jason Arday, the professor of sociology who has just resigned from the University of Cambridge, has been badly let down by his former employer. Surely someone must have thought of putting his PhD thesis through a plagiarism detector before offering him a job? Arday seems clearly unwell, a fantasist who makes it hard to take almost anything he says as the truth.
The list is seemingly endless: his claim to be a world-class athlete who once ran 600 miles in six days, or saying he had been part of the TV documentary series Seven Up. Cambridge managed to overlook all this and more. The greater the fable, the more the university defended him. In the process, it has done far more damage to him than if it had quietly declined to offer him a professorship.
Badenoch’s double standards
Kemi Badenoch seems to be having a bit of a moment. Having appeared on the Political Currency podcast to accuse Reform of “woke” politics and to rubbish Andy Burnham, she has now nailed herself to the cross of defending the former neo-nazi Joshua Bonehill-Paine, who was jailed for harassing the Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger.
In Badenoch’s view, Bonehill-Paine is a reformed man and deserved a second chance to serve as a Tory councillor because all he would be doing was sorting out the “bin collections”. Bonehill-Paine withdrew as a Conservative candidate, but Badenoch appointed him as a Tory special adviser. It’s curious to know what is and isn’t acceptable in today’s Tory party. A bit of previous for antisemitism and Hitler loving? Just fine. Believing in net zero and the European convention on human rights, not so much.
Beckham’s silence
It’s been hard to keep up with the excesses and moral corruption of the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino. One person has remained silent throughout the scandal: David Beckham. For the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, Beckham was paid millions to be a Fifa ambassador. His one contribution was to say he hadn’t spotted any gay people being persecuted.
This time round in the US, David seemed content being an unofficial ambassador, there to be filmed sitting in the VIP seats wearing a suit and looking miserable as he notched up another £24m in advert endorsements. He said nothing when Infantino awarded Donald Trump a peace prize, introduced hydration breaks, or bowed to Trump’s demand to overturn Folarin Balogun’s red card. He has trashed his brand by being complicit. We want our Becks back.
