Bartholomew's Notes

Speaking on Question Time, Nigel Farage goes all in on the claim that a canvasser in Clacton-on-Sea named Andrew Parker is an actor who infiltrated his campaign with the intention of being filmed by Channel 4 News making racist comments. Via the Daily Mail:

He said: ‘We then found out, yes, actually, he is an actor. He’s worked in the past for Channel 4. On his own site he says, ‘I’m a well-spoken actor with an alter-ego, I do rough talking’.

He added: ‘Let me tell you, from the minute he turned up in that office in Clacton and I saw him, he was acting from the very start. He even says on his website, ‘hire me, I do undercover filming’.

Asked who he believed paid the man to pretend to be a Reform canvasser, Mr Farage said: ‘It may well have been the production company, or it’s the guy himself who wanted publicity to get more parts, I don’t know. 

‘What I know is this is a political setup of astonishing proportions.’

Farage’s deputy Richard Tice meanwhile says that Channel 4’s denial of any involvement with the canvasser is “desperate stuff”, and he demands to know “Why did he say he is a property developer when he is an actor?”. The attack line appears to have originated with Tice’s partner Isabel Oakeshott, who suggested Channel 4 may have “used” Parker.

A bad-faith actor infilitrating some cause or group to make it look bad is always a possibility, although this seems to be an overly literal interpretation of the concept. If Parker wanted to express views that aren’t his own, and that are socially stigmatising, why didn’t he use a pseudonym? There are other difficulties.

First, there is ample documentation of Parker’s career as a property developer, including Companies House filings going back years (here and here) and corroborating details that remain available online from a recently deleted LinkedIn profile. In answer to Tice’s question, then, the reason he said he’s a property developer is because he is, and acting is just a sideline he has pursued over the years (since childhood, according to one profile page).

Second, Farage’s claim that Parker has “worked for Channel 4” lacks significance. Farage relies on a screenshot from Parker’s acting CV posted to a site that refers to Dead Pixels, alongside “Al Campbell / Channel 4”. Campbell was the show’s director, and Channel 4 was the broadcaster – but it was actually produced by Various Artists Ltd. The idea that this acting gig (so minor it’s not even listed on his IMDb – maybe the scene was cut) indicates a surreptitious pre-existing connection with Channel 4 News is fanciful. (1)

According to another Daily Mail article, Parker insists that he was a genuine Reform campaigner, although he regrets the comments that he was filmed making. Perhaps he brought his thespian instincts into his campaigning – modifying his accent, improvising some racist banter – but that would more likely mean that he wanted to fit in rather than that he’s an infiltrator. It seems to me significant that other campaigners haven’t come forward to say that he was different with them in private conversation than he was when he was being secretly filmed. (2)

It is difficult to see how Farage’s claim can be disproven, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence for it either. His confidence is either confirmation bias or opportunism, and should be balanced against his crafted image as a tough-talking plain speaker. It also fits a pattern of making wild accusations – he recently alleged that the company that Reform had employed to vet prospective candidates had deliberately allowed individuals with discreditable views to go forward to selection and then had tipped off the media. In fact, it seems that the company had been unable to do its work because the election had been called several months earlier than expected – a rather more plausible explanation than a criminal conspiracy.

The controversy over Parker has also conveniently deflected from another person who was secretly filmed by Channel 4, a man described as a member of Farage’s ground team and named in the media as George Jones. Speaking to several others outside a pub, Jones expressed anger at a “degenerate” rainbow flag on a police car bonnet and suggested that the police were promoting “nonces”. He added:

Our police officers would be paramilitaries, they won’t be police… We’re going to bring back the noose.

Note

1. Parker’s appearance on Channel 4 News is also now listed on IMDb, as “Self” for “Episode dated 27 July 2024“. As such, the site also describes him as “known for… Channel 4 News (1982)”. The “1982” here refers to when Channel 4 News started broadcasting, not when he appeared on it. Richard Tice, taking his lead from Mahyar Tousi, is confused on this point, and uses it as the basis for accusing Channel 4 of “fibbing”.

2. Parker was also filmed saying he had previously met Farage in a restaurant; Farage later told a Channel 4 reporter that he was “someone I met once years ago”, but it seems more likely that he was taking Parker’s claim at face value rather than remembering an encounter that was unlikely to have been significant.

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From British Christian magazine Woman Alive, last month:

Former midwife Laura Brett says she has been called an ‘anti-vaxxer’ and ‘conspiracy theorist’. Here she explains how asking questions led to her personal conviction that no one should have been pressured into taking the Covid-19 vaccine.

Brett alleges that Covid vaccination is “one of the biggest medical frauds in history”, and she writes that in October 2023

we gathered 100 church leaders, heads of charities and other prominent people in the Houses of Parliament to worship, pray and provide evidence-based information about the truth concerning Covid-19 and the vaccination programme

The “hook” for the article was AstraZeneca’s admission in court documents that their vaccine can in rare cases cause blood clots. Although this has been widely known now for several years, the acknowledgement had been presented sensationally in the media as a new development.

Brett is the author of a book called Losing Liberty, Finding Freedom, and as well as being a “former midwife” she describes herself as “an evangelist, a qualified midwife, international speaker, mentor and activist… positioned at the frontline of Christian ministry”. The book came out last last year, and the back cover features a blurb from none other than Covid conspiracist Michael Yeadon praising the work as “a loud bright celebration of the power and greatness of God!” The book was launched first in Williamsburg, VA, but then also in London in January this year: attendees (H/T @PozzyWozzy) included Andrew Bridgen MP, as well as Lara Fawcett, a PR agent known primarily to the public as Bear Grylls’ sister. Bridgen has posted some photos, including one in which he and Fawcett pose in front of a hanging t-shirt bearing the words “conspiracy theorist”.

The front cover of the book, meanwhile, comes with blurb from “Rev Richard Fothergill, Founder and CEO of the Filling Station Trust”. Fothergill was in the news a year ago, after he was “de-banked” after writing to the Yorkshire Building Society “to complain about their public messaging during Pride month”, particular as regards “gender ideology”. The “Filling Station Trust” organises “celebration meetings” around the country, meaning worship sessions along evangelical/Charismatic lines. This is Brett’s own affiliation, and Fothergill is on board with her anti-Covid vaccination alarmism. Writing a comment on the Premier Christian Radio Facebook page, he recently expressed the view that

The eminent Proff [unidentified] got it very wrong. The Vax was never suggested as being ‘experimental’. It was forced on us as a necessity. ‘Don’t kill granny’ remember? We were lied to and now those who did this hope to brush it all under the carpet. Evil days 2020-2022.

In the same thread, Brett adds:

We are happy to pray for anyone who is vax injured or worried they might be and we pray deliverance of all the spike proteins etc. We do this all the time at Harrogate Filling Station. Just get in touch via email and we can do that via zoom. The Lord heals!

Alongside running the Filling Station network, Fothergill is also “Trustee & Relational Covering” of a Christian coffee shop project in Yeovil called “Bread”, run by an evangelist named Dominic Muir. Muir’s other projects include “the Wesley Academy”, where he is listed as “Minister” alongside Rev Dr Joseph Boot, Virginia Logan, Sam Kyung-Min Lee and Joseph Buthee, described as “Bread Church coffee shop manager”. However, Buthee has more recently been active in London, and he recently led the Lord’s Prayer at the recent Tommy Robinson rally in London. Robinson has himself joined the Covid antivax bandwagon, and in September last year he was photographed with Bridgen at a conference in Denmark.

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From the Evening Standard:

Thousands of people gathered in Parliament Square on Saturday for a protest organised by Tommy Robinson.

Speeches were given by Mr Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley Lennon, Reclaim leader Laurence Fox and political commentator Carl Benjamin.

The focus of the protest was meant to be “two-tier policing” although Robinson had a broader list of grievances that were set out in a pre-recorded message broadcast to the crowd from a big screen above the man himself:

They shut down the country. They took away our rights and our freedoms. They flirted with compelling medical treatment, they caused the inflation we suffer from by printing money, continually printing money. And don’t ask questions about excess deaths – miscarriages, stillbirths, cancers, heart disease and vaccine efficacy and [such?]. The failure to reject net zero, the Marxist anti-capitalist dogma that will drive millions into poverty and hardship. They embrace unilateral economic disarmament. They can’t stop the tide, they can’t stop an earthquake, a hurricane, or even a strong breeze, yet they want us to believe that if they tax us more they’ll be able to stop the climate from changing… there’s over a hundred genders, because we say there are. And what will come next? Sex with little children is just another form of sexual expression? It will not be long before denouncing paedophilia is demonized.

Pre-recorded messages were also provided from June Slater of UK Politics Uncovered and from Katie Hopkins, among others – Hopkins was unable to be there in person because she was speaking at the Weekend Truth Festival in Cumbria (covered by Sky News here). Fox used the platform to rail against Pride Month, which (as usual) he described as a “child mutilation cult”.

So far so predictable, but there was an unexpected turn to religion at the end, when an unnamed speaker started talking about a “spiritual battle”, unfurled a banner declaring “Jesus is King” and led the crowd in saying the Lord’s Prayer – although pointedly he skipped over the line “As we forgive those who tresspass against us”. The speaker urged the crowd to “pray with me like you did in Sunday School”, an implicit acknowledgement that this was primarily an appeal to populist nostalgia, drawing on half-remembered phrases in communal memory.

The speaker also had a banner declaring “Jesus is King”, written in the same block capital font that was seen at last week’s “Disciples of Christ” protest outside the Azerbaijan Embassy. That event was led by someone who calls himself “Bob of Speakers Corner”, and Robinson also invited him onto the stage. Bob got the crowd to chant “Christ is King”, although I suspect for most participants this was just another supremacist slogan rather than an affirmation of faith, with no deeper meaning than the chant of “Allah, Allah, who the fuck is Allah?” that was heard from some of the crowd during the march from Victoria Station.

The Mail wrote up the protest as “London Protest Chaos”, an assessment which one person who watched the whole thing with a critical eye described as “ridiculous”. The framing, though, is useful for creating the impression that protests in general are problematic and need a firmer hand.

(H/T @Nullen80 for various clips)

UPDATE: The person who led the Lord’s Prayer was one Joseph Buthee, and he says that the missing part was just a mistake.

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