{"id":593081,"date":"2026-05-19T20:01:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T20:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/593081\/"},"modified":"2026-05-19T20:01:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T20:01:08","slug":"has-anybody-seen-nigel-speculation-swirls-as-farage-performs-disappearing-act-nigel-farage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/593081\/","title":{"rendered":"Has anybody seen Nigel? Speculation swirls as Farage performs disappearing act | Nigel Farage"},"content":{"rendered":"

It has been six days since Nigel Farage<\/a> cancelled a scheduled appearance at a Reform UK rally in Sunderland, a key election target in Labour\u2019s heartlands.<\/p>\n

The reasons given \u2013 chaos in government and what appeared to be an impending Labour leadership race \u2013 seemed logical. After all, as a quotation sometimes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte goes: never interfere with an enemy while he is in the process of destroying himself.<\/p>\n

Yet as the days have passed, the continued absence of a politician who has in recent years seemed almost omnipresent has become all the more stark.<\/p>\n

Reform was contacted to ask about Farage\u2019s whereabouts but gave no response.<\/p>\n

Of course, the elephant in the room has been the investigation<\/a> by the parliamentary standards watchdog into a \u00a35m gift given to Farage by the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne.<\/p>\n

Normally happy to field a list of questions at press conferences at Westminster or elsewhere, Farage has been eager to avoid talking about the money since it was first revealed by the Guardian last month.<\/a><\/p>\n

The cancellation of last week\u2019s Sunderland rally \u2013 accompanied by a Reform statement that the party would \u201cpark our tanks on what was Labour\u2019s lawn another day\u201d \u2013 came on the day it emerged he was facing an inquiry<\/a> by the parliamentary commissioner for standards.<\/p>\n

It meant that celebrations of his party\u2019s historic breakthroughs in elections in England, Wales and Scotland earlier this month were somewhat curtailed. Normally, one might have expected political victory laps to have continued.<\/p>\n

Instead, stories about Farage\u2019s finances have continued to make headlines, while the politician has also provided a new explanation for why he accepted the gift in the weeks before announcing he would stand in the last general election.<\/p>\n

After previously saying the gift was for security purposes, he said in an interview on Thursday that the money was a \u201creward\u201d for campaigning for Brexit.<\/p>\n

It was revealed on Friday that he had bought a \u00a31.4m property in cash shortly after receiving the personal gift from Harborne.<\/p>\n

Since then, there has been further scrutiny of Farage\u2019s claim <\/a>that he paid for the house in Surrey \u2013 one of five he appears to either own or live in \u2013 with his \u00a31.5m fee for participating in I\u2019m a Celebrity \u2026\u2009 Get Me Out of Here! in late 2023.<\/p>\n

Accounts for his personal media company, Thorn in the Side Ltd, suggest that money was not withdrawn from the firm at the time of the house purchase.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, Farage was nowhere to be seen when Reform announced Robert Kenyon as its candidate in the upcoming Makerfield byelection<\/a>, where the party will take on Andy Burnham.<\/p>\n

While Reform had held rallies and press conferences to present byelection candidates, Kenyon\u2019s candidacy was announced on the party\u2019s social media channels. Farage posted a three-line tweet in which he lauded Kenyon as \u201cThe plucky plumber taking on open borders Burnham\u201d.<\/p>\n

A number of other changes in Reform have raised eyebrows. An unexpected reshuffle this week saw David Bull replaced as chair by the Ashfield MP, Lee Anderson.<\/p>\n

Bull will now \u201cfocus on standing at the next election\u201d, according to a Reform press release. Separately, the role of the party\u2019s treasurer, Charlton Edwards, as director and secretary of Reform UK<\/a> party Ltd \u2013 the corporate vehicle for the party \u2013 has been terminated.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Reform activists have been canvassing the streets of Makerfield for some days now.<\/p>\n

As the campaign gets under way for what could be the most significant byelection for decades, it will become harder to excuse the Reform leader not being involved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It has been six days since Nigel Farage cancelled a scheduled appearance at a Reform UK rally in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":593082,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-593081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=593081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593081\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/593082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=593081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=593081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=593081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}