Farage suddenly returns to political stage – but dodges questions about £5m gift

Nigel Farage headed to Makerfield to hold a press conference alongside Reform’s byelection candidate Robert Kenyon. Photograph: Temilade Adelaja/Reuters View image in fullscreen Nigel Farage headed to Makerfield to hold a press conference alongside Reform’s byelection candidate Robert Kenyon. Photograph: Temilade Adelaja/Reuters Analysis Farage suddenly returns to political stage – but dodges questions about £5m gift Rowena Mason and Josh Halliday Reform UK leader has been unusually quiet in recent weeks – at great cost to the party during a crucial byelection Fake images of Nigel Farage have been ubiquitous online lately – but the real politician has proved far more elusive since it was revealed seven weeks ago that he took a £5m personal gift from a crypto billionaire. And while an AI-generated depiction of the Reform UK leader was falsely shown getting violent on BBC’s Question Time, Farage has been largely avoiding the TV studios where he might face questions over the cash. Deepfake images of Nigel Farage have been doing the rounds on X. Illustration: X He has given a handful of interviews to selected outlets addressing the donation – to the Telegraph where he claimed it was for security , to the Sun where he said it was a reward for Brexit , to Sky News where he described it as “waste of time”, and to the Mail on Sunday where he claimed without evidence that Russian hackers had leaked the information. Beyond this, Farage has otherwise remained unusually quiet – cancelling a rally in Sunderland and instead producing short clips for social media, including one inflammatory intervention from a field in which he called for “pure, cold rage” in response to Henry Nowak’s murder . Until Wednesday morning, Reform had not held a single press conference for almost 50 days – which the party said was because attendance had been dropping, and they wanted to show it was more than a Farage-led one man band. Richard Tice, the party’s deputy leader, faced repeated questions about the leader’s whereabouts when he gave a press conference about littering on Wednesday morning, and insisted that his boss was not dodging accountability. 0:39 Nigel Farage dodges question over his £5m gift in LBC interview – video However, staying out of the limelight does not come easily to Farage, when his media strategy for years has involved occupying space on the airwaves and creating news with stunts and controversy. The cost of Farage lying low has been high for the party politically. Reform performed very well at the local elections on 7 May, taking 14 councils and more than 1,000 seats. But since then, it has been losing ground to Restore Britain – an even harder right party led by Rupert Lowe – whose acolytes push a policy of “remigration”. His 50 days of staying out of the limelight came to an end on Wednesday as he made an unexpected re-emergence in Makerfield , but the terms of his appearance were very much dictated by necessity. With an hour’s notice, the party announc