The Sunday Times reports that in 2023, Cottrell put Farage in contact with Jack Anderton, a 25-year-old right-wing political activist from Liverpool, to help run his social media operation, particularly on TikTok – where Farage’s engagement surged. <\/p>\n
It reports that Cottrell paid Anderton a salary equivalent to around \u00a355,000 a year.<\/p>\n
Later that year, Cottrell helped negotiate a \u00a31.5 million fee for Farage to appear on I’m a Celebrity…, the newspaper reports, and started providing Farage with security, primarily composed of elite former soldiers, and drivers.<\/p>\n
After Farage announced that he would stand as a Reform UK candidate in the 2024 general election and became party leader, he started travelling the country – often with Cottrell by his side.<\/p>\n
One such occasion was Farage’s campaign launch in Clacton, Essex, where a milkshake was thrown over him.<\/p>\n
Around this time, the Sunday Times reports that Cottrell began renting a residential property near Buckingham Palace, for which he is understood to be paying tens of thousands of pounds per month, and where Farage has been allowed to stay.<\/p>\n
On 4 July 2024, Farage was elected as the MP for Clacton.<\/p>\n
He then registered a \u00a39,253 trip to Belgium in April 2024 donated by Cottrell, and later added a \u00a315,276 donation from Cottrell for a US domestic flight he provided in December 2024.<\/p>\n
No other support from Cottrell is listed in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.<\/p>\n
Cottrell is now reportedly lobbying the US president for a pardon. He also recently co-authored a book, How to Launder Money, which claims to be a guide for law enforcement, prosecutors and policymakers.<\/p>\n
A spokesman for Farage said: “It comes as no surprise that the Sunday Times has chosen to publish this baseless and contrived story, covering a period of time when Nigel Farage was not even an active politician let alone an elected one, given that the newspaper backed the Labour Party at the last general election.<\/p>\n
“Contrary to the story’s tone, no parliamentary rules have been broken.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Sunday Times reports that in 2023, Cottrell put Farage in contact with Jack Anderton, a 25-year-old right-wing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":675403,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-675402","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\/675402","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=675402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/675403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}