Keir Starmer had demanded an investigation into links between Reform UK and Russia following the party’s former leader in Wales being sentenced to more than a decade behind bars for
Rattled Nigel Farage has joked that the Queen could have been a ‘Putin sympathiser’ while being skewered over his praise for the Russian dictator.
Keir Starmer has demanded an investigation into links between Reform UK and Russia following the party’s former leader in Wales being sentenced to more than a decade behind bars for taking bribes to promote pro-Russian propaganda.
Nathan Gill was jailed for 10-and-a-half years after he was paid £40,000 to make pro-Russian statements in the European Parliament.
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Asked about the PM’s comments, and his praise for the Vladimir Putin, Mr Farage made a bizarre comparison to the late Queen.
He said: “The Putin stuff is nonsense, just because I said in 2013 ‘I admired him as a political operator but didn’t like him as a human being’, before the Ukrainian invasion, I’m a Putin supporter.
“By the way, the Queen met Putin, after I said that, whether she was a Putin sympathiser, perhaps you better ask the Prime Minister, I don’t know”.
Queen Elizabeth II had met President Putin on several occasions as part of her constitutional duties.
Their first meeting took place in 2000, when she granted him a private audience at Windsor Castle during his first visit to the UK as Russia’s president.
Mr Farage also suggested Mr Gill was one bad apple, and the issue was more about UKIP than Reform UK.
He said: “Did UKIP have a problem with an MEP who very clearly was corrupt, yes it did. Did he join very briefly in Wales, he did and very briefly he was leader, yes.”
Earlier this week, Mr Farage refused to launch a probe into Russian influence on Reform, claiming he had no powers. Speaking on a visit to Wales, he said: “I haven’t got a police force. I haven’t got access. I can’t access your phone messages. I can’t access your emails. Unless I can do that, I can’t investigate.”
The Reform leader has been haunted by 2014 comments in which he said Putin is the world leader he most admired. In an interview Mr Farage said he admired Putin “as an operator” but “not as a human being”.
The same year he accused the EU of poking the “Russian bear with a stick” over Ukraine. And between 2010 and 2014 he is understood to have made at least 17 appearances on state-owned Russia Today.
Last year the Reform leader came under fire for telling GB News that the idea Ukraine is going to win is “for the birds”. And he suggested that the West is simply “helping to prolong a stalemate”.