Tomorrow's Business Today
Farage plays the PR game, perhaps not wisely
Nigel Farage is in hot water, though one is tempted to say he hasn’t noticed, since that’s the only temperature he knows.
The Guardian kicked things off with a story that he was given £5m by crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne before announcing he would stand in the 2024 general election.
Neither he nor Harborne said anything at first. But they asked for more time to respond.
That’s not unreasonable – papers tend to agree to that request. It’s factored in.
It’s part of the dance before it prints what it knows to be true.
Farage did not keep up his side of an unspoken deal – he told the Daily Telegraph about the gift, and said it was to pay for his personal security.
That moves things along a bit, and also changes the narrative from just the £5m gift to how he handled the public relations.
The Guardian notes: “Our reporting led to the discovery that Farage had been given £5m by Harborne in the run-up to the July 2024 election. On Monday morning, we asked both men about this. Rather than respond to the questions, they seemed to play for time.”
Which sounds a bit like: we won’t get fooled again.
This creates a problem now for Reform and perhaps for its lawyers.
Next time either asks for more time to respond to a story, they might not get it.
Farage might think he won, since he got the story mostly out in a friendly outfit first. But, well, tomorrow is another day.
Handling a sensitive Reform story, isn’t The Guardian, or anyone else, now entitled to say “this goes live in five minutes, comment after if you want”.
That’s a bit in breach of protocol, but, well, they started it.
And the law is increasingly on the media’s side here.
Case law supporting a quick turnaround on a story includes this judgement in favour of The Times and against Tim Yeo MP.
He said they libelled him. Mr Justice Warby ruled they did not.
Not for the first time, the PR becomes possibly the biggest part of this Farage story.
Be careful out there.
Please send candidates for press release of the day to:
Press release of the day
Half of UK job seekers have faced an AI interview. Most haven’t had a good one yet, says this from Greenhouse.
A third have walked away from a hiring process because it included an AI interview.
Daniel Chait, CEO and Co-Founder of Greenhouse, said: “Most AI in hiring today is making a bad system worse: more applications, less signal, and less transparency. But the process AI is being built on top of was already broken. Nobody likes writing CVs and filling out clunky job applications.”
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