Why did Ukip’s ex-leader want to slip in unnoticed to meet the WikiLeaks chief at the Ecuadorian embassy?
On 9 March 2017, an ordinary Thursday morning, Ian Stubbings, a 35-year-old Londoner, was walking down the street near his office in South Kensington when he spotted a familiar face. He turned and saw a man entering the redbrick terrace which houses the Ecuadorian embassy, where the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been holed up since 2012. And the familiar face? It was Nigel Farage, the man who spearheaded Britain’s exit from the European Union.
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So, at 11.22am, he tweeted it. His handle is @custardgannet and he wrote: “Genuine scoop: just saw Nigel Farage enter the Ecuadorian embassy.” Moments later, a reporter from BuzzFeed, who happened to follow him on Twitter, picked it up and tweeted him back, and Stubbings told her: “No press or cameras around.”
No press or cameras around, that is, until BuzzFeed turned up just in time to catch Farage leaving, 40 minutes later. “Nigel Farage Just Visited the Ecuadorian Embassy in London,” the headline said. “Asked by BuzzFeed News if he’d been visiting Julian Assange, the former Ukip leader said he could not remember what he had been doing in the building.”
And that was how the world found out, by accident, that the founder of WikiLeaks, the organisation which published Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails – a decisive advantage for Donald Trump’s campaign – and Farage, a friend of Donald Trump, were mutually acquainted.
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But in a week that saw two major developments on both sides of the Atlantic regarding the respective roles that Assange and Farage played in the US election and the EU referendum – the same week in which a UK general election was announced – it is an attitude that needs urgent re-examination.
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Last week brought this more clearly into focus. Because in a shock development last Thursday, the US justice department announced it had prepared charges with a view to arresting Assange. A day later, the Electoral Commission announced it was investigating Leave.EU – the Brexit campaign Farage headed.
Significantly, the commission said its investigation was “focused on whether one or more donations – including of services – accepted by Leave.EU was impermissible”.
One of the grounds on which a donation can be deemed “impermissible” is that it comes from abroad. A fundamental principle of British democracy and our electoral laws is that foreign citizens and foreign companies cannot buy influence in British elections via campaign donations.
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Robert Mercer, the billionaire hedge fund owner, bankrolled the Trump campaign and his company, Cambridge Analytica, the Observer has revealed, donated services to Leave.EU. If this issue forms part of the Electoral Commission investigation, this isn’t just a case of possibly breaking rules by overspending a few pounds. It goes to the heart of the integrity of our democratic system. Did Leave.EU seek to obtain foreign support for a British election? And, if so, does this constitute “foreign subversion”?
What did or didn’t happen on 9 March may perhaps reveal clues to understanding this. To unravelling the links between WikiLeaks, the UK and the Trump administration – an administration embroiled in ever deeper connections to the Russian state. Between Trump – whose campaign was funded by Mercer and who came to power with the help of the same analytics firm now under investigation for its work with Leave.EU – and Brexit.
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- Discussion
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@LouiseMensch it's coming out in msm https://t.co/cMgRqq6gXN
— Nanci Hogan (@Nancikhogan) April 23, 2017
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