Hi all,

It’s Sarah here. A slightly more personal introduction to the newsletter today. It’s been fascinating for the Nerve team watching the reaction to the Sunday Times’s cracking investigation into Nigel Farage’s benefits-in-kind from convicted fraudster and crypto magnate “Posh George” Cottrell. It’s thrilling to watch when a political investigation like this “lands” – the squirming TV news interviews from the troops sent out to defend the indefensible (hello Robert Jenrick!), the desperate attempts to pin it on a “leftwing” witch hunt (ha! This is Murdoch's Sunday Times, Nigel), and the drastic crisis comms strategy (I’ll resign and stand again, it’s all an establishment stitch-up!). Hats off to a superb piece of investigative journalism.

Part of the fascination has been because our co-founder Carole Cadwalladr first reported on Cottrell back in 2018 and has been writing about the opaque and nefarious nature of Farage’s funding for even longer. George Cottrell was Farage's right-hand man in the Brexit campaign that Carole investigated. But the rest of the mainstream press is only now catching up. 

In fact, all of us five female founders on the Nerve (see the yellow panel at the end of this email) have been working on this story with Carole since we published the first major investigation about Brexit being a strategy of a network of far-right actors in the Observer New Review in May 2017. We all understood Carole when she explained that the manipulation of information online was a threat to democracy. And that Farage was being supported and funded by people who embodied that threat. 

This has been Carole’s mission for almost a decade – and one that brought her constant abuse online, seeded by those she reported on and, as time went on, an unfathomable lack of support from the majority of her peers in mainstream journalism. The far right in this country is a machine backed by people with immeasurable amounts of money. And that machine came for her – culminating in an infamous trial at the high court when she was sued by Brexit funder Arron Banks for one tweet and five seconds of a Ted talk. Who was in that courtroom during that intense and deeply traumatic week supporting Carole? Some of the Nerve founding team and others from the Observer, including its editor, Paul Webster. Who wasn’t there, and didn't speak out, as one of their own was silenced? The editor of the Guardian or any other major figures in British journalism.

I doubt many mainstream political journalists will read this but if you do, ask yourself – were you right to back away? Time is the great corroborator of Carole’s journalism. The story has landed. Farage has had to take drastic action. 

Part of our mission in setting up the Nerve was to continue investigating Carole’s core subjects (the other key part was to support and report on culture, which is vital to the health of any democracy). We’ve been doggedly doing so – most recently, our series The Harborne Receipts has shown how the vast amounts cryptobillionaire Christopher Harborne has given to Farage and Reform has tracked Farage’s pro-crypto lobbying and policy announcements. And how Harborne placed major investments in defence at the same time that he was having meetings with Johnson in the early months of the Ukraine-Russia war. 

We have built a reporting team and we need your support to keep doing this kind of work. Farage is unlikely to be going away. And Restore Britain – an even more extreme version of the Farage project – is on the rise.

Another, cash-free, way you can help is by forwarding this newsletter to friends and family you think it will resonate with, or sharing our work on social media and asking people to sign up. We know there is a huge untapped audience out there for the Nerve … It’s just challenging to cut through the noise.

As always, our new stories today are featured below, with links to click through to read:

With politics moving apace, cast your mind back to the Makerfield byelection and the deeply offensive comments made by Reform candidate Robert Kenyon. The party’s leader lent his support, claiming that is the way men talk: “It’s lads’ banter … and it will be [said] in every pub tonight.” Deborah Frances-White, aka the Guilty Feminist, and colleagues decided to put that to the test. “As a group we decided to go to pubs, sporting clubs and other likely places, and ask men if they did indeed consider the kinds of things Kenyon said as ‘laddish banter’ and if it was something they expected to hear every night.” What they found might surprise Mr Farage. Read her column here. 

By vowing on social media to deport Rochdale abuse ringleader Shabir Ahmed, the PM-in-waiting has marched firmly on to the far right’s home turf, writes our political commentator, and certainly tapped into the widespread revulsion over Ahmed’s crimes. But at the same time, he must be aware of the legal complexities that have affected the expulsion of other gang members – and the political risk of failure. And then, Sangita writes, there’s a bigger moral question over sending Ahmed to another country – because “he is a risk to all children everywhere”. Read her column here.

The UK is in the middle of a heatwave and the government is urging the public to save two buckets of water a day – all while rolling out data centres that consume what 10,000 people need in a day, writes tech campaigner Adele Walton. Research by the campaign group Global Action Plan reveals that 84% of projected data centre developments in the UK are expected in areas already water-stressed or projected to be water-stressed by 2040. Why is the government fast-tracking one of the most water-hungry industries there is? Read Adele’s timely column here.

“This weather is forcing us to sweat”, says culture writer Hanna Flint in her ringing endorsement for Madonna’s new album Confessions II, “so why not do it dancing to a raucous expression of house, disco, EDM, ethereal pop and breakbeat?” Elsewhere in this week’s hotlist you can cool down with Ruby Tandoh’s brilliant guide to London’s best ice-cream, nip off to the cinema to see Olivia’s Wilde’s fabulous new couples comedy The Invite and much more… Read the hotlist here.

Thanks for reading. We’ll be back on Friday. And please click on the Proton ad below to help fund our journalism!

Sarah

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