Nigel Farage pictured in May this year, just after the Runcorn by-election. Photo: Lia Toby / Getty
When Reform UK used an activist barrister to bully the independent Welsh news website I work for, we decided to respond robustly.
Instead of succumbing to the bullying, we published an article that called out the barrister and said the attempt to suppress our journalism gave a flavour of how any future Reform government was likely to behave towards media outlets that challenge it.
Nation.Cymru was set up in 2017 as a news website covering the whole of Wales. It has a very small core staff, but has grown to a point where it now gets around 2 million page views a month.
Reform hates us. We write a lot about politics and in the run-up to the recent Caerphilly byelection we took a stand against Reform’s disgraceful – and ultimately unsuccessful – campaign, which was largely focused on demonising migrants.
Then on 12 November we reported how the Senedd standards commissioner had recommended a two-week suspension for Laura Anne Jones, a former Tory MS who recently defected to Reform. She had broken the code of conduct by using a racist epithet in a series of WhatsApp messages she had exchanged with members of her staff.
In our story we referred by name to one of Jones’s staff members who had sent offensive messages in the same chat – Ed Sumner, now Reform UK’s director of communications.
Very quickly a barrister called Adam Richardson wrote to Nation.Cymru’s editor, Mark Mansfield, claiming that Sumner’s privacy rights had been infringed and demanding that we remove his name from the story.
We were certain that Sumner had no privacy rights in the matter. Back in June 2024, Nation.Cymru had published a story headlined “‘Sickening’ messages reveal toxic culture of Tory Senedd group”, revealing the content of messages leaked to us that were racist, homophobic and otherwise offensive. One message sent by Sumner made a cruel joke about another MS’s late father.
We saw the bullying as Trumpian and an indication of the kind of behaviour news outlets could expect if the party was elected to office.
Sumner’s name was redacted from the standards commissioner’s report, but as we had identified him in our previous article we named him in our article about the report.
We found it curious that the legal letter had come from a barrister rather than a solicitor. It didn’t take long to discover that Richardson was very much a Reform insider and a longstanding associate of Nigel Farage. He was in the news several years ago when standing as a Ukip candidate in a City of London council election, and as recently as September this year he was reported to be the “secretary” of Reform UK.
Richardson has recently been acting for Farage against the Guardian over its publication of stories revealing how the Reform leader allegedly made pro-Nazi and antisemitic comments while at school. He has also represented the notorious Katie Hopkins.
In the first letter Richardson wrote to Mansfield, he said he was representing Sumner and claimed Nation.Cymru had infringed his client’s privacy rights. He claimed there was no public interest in naming his client and asserted that because Sumner’s name had been redacted in the commissioner’s report, Nation.Cymru had no legal right to identify him.
He cited a number of legal precedents, none of which appeared to us to be relevant to this matter, including one which referred to the supermodel Naomi Campbell being photographed as she came out of a rehab clinic.
He demanded that we remove Sumner’s name from our story and threatened legal action if we didn’t follow his instructions, stating: “Failing compliance, I am instructed to commence proceedings for misuse of private information and breach of confidence, to refer the matter to Ipso, and to pursue damages and injunctive relief. All my client’s rights are reserved.”
Mansfield wrote back to Richardson telling him he regarded his arguments as spurious and that he had no intention of removing Sumner’s name from the story. Richardson then initiated a pre-claim legal process that could lead to a privacy claim in the high court.
Instead of complying with the barrister’s demands, Nation.Cymru published a further article calling out Richardson’s bullying and making it clear that he had no grounds to threaten us with legal action.
We’ve heard nothing from him since.
What have we learned from this episode that may be of value to other news outlets that could find themselves in a similar position?
Our advice is not to play the bully’s game. They want to intimidate you into submission. In the letters we received from Richardson he told us to seek specialist legal advice, something we believe he is obliged to do but which would mean we would be caught up in a time-consuming and expensive legal process.
We were confident we were in the right and decided to tell him to get lost. In fact, we went further and published an article calling out the bullying.
We also saw the bullying as Trumpian and an indication of the kind of behaviour news outlets that hold Reform to account could expect if the party was elected to office.
Unfortunately, some larger news outlets cave in to such bullying needlessly because they think doing so is the easier option. Others simply wouldn’t run the story in the first place. Such cowardice emboldens powerful bad actors to carry on with the bullying.
Faced with such intimidation, news outlets should stand firm, be brave and call out the bullies. Solidarity with others in the journalistic community is important too.
The UK government should also legislate to outlaw so-called “Slapp” actions, brought by the rich and powerful to stop news outlets from publishing stories that expose their misdeeds.
Martin Shipton is associate editor of Nation.Cymru