Labour party chair Anna Turley has referred Nigel Farage’s claims of Russian phone hacking to the Metropolitan Police and the National Cyber Security Centre after Farage and Reform failed to confirm whether they had themselves reported the alleged breach within the 24-hour deadline she set. ITV News subsequently reported that Reform had reported the allegations “to the relevant authorities” – but only after Labour acted first.
Turley wrote: “Since then, a Reform spokesperson has issued a vague response to the media, which fails to confirm exactly which authorities this potentially serious national security breach has been reported to. I have therefore today contacted the National Cyber Security Centre and the Metropolitan Police to ensure that the suspicions you and Reform UK have publicly raised are investigated properly. I have done so because it is in the national interest to do so.”
The sequence of events
The chain of events leading to this point is specific and revealing. As we reported in our Farage Russia hacking piece, Farage claimed that counter-espionage experts had concluded “hostile state actors, almost certainly linked to Moscow” had used spear phishing techniques to hack his phone, email and bank accounts – and that this was how the story of his undisclosed £5 million gift from Christopher Harborne reached The Guardian. The Guardian described the claim as “an absurd deflection.”
Turley first wrote to Farage earlier this week, asking him to confirm whether he had reported the alleged hack to the police and the NCSC. She gave him 24 hours to do so. The specific logic was straightforward: if Farage genuinely believed his phone had been hacked by a foreign state, failure to report it to the relevant national security authorities would itself be a significant and revealing choice.
Reform’s response was, in Turley’s characterisation, “vague” – failing to confirm which authorities the matter had been reported to or what proactive steps had been taken. The 24 hours passed. Turley referred it herself.
Why the referral matters – beyond the obvious irony
The immediate and obvious irony is that a man who claimed to be the victim of Russian state hacking apparently needed the Labour party chair to refer the matter to national security authorities on his behalf. But the referral has a more specific purpose than irony.
By referring the matter to the NCSC and the Metropolitan Police, Turley has created an investigative trail that Reform cannot simply ignore. The NCSC and Met Police cannot uninvestigate a formal referral. Any investigation will require cooperation from Farage and Reform – the very cooperation that Farage has refused to provide to journalists, parliamentary investigators and the public on the underlying £5 million question.
As Turley’s letter states: “The alleged crime is an incredibly serious one with potential wider implications for Britain’s national security, the integrity of our politics and public confidence in our democratic system. It is therefore essential that any evidence of hostile-state hacking or foreign interference is placed in the hands of the proper authorities for thorough and independent investigation.”
The £5 million questions that remain
Turley’s letter uses the hacking referral to press simultaneously on the underlying financial questions that the hacking claim was used to deflect from. As we reported in our formal Parliamentary Standards investigation piece, the Commissioner for Parliamentary Standards has opened a formal investigation into whether Farage broke Commons rules by failing to declare the gift.
The Labour letter sets out three questions Turley says remain unanswered:
Why didn’t Farage declare the £5 million gift? How have the millions been spent? Has Harborne given any other undeclared money to Farage or other Reform politicians?
The letter also documents the shifting explanations Farage has given – from “purely personal” security gift to Brexit reward – as we tracked in detail in our FT accounts analysis piece.
“It is vital that these outstanding questions are finally addressed so the public have the full facts. It is long overdue that you took the opportunity to do so and levelled with the British people,” Turley wrote.
Farage’s record of non-engagement
The referral comes at the end of a week in which Farage’s engagement with questions about his finances has been comprehensively documented. As we reported in our Channel 4 car getaway piece, he drove away from Channel 4’s Clare Fallon in his own byelection constituency when asked about the gift. As we reported in our Newsnight ten requests piece, he has sent a thumbs down emoji in response to ten separate interview requests from the programme.
His response to the hacking claim – issuing a statement through a party spokesperson, claiming Russian involvement, using it to attack The Guardian’s journalism, and then apparently not reporting it to the relevant national security authorities within 24 hours of being asked to confirm whether he had – is consistent with every previous engagement with the financial questions. The deflection comes first. The accountability does not follow.
Labour’s referral to the NCSC and Met Police means the accountability question now has a formal institutional home that Farage did not create and cannot control.
