‘Farage’s newest small boats circus is choreographed nonsense designed to divert consideration from his crypto scandal’
Parliament’s standards watchdog had scarcely opened another investigation into Reform before Nigel Farage began hammering the distraction button.
Within hours of deputy leader Richard Tice becoming the second senior party figure in weeks to face scrutiny over alleged undeclared interests, Farage announced Operation Fortress – a plan to send the Royal Navy into the Channel to forcibly return small boat migrants to France.
The headlines changed. The cameras followed. Reform escaped the questions it did not want to answer.
That is the purpose of this naval pageant. It is an old stunt dressed up as emergency action. Reform proposed the same idea in January 2025, when it collapsed under the weight of its own emptiness. There were no workable details then, and there are none now.
Former Royal Navy commander Tom Sharpe has torn it apart. The Navy lacks the right vessels, while warships costing billions and built to defend Britain from threats such as Putin’s Russia should not be diverted into an expensive Channel pick-up service.
Yet the ugliest deception is Farage pretending to rescue Britain from a disaster bearing his fingerprints.
He was Brexit’s chief salesman. He promised control of the borders. Britain instead lost the Dublin Convention protections, which had offered a route to return asylum seekers to European countries they had already entered.
In 2018, 299 people crossed the Channel in small boats. By 2022, the total had exploded beyond 45,000.
Farage helped tear up the system, then made a career blaming others for the wreckage. Now he expects taxpayers to fund the theatre, concealing his failure.
Reform’s working-class supporters deserve better. Such hard workers are the people this newspaper stands beside, and they should not be patronised or treated as electoral puppets as they are now by Reform in Clacton.
They are being asked to trust a party whose deputy leader is under investigation over an allegedly undeclared financial relationship with a convicted fraudster, whose leader faces an unresolved standards referral and whose response to scrutiny is to wheel out the Navy. There are also serious questions over the millions of pounds accepted from donors living outside Britain.
Voters deserve the unvarnished record. Farage sold them control and delivered chaos. Reform now wants their votes, their trust and their taxes to pay for the damage.
