Evening all, 

Carole here. You don’t want to think about Nigel Farage and I don’t want to think about Nigel Farage but none of us have any actual choice in the matter as he’s currently disporting himself on the Essex coast in what feels like an end-of-pier Punch and Judy show, if Judy were an intergalactic bin from a planet far away. 

Farage should be on holiday. The good news is that he isn’t and it’s all his own fault. He has another week of sweating it out on the doorsteps of Clacton. I don’t think it’ll bother his high-priced libel lawyers (looking at you, Carter-Ruck!) to suggest that he’d prefer to be hanging out with his crypto chums in a yacht off the Montenegrin riviera than canvassing door to door in a heatwave. But tough titties, Nige. You do the crime, you do the time. 

More on how the Nerve is making plans for Nigel below. The person who is off on his holidays is Stewart Lee. (You see, Nige, that could have been you.) We have another Nerve regular instead, our cultural agony aunt Philippa Perry, who’s written a well-timed column on the concept of holiday guilt – and how to banish it – even when the planet is burning. Maybe especially when the planet is burning. She quotes Voltaire’s advice in Candide: "We must cultivate our garden”. Wise words – but not if it involves a hosepipe.

We also have a brilliant and necessary article by Nerve film critic Ellen E Jones on Hollywood’s rapid acceptance of AI. There’s no doubt that this technology is more than adept at creating movies, she says. But what they can’t create is art. 

Back to Farage. The problem is that however much this particular episode of British politics has the look and feel of a pantomime with Farage as Widow Twankey, there is something much deeper and darker going on. And to understand that, you have to follow the money.

That’s what we’ve been doing since May in a series of articles that’s attempted to understand who the man is behind the biggest sum of money of all: the extraordinary gift of £5m deposited in Farage’s bank account by a mysterious offshore cryptobillionaire, Christopher Harborne. 

Today, we’re publishing a new master timeline of Harborne’s donations, his crypto connections and his influence on UK politics. In my introduction to it, I explain our reporting so far – and even though I wrote a large chunk of it, I still find it hard to believe what we’ve uncovered. 

Did you know that there are allegations (denied by the lawyers – looking at you again, Carter-Ruck!) of a deal brokered between Farage, Johnson and Harborne to throw the 2019 election in Boris Johnson’s favour? Or that Harborne doesn’t just make his money from crypto but also from laser weapon technology? Or that he went on a secret, undeclared trip to Kyiv with Boris Johnson a couple of months after giving him £1m? 

No? Well there’s all that and much more. All of which has only been possible because of the incredible support of Nerve members. If you’re reading this and haven’t yet signed up, for £6.95 a month you’ll receive our unending gratitude, and the unguilty pleasure of contributing to Farage’s holiday woes. 

Now over to the rest of the team for the links to this week’s stories:

Introduced by Carole Cadwalladr, here are all the facts we’ve unearthed and assembled about Nigel Farage’s biggest benefactor, Christopher Harborne, in one handy reference resource, including the drip feed of more than £30m that he’s given to Reform UK, the Brexit party, the Tory party, Boris Johnson and Farage himself, plus pro-crypto activity, military investments, visits to Chequers and more. We’ll be adding to this as we go on (Cottrell’s funding activity coming soon). Read it here.

If you’re about to go on holiday in a burning world (and especially if you’re flying) you might be feeling bad about it, writes our cultural agony aunt – because “somewhere, someone is suffering, the planet is suffering”. But, as she says, that kind of emotion can simply end up being self-destructive: “there is the pain of knowing that terrible things happen, and then there is the extra pain we create by insisting we must never enjoy ourselves while they do.” Going on holiday can be “the lesser of two evils, the other one being staying home and feeling resentful about it”. Philippa’s advice? “If the choice is between guilt and resentment, choose guilt.” Read her column here.

The AI dawn has arrived in Hollywood with two machine-made films premiering earlier this year and the AI-generated actor Tilly Norwood getting ready to make her feature debut.  Film-makers are squaring up for the battle of the soul of cinema. As our film critic Ellen E Jones writes: “Our urgent task is not to use AI less – a barn from which the glass horse has, in any case, already bolted – but to love real art more. And, crucially, to discern the difference.” Read Ellen’s piece here.

Bryony Kimmings is at the Edinburgh festival with her acclaimed show Bog Witch, but took time out to share her cultural tips. Not surprisingly, some are in the Scottish capital: there’s the intimate new venue that’s the brainchild of super-producer Francesca Moody where “artists are paid and supported properly”, and the world premiere of an opera – The Galloping Cure – that confronts the opioid crisis. Her choices also include the Booker-longlisted novel in which a man lives in a big black bag, and a film in which Olivia Colman’s husband is made out of wicker. Here’s the full list.

Google the Victorian artist Richard Dadd and it’s likely that the first story to appear will be that he killed his father in 1843 and spent his remaining years locked up in various institutions. But art historian and critic Ben Luke has visited a new exhibition of his work at London’s Royal Academy which includes his best known painting, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke – a rustic fantasy that he painted in Bethlem psychiatric hospital – and other works, including two paintings featuring scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “How you respond to this turbocharged whimsy,” says Ben, “will probably reflect the extent of your enjoyment of this show”. Read the review here.

Ed Smith is the author of the popular weekly food newsletter Rocket & Squash. Earlier this year he published his fifth cookbook, Peckish – essentially 80 ways to cook chicken, or, as he puts it, “a one-stop-shop for chick-inspo”. Today’s recipe takes inspiration from a popular dish in many Thai restaurants: “It’ll likely have been called gai yang, and you’ll have loved it.” Get the details here.

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