Authenticity?
Farage’s Cameo scandal reveals him for what he really is: a performer dancing
in the gutter
Gaby
Hinsliff
Taking
money from just about anyone is just the latest example of Reform’s leader
following the Trump school of self-enrichment
Thu 19
Mar 2026 17.36 GMT
Nigel
Farage will say pretty much anything for money. Write him a script, stuff a
coin in the slot and off he goes: the man who would be prime minister could be
your personal mouthpiece for less than £100.
Or at
least, that’s the obvious explanation for why – until he was exposed by the
Guardian – the Reform UK leader has been churning out written-to-order video
messages on request for (among others) Canadian white supremacists, a man
jailed for throwing a bottle during the 2024 summer riots, and someone
apparently keen to hear him talk about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “big
naturals”, pornified slang describing the breasts of a woman who could be
running for US president before long.
Either he
wanted the cash (and the exposure) enough not to ask too many questions, or he
actually meant the stuff he was saying, and since he swears he’s not a racist
or misogynist – well, draw your own conclusions. For what it’s worth, a
representative of the Canadian group now insists they picked Farage “for a
laugh” and to teach him the consequences of “being lazy and stupid enough to
say anything for a dollar”.
That
lesson has apparently been learned. Farage withdrew his services from the
platform on Thursday, with sources citing “security concerns”, suggesting that
for once he does feel rattled. His side hustle on Cameo – a platform where
B-list celebrities and reality TV contestants rent themselves out to record
personalised messages for your loved one’s birthday or stag do – almost
certainly wasn’t a dealbreaker for diehard Reform voters. (What’s revealing
about the platform isn’t just what performers will say for money, but what
their fans typically want to hear from them. The actor Miriam Margolyes, for
example, gets hired to tell mothers how much their daughters love them;
comedians invariably get asked to repeat their best-known catchphrase ad
nauseam. Farage meanwhile got commissioned to discuss how secret societies are
running the world, and obliged by rattling off a list of antisemitic conspiracy
theories before hastily adding that he doesn’t believe them and thinks the rot
set in with Marxism.)
But
Reform’s recent tailing off in the polls suggests some of its newer supporters
are capable of getting cold feet. The careless trampling of political norms
that used to play so well for Farage has real potential to do him harm, now
that we can all see what the Trumpification of British politics might mean in
practice.
When the
first soldiers’ coffins began returning home from his war on Iran, President
Trump greeted the fallen wearing a tacky branded baseball cap from his own
range of merchandise, which he did not bother removing for the salute. It’s
hard to describe how jolting that is for veterans, but product placement is a
hallmark of what has become more a brand than a presidency. The American
business bible Forbes estimated last autumn that Trump had swelled his personal
fortune by more than $3bn in his first year in office, essentially by
leveraging the Oval Office for profit. The president has built a monetised cult
of personality capable of flogging everything from memecoins – a growing area
of interest for Farage, who recorded several Cameos hyping various cryptocurrencies
that characteristically later collapsed in value – to T-shirts, while seemingly
treating foreign policy as an extension of the family real estate business.
(Having failed so far to turn Gaza into a beach resort, Trump now dreams aloud
about “taking Cuba” and doing whatever he likes with it.)
By
comparison, Brand Farage is barely getting started. But the Reform leader made
more than £1m in a year, reportedly, by juicing the attention economy for all
it’s worth, operating more like an influencer than a conventional politician.
Besides the Cameos, the GB News shows and the paid speaking gigs in Washington
at rates more often commanded by ex-prime ministers, there’s the £400,000-odd
earned promoting gold bullion as a “tax-efficient” alternative to retirement
savings – let’s hope no pensioner comes to bitterly regret investing in that
one – while his monetised blue-tick account on X earns him a cut of the revenue
his viral content makes for Elon Musk’s outrage factory.
Yet to
take the reputational risks he did on Cameo for (at his most recent rate) £79 a
pop remains puzzling. Since he himself says he didn’t check out his commissions
first, Farage was potentially laying himself wide open to manipulation by
rivals: he couldn’t have known who might potentially have been hiring him under
an assumed name, getting him to create material that could later be used to do
him damage. Either he has come to believe he walks on water, or else he really
wanted that money.
Farage
pitches himself as a man of the people who did well in the City and can now
afford to do politics for the love of it, insisting over a recent two-bottle
lunch with the Financial Times that he’s not the sort to crave a Ferrari. But
he was cranking out those Cameos at an industrial rate, slotting them in even
on election day. Did witnessing the in-your-face opulence of the Mar-a-Lago
set, or even the influence enjoyed by the multi-millionaires he has had to
persuade to bankroll his own assorted parties down the years, feed a certain
envy? Back in 2023, he defended the £1.5m he trousered for doing ITV’s I’m a
Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! on the grounds that his old mates in
commodities trading are now filthy rich, whereas in the name of Brexit “I gave
all that up”. Perhaps he thinks he’s owed something for the lean
post-referendum years, when he’d successfully abolished his own job as an MEP
and was in the throes of a second divorce, complaining of being “separated and
skint”. Shades of Boris Johnson, who started out dismissing his £250,000 Daily
Telegraph salary as “chicken feed”, and ended up engulfed in a scandal over the
funding of his third wife’s fancy home renovations.
But
perhaps the most damaging thing about those videos in the end isn’t the money,
so much as the sense of seeing how the sausage gets made. Nigel Farage’s genius
has always been his ability to sound as if he’s just saying what he
authentically thinks, whether you like it or not. But what we see here are
performances, where he who pays the piper literally calls the tune: a
politician essentially prostituting himself, with disturbing ease and fluency,
sailing closer and closer to the wind as time goes on. Ironically, it’s how
many disillusioned Reform voters have probably always thought politics worked.
It’s just that until now, they were nearly always wrong.
Gaby
Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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