Where Are We This Morning?

Gabriel Pogrund tweets:

Where are we this morning?

George Cottrell’s lawyers acknowledged he paid for Nigel Farage’s staff and security. He did so via electronic transfer from bank accounts in his name.

On the townhouse, they said their client “does, and did” let Farage stay there.

Farage has sought to dismiss both.

On failing to declare funding for operation, he said he didn’t need to: he wasn’t a politician at the time.

On failing to declare use of house, he said he didn’t need to: Cottrell is a friend, so it is exempt.

Sources close to him are also downplaying this dimension generally, saying stays extremely infrequent.

The parliamentary rules say any benefit exceeding £300 in value that is not “purely personal” — i.e., romantic partner or family — and is in any way related to an MP’s “political activities” must be declared. This includes the 12 months before a new MP’s election.

Please read our article but also Reform’s statement, in which we are described as having a pro-Labour government bias and seeking to promote our podcast.

School Report

What to make of the closure of Durham High School? The Headmistress had been under investigation for misconduct.

And both it and Ruthin had been bought by Global Galaxy Education, a Chinese asset-stripper that had already closed Malvern St James, having bought all of them, and Plymouth College, during this Parliament, meaning that it had known full well about the impending imposition of VAT on school fees.

There is a much deeper story here.

Two Years of Starmer: The Lightness of the Gavel

Paul Knaggs writes:

Two years ago today, standing on the threshold of Downing Street, Keir Starmer looked into the cameras and promised an exhausted nation that his government would tread more lightly on our lives. It was an elegant phrase, built to soothe. Yet as we survey the wreckage of the last twenty four months, we must ask the only question that matters. Lightly for whom? The answer to that promise has become Orwell’s boot.

Let me show you what it looks like. On 15 June this year, outside the Royal Courts of Justice, more than a hundred people were arrested for holding signs. Not for breaking windows. Not for blocking ambulances. For holding signs, while inside the building five judges ruled that the government was entitled to call the organisation named on those signs a terrorist group.

That is not an accident of policing. It is what two years of patient legislating were always building toward: a country in which, by the time the working class finally decides it has had enough, every tool it once used to fight back has already been taken from the cupboard.

That is the argument of this column. Not that Keir Starmer is secretly a tyrant. Something worse, and more familiar. A Labour government, elected by working class votes on a promise to tread lightly, has instead built the apparatus of a government that knows exactly what happens when disappointment turns to anger, and is getting ready for that day. The street, the placard, the jury box, the anonymous crowd, even the privacy of your own medical file. One by one, taken off the table. Let us go through them.

FIRST THEY TOOK THE STREET 

The Crime and Policing Act 2026 received royal assent on 29 April. Its protest provisions came into force on 29 June, five days before this column went to press, and they read like a manual for making demonstration legally impossible. 

A police inspector can now declare any area a mask free zone for 24 hours, and covering your face inside it, a scarf against the cold, a mask against a camera, becomes a criminal offence carrying a month in prison. Carrying a flare, a fixture of marches for half a century, is now a crime. Climbing on a listed memorial is now a crime whether or not a protest is even happening. Standing outside the home of any public office holder, from a cabinet minister down to a parish councillor, to tell them what you think of a decision they made, now carries up to six months. 

And then the quietest, most dangerous provision of all. Senior officers must now weigh the cumulative disruption of protests in an area when deciding whether to impose conditions. Your march can be restricted because of someone else’s march, last month, about something else entirely. The nurses’ picket pays for the climate blockade. The tenants’ demonstration pays for the Gaza vigil. Protest itself, as a category, becomes the disruption, and every campaign becomes jointly liable for all the others.

This is the second major rewrite of public order law in four years, and the government’s own justification for the pace is candid to the point of chilling. Evolving tactics require evolving powers. Which is another way of saying that the more inventive you become at being heard, the more law will be written to silence you. 

THEN THEY TOOK THE PLACARD 

On 5 July 2025, Yvette Cooper proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, after its members sprayed paint on military aircraft at RAF Brize Norton. Paint. Under the Terrorism Act 2000, expressing support for the group now carries up to fourteen years, the same maximum the law reserves for people who fund actual bombs. 

What followed was the largest wave of political arrests in modern British history, more than three thousand of them, most for placards and silent vigils. In February the High Court ruled the proscription unlawful and disproportionate. The government’s response was to keep the ban in force, appeal, and keep arresting, so that on the day the Court of Appeal handed it victory in June, the Metropolitan Police could celebrate by detaining more than a hundred people outside the courtroom. 

Four of the activists who raided Elbit Systems’ factory in Filton were sentenced that same fortnight to more than twenty six years between them. Be honest about what happened there first, because the honesty is what makes the rest of this argument unanswerable. One of them, Samuel Corner, struck a police officer with a sledgehammer and fractured her spine, an injury she is still being treated for two years on. That was rightly charged and rightly punished as grievous bodily harm. Nobody, least of all this column, pretends otherwise.

Be honest about what happened first, because the honesty is what makes the rest of this argument unanswerable. 

But he was one of four. The other three, Charlotte Head, Leona Kamio and Fatema Zainab Rajwani, were convicted of nothing but criminal damage to property. Drones and machinery smashed. Nobody struck. And for that alone, a judge applied a terrorist connection finding that lengthened their sentences: the first time in the entire history of the Terrorism Act that damage to property, with no violence against a single human being, has been sentenced in Britain as an act of terrorism. That is the fact that should stop you cold. A power that stretches this far to reach three protesters convicted of nothing but vandalism fits a striking union or a rent strike committee just as easily tomorrow. Proscription has never, in the history of that Act, been handed back once taken.

THEN THEY CAME FOR THE JURY BOX 

Here is the piece of this that has had the least attention and deserves the most. In February, Justice Secretary David Lammy introduced the Courts and Tribunals Bill. Strip away the language of backlogs and efficiency and it does something no government has dared do in this form before. It abolishes the defendant’s right to choose trial by jury for the entire middle band of criminal offences, sending any case expected to draw a sentence of three years or less to a judge sitting alone.

Now hold that next to everything above. The government has just spent a year creating new protest offences: masks, flares, memorials, front doors, placards. Almost all of them fall exactly into the band this bill takes away from juries.

The jury is not a procedural nicety. It is the one place in the criminal justice system where the state must convince twelve ordinary people, not a salaried judge, that a prosecution deserves to succeed. In 1985, a jury acquitted the civil servant Clive Ponting under the Official Secrets Act after the judge directed them there was no defence in law available to him. In 2022, a jury acquitted the Colston statue defendants outright. Juries have been getting in the state’s way for as long as there have been political trials, precisely because ordinary people can smell a political prosecution at a hundred yards. This government is the first in living memory to legislate that instinct away, at the exact moment it has multiplied the offences a protester can be charged with.

This is not a fringe reading. At second reading, a hundred Labour MPs failed to back their own government’s bill, ten voting against it outright and ninety more simply not turning up to vote for it. Karl Turner, a Hull barrister on Labour’s own benches, led that rebellion. The party suspended him for it. The Criminal Bar Association tore the government’s supporting evidence apart. The bill passed the Commons anyway and is now in its final stages in the Lords. If it becomes law in its current form, the courtroom stops being a place where the state can lose.

THEN THEY CAME FOR THE CROWD ITSELF 

A protest movement survives on one more thing beyond the street, the placard and the jury: the ability to exist without the state knowing exactly who you are. That is what is being dismantled last, and most quietly.

In September 2025 Starmer announced a digital ID and told the country it would be mandatory for the right to work. Nearly three million people signed a petition against it. Streets filled. The government retreated, or appeared to. By January the mandatory element was gone, and the Digital Access to Services Bill now before Parliament legislates only a voluntary ID for public services. The government’s own papers make no secret of where this is heading, though. Mandatory digital right to work checks by the end of this Parliament remains the stated ambition. The scheme the public threw out the front door is being carried back in through the tradesman’s entrance, one eligibility check at a time. First to work. Then to rent. Then to claim. The people asked for their papers first will not be barristers or newspaper columnists. They will be cleaners, carers, warehouse workers and the migrant workforce every employer will be deputised to police.

Alongside it sits the Online Safety Act, and honesty requires saying plainly that this was a Conservative law, passed in 2023 before Starmer took office. What this government owns is the choice to enforce it at full speed, and now to build directly on top of it. When Phase 2 of the Act came into force last July, requiring highly effective age assurance from any service likely to be accessed by children, age checks began running at more than five million a day, the overwhelming majority of them on adults reaching for nothing more than the ordinary internet. Sign ups for VPNs, the traditional escape route from exactly this kind of check, rose by well over a thousand per cent within days.

This month the government announced a full ban on under sixteens using the major platforms, dressed, as these things always are, in the unimpeachable language of child safety. But ask the only question the announcement was built to make you forget. How do you stop a fifteen year old opening an app without first confirming the age of the adult standing next to her in the queue? You cannot. There is no filter that quietly checks the child and waves the adult through unseen. To catch the child, the system must interrogate everyone, and everyone now includes you. We already know how well that goes when it is entrusted to private hands. In October, hackers breached a vendor handling Discord’s identity checks and walked off with the government issued documents of some seventy thousand people. Discord’s response to a leak caused by collecting identity documents was to expand identity collection to every user on the platform. That is the entire logic of this project in miniature. The harm done by demanding your papers is answered, every time, by demanding them more often.

And there is one more layer. The National Security (State Threats) Bill completed every one of its Commons stages in a single sitting this June and cleared the Lords within three weeks of being introduced. It hands the Home Secretary the power to designate organisations, on the terrorism proscription model, for foreign power threat activity, and makes it an offence, fourteen years again, to support them or express an opinion supportive of them for a purpose prejudicial to interests of the United Kingdom that the law nowhere defines. Some of this genuinely is about Iranian plots and Russian sabotage. But undefined interests, decided by one minister, enforced with terrorism scale sentences, is not a national security law. It is a blank cheque with a national security watermark. Ask the three thousand people arrested over placards how confident they are that a blank cheque stays in the drawer.

AND ALL THE WHILE, PALANTIR READS YOUR MEDICAL NOTES 

If you want to know who a government is building the machinery for, look at who it hires to run the data. The NHS Federated Data Platform is operated by Palantir, a US firm whose business is surveillance: battlefield targeting, predictive policing, and software that helps American immigration agents find people to deport. Its co-founder, Peter Thiel, told the Oxford Union in 2023 that the NHS makes people ill and needs market mechanisms, by which he meant privatisation. The £330 million contract was signed by the Conservatives in November 2023. This government inherited it, and at every decision point since, has chosen to keep it.

It has done more than keep it. In May, an internal briefing revealed plans to grant Palantir and other contractor staff admin level access to identifiable patient data, sweeping away the old case by case approvals. In December, the Ministry of Defence handed Palantir a further £240 million deal without competitive tender. Across at least ten departments, councils and police forces, the company now holds British state contracts worth upwards of £670 million.

Parliament’s own Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, cross party, has now told the government in terms to cancel the contract and use next year’s break clause to build a British replacement. The resistance has come from below too. The British Medical Association has voted to oppose the platform’s rollout entirely. And on 24 June, Sheffield became the first council in England to formally oppose it, when councillors voted 62 to 1 to call on their local NHS bodies to freeze integration. The motion’s proposer, Toby Mallinson, made the point that deserves to be heard in every trust boardroom in the country. Reform UK has already pledged to use exactly this kind of data infrastructure for mass deportations.

The same government asking you to hand over a placard is asking you to hand over your medical file to a firm that helps deport people for a living. That is not two stories. That is one government, in two uniforms.

THE ENEMY IS NOT INCOMPETENCE 

The comfortable explanation for all of this is drift. A weak Prime Minister, a panicking party, each law an isolated overreaction to an isolated headline. Take each one alone and each has its alibi.

Refuse to take them alone. Put them in one column, dated, and read down the list. Every measure lands on the same people: the ones who march, who picket, who hold placards, who sit on juries, who cannot buy their way around an ID check, whose data sits in an NHS file rather than a private clinic’s. Not one of these laws inconveniences a landlord, a hedge fund or an arms exporter. Two years of frantic legislation and not one new power points upward. That is not drift. That is aim.

The enemy of this argument is not one man in Downing Street. Starmer will go, probably sooner than later, and the powers will remain, filed and ready for whoever comes next, and the polls tell us plainly who that might be. The enemy is a political class, blue and red alike, that has stopped believing it can win the working class’s consent and has decided to manage its anger instead. A confident government persuades. A frightened one builds designation regimes, judge only courts and biometric databases. Every one of these laws is a confession.

THE BOOT AND THE BALLOT 

Orwell warned that the future of power was a boot stamping on a human face, forever. The detail everyone forgets is that in his telling, the boot did not arrive by coup. It arrived by increments, each one reasonable, each one lawful, each one passed by people who told themselves it would only ever be used on someone else. 

The working class of this country has faced down worse than Keir Starmer’s statute book. It broke the Combination Acts. It survived Peterloo and got the vote anyway. It buried the Poll Tax and the government that introduced it. Every tool it used to do those things is precisely what is being confiscated now, and that should be read not as our weakness but as their fear. Governments do not disarm people they expect to stay quiet.

So do not stay quiet. The Courts and Tribunals Bill is in the Lords now, this month, and a letter to a peer takes ten minutes to write. The Palantir contract comes up for review this year, before the break clause even falls due, and Sheffield has shown that sixty two councillors in one chamber can put a £330 million contract on notice. Write to yours and ask why they haven’t.

They promised to tread lightly. Two years on, the gavel falls heavier than the boot ever did, and it is falling on exactly the people who put them there. Make them regret ever teaching us to count the blows.

Stripped Responsibility

The women Labour MPs who want half of Ministers to be women obviously know what a woman is, yet Janet Eastham writes:

The Health Secretary stripped responsibility for a puberty blocker trial from a junior minister who had raised safeguarding concerns, The Telegraph understands.

James Murray stopped Preet Kaur Gill, the minister for health innovation and safety, from taking a leading role on the controversial Pathways trial, according to people familiar with the matter.

The trial will involve 226 children who believe they are transgender being offered puberty-suppressing drugs, with girls as young as 11 and boys as young as 12 eligible.

Ms Kaur Gill, a former social worker and MP for Birmingham Edgbaston, has in the past voiced alarm that “credible safeguarding warnings” about puberty blockers were being ignored.

When she took office in May, replacing Dr Zubir Ahmed, who had resigned in protest against Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership, Pathways was initially included in her portfolio, having previously fallen within Dr Ahmed’s brief.

It is understood that Ms Kaur Gill was preparing to raise concerns about Pathways with officials at the start of last month. At the time, the trial, which had been commissioned following the Cass review to gather data on the side effects of puberty blockers, was on hold over safety concerns.

However, she appears to have been sidelined, and by the time the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) announced on June 19 that Pathways could proceed with minimum age limits introduced, responsibility for the trial had passed to Baroness Merron, the minister for women’s health and mental health.

Three days later, Mr Murray told the Commons that, while he felt “discomfort and unease” at the prospect of trialling children as young as 11 on puberty-suppressing drugs, he thought “proceeding with the trial is, on balance, the most appropriate way forward”.

One Whitehall source told The Telegraph: “If this trial had stayed the responsibility of Preet Gill, she would have rightly cancelled it, at least until the child victims of the appalling Tavistock scandal had been tracked down to find out how badly damaged they are.

“Instead, in an increasingly desperate attempt to go ahead with this shocking trial, it has been taken away from her.”

Another source accused the Health Secretary of ignoring concerns not only from Ms Kaur Gill, but also from two other female health ministers said to have reservations about medicalising gender-questioning children.

“It shows women’s voices are still not being listened to on this issue, and that one man [Mr Murray] – who’s only been there for two seconds – is trying to push it through regardless,” they said.

Change of ministerial responsibilities ‘routine’

A spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) insisted that any views Ms Kaur Gill had expressed on gender medicine had “no bearing” on the decision to transfer responsibility for the Pathways trial to Lady Merron.

Officials said the rearrangement of ministerial responsibilities was routine and done to centralise and consolidate roles.

The spokesman added that ultimate decision-making power sat “as it always has” with the Health Secretary, and said it would be “completely untrue” to suggest otherwise.

However, by removing Ms Kaur Gill from the brief, Mr Murray may have reduced the risk of internal opposition as the department faces legal and political challenges aimed at stopping recruitment beginning on Aug 1.

The Conservatives’ June 23 Opposition Day vote to ban puberty blockers was defeated by 283 votes to 112, after two-fifths of MPs, including Andy Burnham, the MP for Makerfield and assumed next prime minister, did not turn up.

The High Court will also hear an application on July 27 for an injunction to halt the trial. It has been brought by campaigners including James Esses, a therapist, the Bayswater Support Group, which supports parents of trans children, and Keira Bell, a detransitioner.

They are seeking a judicial review against the Government over the way Pathways was approved. If granted, the injunction would stop recruitment until the case is heard.

Other dissenting voices

Ms Kaur Gill is not the first senior figure whose role on the trial appears to have been curtailed.

In March, the MHRA announced that its chief medical and scientific officer Prof Jacob George, whose safety concerns had led to Pathways being paused, would no longer be involved.

The agency insisted his recusal was voluntary, and said the decision was taken as a “precaution” after social media posts emerged in which he praised JK Rowling and criticised the denial of “basic biological fact”.

After his intervention, King’s College London, which is running the trial, introduced clearer rules for stopping the drugs if children show reduced bone density and better monitoring of vaginal bleeding.

As minister for health innovation and safety, Ms Kaur Gill is responsible for “research” and “medicines”.

Her predecessor, Dr Ahmed, answered parliamentary questions on Pathways, including on ministerial approval, safeguards and clinician guidance.

A DHSC spokesman also insisted that responsibility for the trial “has not changed”. However, DHSC officials also conceded that the department had assumed Ms Kaur Gill would continue to be involved in Pathways, as Dr Ahmed had been, but this was later changed.

Before becoming a minister, the Labour and Co-operative MP for Birmingham Edgbaston had expressed significant concerns about giving children puberty blockers.

On Dec 17, 2025, during a Commons urgent question, Ms Kaur Gill told Wes Streeting, the then health secretary: “As a former children’s services manager, I am concerned that credible safeguarding warnings from clinicians and academics about puberty suppression in children are not being heard.”

She asked Mr Streeting to meet doctors who held those concerns and to review the lower age limit for the trial. That meeting went ahead in February.

‘Data linkage study’

The Health Minister also appears to have questioned why more efforts are not being made to complete the so-called “data linkage study”, another key Cass recommendation.

The study aims to link the records of former Tavistock patients with their adult NHS records to establish the long-term outcomes of treating children with puberty blockers and hormones.

But it was delayed after some adult gender clinics refused to share data. On Feb 24, Ms Kaur Gill asked whether the health department “will mandate data sharing across NHS trusts and adult gender services to enable a robust, independent longitudinal study consistent with the recommendations of the Cass Review”.

DHSC did not respond to questions from The Telegraph on whether data sharing is now compulsory.

Plain For All To See

Before anyone says that I can talk, I do not bankroll the possible next Prime Minister but one. If you doubt that his political movement is a cult, then watch the reaction to this jaw-dropping exposé by Gabriel Pogrund, Venetia Menzies, George Greenwood and Emanuele Midolo:

At 6.36pm on June 16, a black-tinted Range Rover crept down an empty backstreet a short walk from Buckingham Palace. The driver parked directly opposite a Georgian townhouse, the back door positioned so the passenger could take the shortest walk possible to get inside.

The first person to leave the vehicle was a former Royal Marines commando who began working as Nigel Farage’s bodyguard after the general election.

He opened the door for the VIP in the back seat.

Out stepped not Farage — the Reform UK leader was headed north for the Makerfield by-election — but a convicted criminal and crypto-gambler holding a fat wad of cash.

His name is George Swinfen Cottrell, otherwise known as “Posh George”. A baby-faced British aristocrat and former US federal inmate, he has no official role in Reform UK — but has been Farage’s closest adviser for more than a decade and travels with him in Westminster and around the country. The pair’s lives are so intertwined Cottrell uses the ex-soldier for his own protection, having quietly paid for Farage’s security for a number of years.

Secrecy follows Cottrell, 32, who has made an art of being difficult to pin down. He was once labelled “deceptive” by a judge for legally changing his name from “Cottrell” to “Cotrel”. Today he flies on private jets and makes bank transfers under the alias “George Co” and is a key player in a crypto gambling company owned via a complex offshore structure whose ownership is invisible to the public.

Yet his relationship with Farage, whom he calls “Daddy”, has been most opaque. It is so important to the Reform leader that lying in one of Cottrell’s homes is a copy of Farage’s maiden speech as an MP, the culmination of repeated attempts to enter the Commons over three decades. The Clacton MP signed it by hand as a tribute to his friend’s support, writing: “Thank you for everything! Nigel Farage”.

Today, Insight, the Sunday Times investigations unit, reveals the reason for this debt of gratitude. Our report, published alongside a podcast, Posh George: The Criminal Behind Farage, shows the web of undisclosed gifts and payments from Cottrell that helped pave Farage’s path to Westminster.

Farage appears to have broken MPs’ rules by failing to declare that Cottrell provided funding for his operation in the year before his election.

We can also reveal that:

• The Reform leader received “in kind” benefits ranging from his back office to his private security, staff, transport and accommodation. 

• Cottrell recruited and paid three staff to transform Farage’s social media presence, producing content on immigration, human rights law and political correctness, and that promoted Reform. 

• Cottrell has been involved in a crypto-gambling platform implicated in potentially illegal betting in the UK. 

• Two men — a friend of Cottrell’s and a Reform employee — owned UK companies which allowed illicit payments originally from or destined for the platform, which did not have a legally required UK licence. 

• Since the election Cottrell has let Farage use a five-storey house he rents on a street near Buckingham Palace. His lawyer said: “As a close friend, our client did, and does, allow Mr Farage to stay in our client’s rental property.” 

• The convict has applied for a presidential pardon in the US, where he pleaded guilty to wire fraud. 

• Cottrell received an £8.5 million Chelsea property from the billionaire Reform treasurer Nick Candy in the last year. Land Registry documents say the price paid was zero. Candy said Cottrell paid him by buying shares in an offshore Guernsey company but would not specify the value of the transaction.

The code of conduct says MPs must disclose any benefit which “might reasonably be thought by others to influence [their] actions or words” on their register of interests. Its “overall aim” is to protect democracy by upholding the highest levels of transparency. It says MPs must declare any gifts, benefits and hospitality received in the year preceding their election and which relate “in any way” to their “political activities”. The exception is “purely personal” gifts, such as presents from family. Even then, the code says “both the possible motive of the giver and the use [of the gift] should be considered”, clarifying: “If there is any doubt, the benefit should be registered.”

On his arrival in parliament, Farage registered a single benefit from Cottrell — £9,253.60 for travel, security and accommodation to attend a conference in Belgium — but otherwise declared nothing. These omissions appear to be a breach of the rules. Those found in breach face investigation and sanctions up to and including suspension from the Commons, potentially leading to a by-election.

Farage, 62, denies that the benefits required registration. He is already under investigation by the parliamentary standards commissioner for not registering a £5 million gift from Christopher Harborne, the crypto-billionaire, and which he said he did not need to divulge. The Clacton MP has since vocally championed crypto. He used a meeting with the Bank of England to argue against state involvement in the sector, and his party has published a draft piece of legislation, the Cryptoassets and Digital Finance Bill, which it says will make the “United Kingdom the world’s premier hub for cryptocurrency”.

In addition, like Harborne, Cottrell stands to gain from his relationship with Farage. He is a crypto-gambling entrepreneur involved in an offshore bookmaker, Tether.bet, which uses a digital currency part-owned by Harborne, according to US court documents. Cottrell denies he expected any benefit from his relationship with the Reform leader.

Cottrell is seeking a pardon from President Trump, with whom Farage has close ties, and whose vice-president, JD Vance, he has met a number of times, including on Saturday. Cottrell, who has spoken publicly of his closeness to Farage, recently created a political consultancy offering clients advice on “politics”, “campaigns” and “global business”.

It is unclear what due diligence, if any, Farage performed before accepting Cottrell’s help. Farage knew he was a convicted felon because the pair were travelling back from a Trump rally in Cleveland, Ohio, in July 2016 when Cottrell was arrested and charged with 21 offences for his role in a “dark web” money laundering plot. He later pleaded guilty to wire fraud and spent time in prison in Arizona.

Yet the latest disclosures show Cottrell has since become intimately involved with a gambling network which appears to be providing unlicensed activities in the UK, including in the period before he started supporting Farage’s private and public life.

Experts have told us that Farage should have declared financial support in this instance. Instead, it is laid bare today in an investigation based on leaked documents, open sources intelligence and interviews with sources.

The disclosures also pose questions about Farage’s claim the £5 million gift from Harborne was to cover his security; in fact Cottrell had been bankrolling his security for months.

Earlier, Reform said Farage did not need to declare Cottrell’s support as it preceded his announcement he would stand for parliament and so he was not a politician at the time. Instead, it said, he was a media personality and commentator so the funding did not support political activity. A Reform source added that Farage almost always stayed in his own home and did not routinely use the London property.

Here is the full story of Farage and his criminal consigliere.

From expulsion to prison 

George Swinfen Cottrell was born in Gloucester Maternity Hospital in October 1993.

His mother, the Honourable Fiona Cottrell, is an aristocrat whose father, the 3rd Baron Manton, inherited a family soap empire. In the 1970s she briefly dated Prince Charles, only for the royals to kill the match after it emerged she had posed naked for Penthouse, the men’s magazine.

His father, Mark, attended Gordonstoun school, where he was a contemporary of Prince Andrew’s. Newspaper columns from the 1970s describe Mark as a “Gatsby-esque” figure and man of “mystery” who refused to discuss his background. His passions were bobsledding, boats and flying helicopters.

Fiona and Mark married in 1978. On their wedding certificate, they listed their occupations as “of independent means”. They had a daughter a decade later, followed by their only son. Then the family moved to Mustique — the Caribbean island beloved of celebrities and royalty, where his father pursued his passion for sailing.

Cottrell was sent to boarding school at a young age. He spent his teenage years at Malvern College in Worcestershire. Yet the experience was cut short by a gambling addiction in which at one point he walked to a bookies with £50,000 in cash. He was expelled in 2010 because of his betting and left education without A-levels.

Like Farage, Cottrell did not attend university, instead deciding he wanted to make money. He became fixer-cum-financier to the ultra-rich in Mayfair, learning how to move large sums of money around the world as discreetly as possible. This gave him valuable skills, among them expertise in the emergent worlds of digital cryptocurrency and the dark web.

So it was that, in 2014, Cottrell offered anonymous drug dealers help laundering the proceeds of crime into bitcoin. Adopting the pseudonym “Bill”, he travelled to Las Vegas to meet his clients in the flesh, outlining how he could move hundreds of thousands of dollars and brokering a deal to launder an initial $20,000.

It would be the source of his downfall in due course — but first Cottrell pivoted into politics.

Why Cottrell became so senior in Farage’s team so young is difficult to determine. He, like many members of Farage’s coterie, had a background in finance and a roguish if charming demeanour.

Yet friends say Cottrell is not intensely political — and may have ended up in Farage’s UK Independence Party through happenstance. His maternal uncle, the F1 motor racing peer, Lord Hesketh, was a prominent member of Ukip.

After volunteering in an Essex by-election in 2015, Cottrell proved himself a talented fundraiser and a natural Farage whisperer, capable of determining when his boss wanted a cigarette, a pint, a moment’s peace, or, a “PFL” — a proper f***ing lunch. His cut-glass accent, regular claims to have a trust fund of £250 million and willingness to buy drinks, were a source of amusement, but he also worked tirelessly for Farage. The pair became close. Farage said he was like a “son” to him. One person said the dynamic was more that of a master and servant.

The 22-year-old was rewarded with a role as Ukip’s head of fundraising and a ringside seat to history as the 2016 Brexit vote approached. He was with Farage throughout June 23, the day of the referendum. In the nervous hours after voting closed, he furnished Farage with cigarettes and persuaded his boss to go for a “PFL”.

While sinking dessert wine at Zafferano’s, a Westminster restaurant, he also sensed a commercial opportunity: he later claimed to have aggressively “shorted” the pound when it became clear Leave had won and the value of sterling plummeted. He later boasted of making a killing, only to lose it the next day gambling.

The losses did not seem to matter: his life was on the up, tethered, as it was, to Farage’s political fortunes. The month after the result, he travelled to Ohio as Farage appeared at a rally with Trump, then running for president. On stage before thousands of supporters, Trump feted Farage as the architect of Brexit, a forerunner of the populist movement he now led.

Farage and Cottrell travelled back together, flying via Chicago’s O’Hare airport. The men were heading onto their connecting flight when federal agents seized Cottrell. It transpired that, two years earlier, when Cottrell had offered his money-laundering services he was speaking not to drug dealers, but to undercover federal agents.

The Department of Justice pounced after realising he was in the country.

Cottrell was denied bail, the judge determining that his recent decision to legally change his surname, from “Cottrell” to “Cotrel”, was evidence of deception. He was held in a federal prison, where he was incarcerated alongside murderers and rapists. The young man was suddenly very alone: court transcripts describe his situation in terms similar to his mother’s following her nude photoshoot: a “black sheep”, “basically disinherited” from his family. Yet Farage refused to disown him, responding to questions on breakfast TV by saying he did not know whether he was guilty, and downplaying the charges.

Cottrell faced 20 years in prison, but had a stroke of luck. Federal agents had been amazed by his sophistication given his youth. They also felt he had valuable insight. Before his trial in 2017, he agreed to provide “information” about his activities and also argued his intention had always been to steal the money from the drug dealers, not launder it. He brokered a plea deal, admitted guilt to a charge of wire fraud and ended up serving only eight months in prison.

After returning to London in late 2017, Cottrell found himself at a crossroads. At first, he told those who would listen that prison had been a wakeup call. He would stay out of trouble and redeem himself in the eyes of his family, including his beloved mother. After his release, she had given an interview describing her son’s claims to have a huge trust fund as “ridiculous, absolute rubbish”: he was, she said, simply a confused young man with a gambling problem.

The contrition did not last long. In public, Cottrell adopted a new version of events. He claimed his “youth and inexperience” had been exploited: that all he had done was play along during a conversation with two strange men who turned out to be undercover agents entrapping him. Yet he also luxuriated in his status as a “former federal inmate” — as he put it on LinkedIn — and gave interviews about the gangland members he had met behind bars.

The tabloids relished the backstory too. In late 2018, he met Georgia Toffolo, or “Toff”, the victorious candidate in I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here. The pair began a romance in which he, like his parents half a century earlier, graced the gossip columns of the Daily Mail. She was described as “smitten” with her “beau”, the “shamed banker” and “convicted felon”. After a few months of dating Cottrell made his next gamble. He moved to Montenegro.

From Mayfair to Montenegro

In Tivat, a tiny port city on the Adriatic coast, he married his two passions: crypto and gambling. He is understood to have become a key player in Tether.bet, an online bookmaker and casino that offered punters huge stakes on sports and politics.

The concept was that customers could place large sums of money — in some instances millions — in either cash or crypto. As its name suggested, this included Tether, a digital currency part owned by Harborne, the billionaire behind the £5 million gift. In fact, Tether.bet’s website was registered days after Farage, Cottrell and Harborne lunched together in Mayfair.

Cottrell’s decision to relocate to the Balkans had less to do with the warm weather than the political climate. Across the West, governments were finding ways to regulate digital currencies over fears they facilitate crime and money-laundering.

But Montenegro, a nation state on the edge of Europe, was doing the opposite: his arrival coincided with a shakeup in the country’s politics in which a crypto investor had been appointed finance minister. Tivat, Cottrell’s home, had long been a gateway for cigarette and cocaine smuggling, but now found itself at the forefront of a crypto boom.

The lack of crypto or gambling regulation was a key feature of Tether.bet.

In Britain, customers are often banned from gambling with traditional bookmakers, or face stringent limits on the amount they can bet. The reasons vary: in some instances, they do not pass “KYC” — “know your customer” checks — because of past criminal or addiction issues. In others, they are professional gamblers whose use of computational methods means they are too sophisticated — and effective — for most bookmakers to accept their custom.

Tether.bet told the gambling world: bet with us instead. High-rolling customers could use the anonymity of crypto, and the huge stakes, to make a killing.

Alongside Cottrell, two men were involved with the platform from an early stage: David Robery, 62, a software expert who lived in the cottage neighbouring his family home in the Worcestershire countryside, and Hon Kong Yong, 69, a formerly bankrupt Malaysian accountant and friend of Cottrell’s, both of whom were based in Montenegro.

Collage of two images, one with an older man and woman in a dress and tiara, and a black and white image of a man smoking.

The platform did not exist as a single company but, rather, a network of connected entities spread across several offshore jurisdictions. While it had an office and bank account in Montenegro, it said it had a gambling license from Curaçao, the Caribbean nation, and that payments were processed through Cyprus.

In November 2020 Tether.bet publicly launched with a big bang, claiming to have accepted the world’s biggest politics bet: $5 million on Donald Trump to win the election, with a promised $25 million payout. The Sun reported that a “mystery Brit gambler” and “rich former banker” who had consulted “Trump camp insiders” was behind the new venture.

From the outset, Tether.bet attracted a colourful clientele. One customer was a Tottenham hardman whose family waste management company had had several brushes with the law. Another was the gambling syndicate run by Tony Bloom, the billionaire owner of Brighton FC. Kia Joorabchian, a football super agent, also bet small sums.

Shortly after Cottrell settled in Montenegro, he invited Farage to his new home, bringing him to an equestrian event “Polo in the Port”, where they smoked and drank in the sun.

From afar, Cottrell seemed to be doing well. He had a penthouse overlooking the Riviera, drove a £300,000 Lamborghini, and began an on-off relationship with Andjela Vukadinovic, that year’s winner of the “Miss Montenegro” contest. He hosted lavish parties, where, according to several sources, crypto investors mixed with Eastern European sex workers. Cottrell denies inviting or hosting escorts to his parties.

Yet despite the veneer of opulence, Cottrell was increasingly distracted by his own personal gambling through Tether.bet, and losing money quickly. According to court documents, on one occasion he placed £250,000 on a single lower league football game involving Cambridge United. Documents filed at the High Court record one professional gambler’s judgment: “[He] was not a particularly successful gambler and frequently lost large sums of money.”

Tether.bet was also less professional an outfit than it might have appeared: behind the scenes, insiders said the operation was chaotic and customers reported being unable to withdraw winnings.

At one point, in early 2022, High Court documents claim, Cottrell was under sufficient pressure that he did a deal with the billionaire Bloom’s gambling syndicate. He would allegedly act as their frontman, placing bets they might not otherwise be able to make, if they stopped betting using Tether.bet. Cottrell maintains that he only was a user of the site and has no other role.

Adding to the pressure was the unpredictable world of Tivat. In the spring of 2023, police attended the premises of a casino, Salon Prive, belonging to his friend, Hon Kong Yong, to inspect a potentially illicit “crypto ATM”. A minister then accused Cottrell of being linked to the device and financing a pro-crypto candidate for prime minister. Both men denied, and continue to deny, wrongdoing, and no charges were brought.

Cottrell left the country around this time, returning only when the candidate won and opened the door to his return. Dritan Abazovic, the former Montenegrin prime minister, told us: “After a few months when he saw that there was a new political option coming into power, he came back.”

Cottrell was distracted, under pressure — and taking risks.

According to allegations in court documents filed last year, Cottrell started quietly looking for British gamblers who might be interested in using Tether.bet — among them the sorts of millionaires he came across in Mayfair. To the professional gambler who brought the case, this posed legal risks because Tether.bet did not have a licence in Britain, meaning it was not allowed to advertise or provide services in the UK. Anyone who visits the website would find a notice reading: “Unfortunately you are accessing from a restricted territory.” Cottrell is not a party to the court case, but denies many of its claims.

Yet as late as 2022, we can reveal, middle men facilitated Tether.bet gambling to high-end UK customers by directing them to deposit money in two British companies.

One was Global G Corp Ltd, a shell company solely owned by Robery, his family friend and Tether.bet associate. There is no evidence it engaged in legitimate business activity and it was eventually struck off for failing to file accounts in 2023.

The other was Fispay Ltd, owned by Mowbray Jackson, a security consultant who is friends with Farage and Cottrell. He now works for Reform as its data protection officer.

According to sources, the middlemen facilitated Tether.bet bets in which certain customers deposited tens of thousands of pounds cash via bank transfer into these entities, then had an equivalent sum converted into crypto and placed on their account with the platform. If they won, they could receive the cash as crypto or have it converted into cash and paid out via the same companies. Cottrell himself denies seeking clients for Tether.bet.

It is an offence to advertise or provide unlawful gambling to customers in the UK, punishable with imprisonment or a fine. It is also a criminal offence to handle the proceeds of crime or launder money, which, in this instance, may have taken place every time the UK companies paid out winnings — as they were the proceeds of illicit gambling.

A source close to Jackson said he would need to take legal advice. A source close to Robery denied wrongdoing and said that his company had never traded.

Return of the prodigal son

By the spring of 2023, Farage found himself at a crossroads.

Brexit was over, the rancour of the referendum in the rearview mirror. He continued to have a foot in politics, serving as Reform’s honorary president, but was also enjoying the freedom of life as a commentator and presenter on GB News. While the Tory government remained vulnerable to its right, Trump had vowed to run for president again. He was keen to play a role in that campaign when it came as much as he was any election.

Still, he continued to think about a comeback. In June, Farage revealed he had been “debanked” for political reasons. He started a one-man campaign, and even a website, against the “banking establishment”, which dominated the media and politics for weeks. It culminated with the departure of NatWest’s chief executive, serving as a reminder — to Farage and others — of his singular ability to dominate events, even, in this instance, for reasons well removed from day-to-day politics.

During this period of possibility, he turned to Cottrell. According to sources, Farage decided he would professionalise his operation, bolster his brand and reach beyond his natural audience. That would serve his interests whatever came next.

In September, Cottrell recruited a young man who could do just that: Jack Anderton, 25, a right-wing political activist from Liverpool. Anderton had created his own polished social media videos presenting immigration as a problem affecting young people. He said he could do the same for Farage, especially on TikTok, a platform which a third of young voters use as their primary source of news. Cottrell paid him a salary equivalent to around £55,000 a year.

He also paid Tom Dupre, 31, a Paris-based British writer once affiliated with Generation Identity, described as a “hipster far-right” movement. Dupre created a website, nigelfarageoffice.com, and assisted with recruitment and other back office operations. And Cottrell recruited a third person, Leah Thornton, who became Farage’s assistant.

Cottrell’s lawyers said “Mr Anderton and Ms Thornton were only paid by bank transfer using accounts in our client’s name only”. They, and Reform, denied Dupre worked for Farage.

With Cottrell and a team behind him, Farage’s digital presence changed instantly. The grainy and horizontally shot footage disappeared, giving way to mobile-first, snappy content designed to go viral. Farage increased but also broadened his output. He positioned himself as more than a former Brexit campaigner — a cultural commentator on issues from immigration and crime to trans rights.

His daily videos about “an invasion” of illegal migrants crossing the Channel, net zero U-turns from Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government and the “dreadful” Black Lives Matter movement raked in hundreds of thousands of views. He also continued to champion Reform, sharing a video bearing the party’s turquoise logo and encouraging viewers to vote at the October by-elections. “My efforts and my work will be solely behind Richard Tice and Reform UK,” he boasted in a video captioned “Reform is here to stay.”

In December 2023, Farage appeared on I’m a Celebrity, for which Cottrell had helped negotiate a £1.5 million fee after asking Toffolo, his ex who had previously won the show, to advise him. With Farage in Australia, Anderton was back in London, clipping highlights from the show which went viral online.

All this helped Farage enter the new year as one of the most popular politicians in the country and the most sophisticated in reaching audiences that eluded most MPs.

Cottrell also provided Farage with security, primarily composed of elite former soldiers, and drivers. He did not specify how much he spent on the personnel, or when payments began. He added: “Our client has not had time to check his records, but the last payment was in Q1 2024.”

Once the general election was called on May 22, Farage kept his supporters waiting. His social media accounts, with the help of Anderton, pumped out pro-Reform content emblazoned with its logo, presenting the party as the only solution to “stop the boats”. The videos, posted on Instagram and TikTok, criticised Labour for “betraying” voters on Brexit, and denounced the Conservatives as “charlatans”.

On June 2, with the election campaign already underway, Farage announced he would run for Reform in Tory-held Clacton. He instantly became the party’s leader and the face of their national campaign.

Cottrell spent the weeks that followed side-by-side with Farage, on hand to provide emotional support, counsel — and even physical protection. He was with him when Farage was doused with a milkshake by a protester, and escorted his mentor away.

Anderton was with them too. He was put on Reform’s payroll for June, charging the party £4,500 for campaign services, and pumping out videos that led to him being credited as “the brains behind [Farage’s] social media blitz”. The Evening Standard noted that he was not on Reform’s official campaign, but had worked for Farage for “months”.

A number of academics would observe that Farage began the campaign with a social media head start. He boasted 625,000 followers on his personal TikTok page, while rivals such as Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer did not even have profiles. It was an advantage Farage hammered home, generating more engagement than all political parties combined.

Nigel Farage, covered in a thrown drink, reacts after an incident during his election candidacy launch.

Meanwhile Farage continued to rely on Cottrell in other ways.

Around this time, he began renting a residential property near Buckingham Palace — a 30-second walk from Reform’s temporary HQ for the election. The five-storey Georgian townhouse has served as Farage’s “central London bolthole” and a place for him to stay when he could not stay at his homes in Kent and Essex. It is an ultra-luxury mansion that was extensively refurbished by its current owner, who bought it for more than £4 million, according to Land Registry documents, and could now be worth significantly more. Cottrell is understood to be paying tens of thousands of pounds per month in rent.

On July 4, Farage was elected, easily defeating the Conservative incumbent and becoming an MP for the first time. At that point, Farage had four weeks to disclose any “benefit” received for free over the preceding 12 months: anything, according to the code of conduct, exceeding £300 in value that is not clearly a “purely personal” gift such as that from a friend or family member. He disclosed one form of support from Cottrell: the £9,253.60 estimated cost of flights and hotels for him and a staff member, and security, to attend a conference in Belgium weeks earlier.

Since then, it appears, Farage has continued to rely on Cottrell. According to sources and neighbours, he still uses the London property. Reform sources acknowledged there was a standing invitation, but that it did not need to be declared, indicating it was a purely personal matter.

Cottrell’s only affairs, meanwhile, remain closely entwined with Farage’s: a fortnight ago, he returned home flanked by the former Marine, who we are not identifying by name and who was with Farage campaigning in Sussex and Cottrell in central London in the run-up to the local elections. Reform said the ex-soldier no longer worked with Reform and that his private arrangements were a matter for him.

Farage has revealed only two payments involving Cottrell in the past year. One was the £15,200 for him to fly to a Trump fundraising event in Florida last year, which he divulged late and only in response to inquiries from The Sunday Times.

The other did not come from George himself, but rather Fiona, his mother.

In June last year, the Electoral Commission revealed that she had donated £750,000 to the party, making her one of its largest donors. We obtained legal documents dated 2023 in which she described herself as a “retired stylist”. The same papers show that, when her husband died that year, his estate — administered by Fiona — was valued at £1.5 million. The Electoral Commission has refused to disclose records about the payment.

When we visited her at her cottage in rural Worcester, she said “no comment” before questions could be asked. Cottrell himself has continued to prosper from the Farage association.

As a man whose wealth derives from crypto, he could not have a more vocal champion in Farage, who has vigorously lobbied for the sector. This included a recent face to face meeting with the governor of the Bank of England, whom he urged to stay out of the industry.

Yet the benefits may be more direct too. Towards the end of 2023, Nick Candy, Reform’s honorary treasurer, listed a house in Chelsea for sale of £8.5 million. It did not sell so Candy did something else. According to legal documents we obtained, he gave it to Cottrell. Transfer documents show the asset moved hands “not for value”. The price paid is listed as zero.

Candy said it was not a gift: rather, he said, Cottrell became the beneficial owner of the property by purchasing shares in its parent company, registered in Guernsey, and also settling a loan the company owed the Candy Group. This appears inconsistent with the documents which say the company is no longer the owner: rather, it belongs to Cottrell. Asked how much Cottrell paid, neither he nor Candy would say.

If Cottrell’s lobbying for a pardon from Trump is fruitful, he could travel to the US, and put his crimes behind him for good. Cottrell is thought to be determined to draw a line under the episode, and recently co-authored a book, How to Launder Money, which he claimed was a guide to law enforcement on stopping the methods he had become familiar with. Farage was reportedly at the launch at the Old War Office, a five-star hotel opposite Downing Street.

As part of his attempt to rebrand, Cottrell has also created a new political consultancy, purporting to offer campaign advice, polling and strategy. The motto on its website: “Reputation is built brick by brick.”

Reform UK 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. Contrary to the story’s tone, no parliamentary rules have been broken. We also understand The Sunday Times has a new podcast to promote, which it seems very excited about. Its agenda should be plain for all to see.”

Absolutely Core

It is perfectly possible to be delusional and realistic at the same time. By claiming the credit for any Labour victory at the next General Election, Keir Starmer is clearly away with the fairies. Yet by holding onto his Commons seat, Starmer is realistically admitting both that the Greens would win a by-election at Holborn and St Pancras, although that would not bother him, and that he himself was, if not unemployable, then badly in need of a guaranteed floor of £98,599.

Starmer nominated Andy Burnham for Leader in 2015, he was then a Shadow Home Office Minister under Burnham in the early Corbyn days, and he now says that he wants to carry on as a backbench MP. But he could not possibly do so in the party that was governing against his record. He really did come to politics very late in life.

Although he has easily mastered the dishonesty. Political or moral bankruptcy is a matter of opinion, but financially the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn was in the black for the first time since the 1970s. It has been under Starmer that, despite huge corporate and individual donations, Labour has returned to an overall deficit approaching four million pounds. Starmer is still lying. Politically, financially and morally bankrupt, indeed.

More Cool Thought

Peter Hitchens writes:

Have our brains turned into lasagna? I struggle all the time to work out which of the many wars now wrecking the world is good, and which is bad. How can you tell? Are the bad people the ones who commit murder and kill children? Apparently not. As Iran buries its assassinated leader, in a colossal, furious funeral lasting for days, Western media are full of the usual rather dim and thought-free stuff about the sinister bearded regime and its desire to have nuclear weapons.

Well, OK, it is sinister and it is bearded and it pretty certainly wants nuclear weapons now, even if it didn’t before it was bombed by the US and Israel. Yet what would we say if a Russian missile had been used to kill a major Western leader, and in the course of doing so had murdered his year-old granddaughter? You’d never hear the end of it. Yet this is what the US did to Iran.

The girl’s name was Zahra Mohammadi Golpayegani and her life was worth exactly as much as that of any other year-old little girl, anywhere in the world. Nobody in the US government has ever directly addressed her death, let alone said sorry. The view seems to be that it was the Iranians’ fault for having a little girl there when the US chose to assassinate her grandfather in a surprise attack.

Oh, and by the way, aren’t we against assassination? Isn’t the murder of John F Kennedy one of the worst crimes of our time? Don’t we rightly excoriate the Russians for their revolting poisonings on British soil? I must take another handful of anti- confusion pills before I continue. Then what would we say if Russia had rocket-bombed a girls’ school in Ukraine, killing 175 people, mainly children? But when the US obliterated the Minab girls’ school in Iran, there was never any really fierce grief or anger in the West. Why not? What civilised human does not weep and rage at the slaughter of children, any children?

Once again, it turns out to be Iran’s fault for aggressively putting a girls’ school where the Pentagon thought there was a Revolutionary Guard base, or some such tripe. Where are all those sophisticated satellites – you know, the ones that can tell a blackboard from a submachine gun at a height of 150 miles – when you really need them? As for Israel’s bombing and shelling of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon, what would we say if the Russians did these things in Ukraine? We’d be pretty cross. We certainly wouldn’t (as the Americans do) send them more money and ammunition so that they could keep right on doing it.

My point is very simple. Our emotions about these events are in a mess. We are quite right to be distressed by assassinations, by the deaths of children, by the mangling and killing of civilians in wars they did not choose. But our pity and distress must apply in all cases, not just in some. Our own side, if such a thing still exists, has, alas, done some terrible things which may not be expiated in our lifetimes. It is not even true that the bad people have, in all cases, started the fighting. Vladimir Putin is rightly despised for his lawless invasion of Ukraine. But the surprise bombing of Iran, while peace talks were in progress, was a shameful act of duplicity which its victims will not quickly forget.

So, in all these wars, may we please have less righteous passion? We aren’t entitled to feel especially righteous. And may we have more cool thought, which we badly need? What outcome do we really seek in Ukraine or Iran? Can we afford the price, in lives and freedom, which we are being asked to pay for it? Do we want a more or less permanent war of bombing in Europe, which might at any time spread westwards to our own cities? Have nearly 50 years of relentless hostility to Iran, and cruel sanctions imposed on its innocent people, brought down the regime? Well, no. Might it be worth trying something else?

For these suggestions I shall of course be called, yet again, an appeaser, traitor etc. This thoughtless bilge drowns debate in countries which have let simple-minded propaganda drive out thought. Carry on like this and we will blunder into total national disaster.