On the night of Thursday, February 5, President Trump’s Truth Social account posted a video about election fraud that included a two-second splice featuring Barack and Michelle Obama, portrayed as apes in the style of The Lion King.

The outrage machine swung into gear, culminating in the likes of CNN’s Bakari Sellers demanding a “fumigation” of Trump and MAGA from the United States.

But as the aching “anti-racism industry” locomotive groaned back into a pathetic trundle, distracted editors at the Guardian – a 205-year-old progressive publication – were weighing a story that would have staggering implications for President Trump, his Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, his Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and indeed his entire administration.

It was, in large part, an attempt to lay the foundations for a fresh impeachment of the 47th President of the United States.

“NSA detected phone call between foreign intelligence and a person close to Trump,” the headline roared.

It could have been a stomach-dropping, monster revelation… if it was true.

The story was immediately seized upon by NeverTrump™ figures like Bill Kristol, Rick Wilson, Michael Weiss, and even the band Wheatus – of ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ fame – garnering millions of impressions over the next few hours.

At the time of publication of this Substack piece, the Guardian’s author, Cate Brown, still hadn’t removed her original tweet, asserting what would soon be debunked as “fake news.”

If the story had even been a little bit true, it could have triggered months of investigations, jamming up the Trump agenda in a Russia collusion-style hoax.

There was just one problem: when the Guardian’s single source saw what they had written about his testimony, it was his stomach that dropped.

They had the story wildly wrong. Was it their mistake, or his? There was no “person close to Trump” on any call, he hurriedly informed them. Either the Guardian reporter misheard or he misspoke.

Over Saturday afternoon, evening, and late into the night, the Guardian agonized about what to do with this damaging revelation. They even considered eschewing a correction and instead publishing a whole new story, with more accurate details.

Eventually, they succumbed to basic journalistic standards. Eventually.

It was only on Sunday morning that they decided to change the headline to: “NSA detected foreign intelligence phone call about a person close to Trump.” [Emphasis added]

In other words, there was never a “person close to Trump” picked up on a foreign intelligence intercept. Instead, a “person close to Trump” was being discussed by two other, unidentified people.

Furthermore, the paper admits: “The person close to Trump is not understood to be an administration official or a special government employee.”

Well, if that ain’t just the non-story of the year.

Editors reluctantly added a humiliating addendum, right at the bottom, with a sort of jaw-dropping nonchalance about it all:

Editor’s Note: This story was updated to clarify that the phone call was between two people associated with foreign intelligence who discussed someone close to Donald Trump, not between someone and a person close to Trump. The earlier version was based on multiple phone calls with a source who later said he mispoke and clarified the actual details of the call.

This also then changed, with the Guardian forced into naming the source himself:

This story was amended on 7 February 2026 to clarify that the phone call was between two people associated with foreign intelligence who discussed someone close to Donald Trump, not between someone and a person close to Trump. The earlier version was based on multiple phone calls with the whistleblower’s attorney, Andrew Bakaj, who later said he misspoke and clarified the actual details of the call.

The Guardian’s report isn’t the first time a claim was made that a “whistleblower” had filed an inspector general (IG) complaint. Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal popped a story on February 2, which alleged in an uncharacteristically alarming tone:

A cloak-and-dagger mystery reminiscent of a John le Carré novel is swirling around the complaint, which is said to be locked in a safe. Disclosure of its contents could cause “grave damage to national security,” one official said. It also implicates another federal agency beyond Gabbard’s, and raises potential claims of executive privilege that may involve the White House, officials said.

In journalistic parlance, this means it is being heavily “shopped around.”

The complaint itself appears to date back to May 2025, just two and a half months into Tulsi Gabbard having her feet under the DNI desk. And despite a spokesman for the IG telling the Wall Street Journal that allegations against Gabbard weren’t credible, the Guardian pursued the story.

It was only on Friday, February 6, that Guardian reporter Catherine (“Cate”) Anne Brown would speak with the alleged whistleblower’s lawyer, Andrew Bakaj (say: ‘Buh-kai’), at length.

Brown herself began a formal career in investigative reporting around four years ago, starting with the Washington Post in late 2022, before her final piece was published in January 2026. Before that, she worked as a freelancer for outlets like Business Insider and completed what she calls “OSINT research training” with Bellingcat, an “intelligence agency” closely linked to pro-establishment U.S. and UK operatives. Bellingcat has received funding from the “CIA sidekick,” the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), as well as from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.

Brown and Bakaj would speak about the whistleblower’s claims, with Bakaj taking the final rap for the factual flub on the front page of one of the world’s oldest newspapers. And while it is unclear whether the two knew each other very well before their call, almost everyone in Washington, D.C., knows to treat Bakaj’s claims with a ladleful of salt, given his role in the first failed Trump impeachment effort.

Bakaj, of Ukrainian descent, is a former CIA officer who also worked for Hillary Clinton and the Bush State Department in Kiev. After bouncing around government, he landed with Democrat lawyer and ‘Disney adult’ Mark Zaid at the Compass Rose Legal Group.

The pair cooked up the first Trump impeachment, with Bakaj serving as legal counsel for whistleblower Yevgeny “Eugene” Vindman. His twin brother, Alexander Vindman, now running for Senate as a Democrat, served as one of the most hyped witnesses in this process before anyone knew his own brother was the progenitor of the claim against President Trump. Vindman was even offered the job as Ukrainian defense secretary, a bizarre turn of events for a U.S. Army officer inside America’s national security apparatus.

So Bakaj’s claims, at least to a serious investigative reporter, should be viewed as extremely partisan – especially when it comes to whistleblowers and national security. His previous clients failed in their attempt to oust a sitting president, and repeatedly disgraced themselves in apparent fealty to a foreign nation of which they all share recent ancestral lineage.

For Brown, however, these characters would become the backbone of a story rushed out amid the media’s monkey meltdown, provided on a “single source” basis and without appropriate consultation with ODNI and its communications team.

For a story as explosive as the Guardian’s, one would expect a reputable news outlet to:

1. Have more than a single, hyper-partisan source;
2. Wait to hear back from the government department they’re reporting on;
3. Consult with its other employees and reporters in town;
4. Work overtime to verify the claims made by the partisan lawyers.

The Guardian’s editors did none of these things, with sources indicating they were transfixed on the Trump Truth Social monkey mania, distracting them from what should have been basic journalistic rigor.

If this had been a Breitbart News report about Hillary Clinton gone wrong, it would currently be leading the nightly news and even have pseudo-comedic mentions on late-night.

Instead, it is being hurriedly brushed under the carpet. There has been no accountability inside the Guardian, thus far. No one has been suspended. No one has been taken off their beat. And no form of apology has been offered, neither to the subjects of the piece nor to the Guardian’s readership.

Andrew Bakaj won’t be disinvited from any television shows. The American Bar Association will do nothing to him. His firm will not place any sanctions on him. The swamp, as they say, is alive and well.

The story here is of critical importance because this is precisely the playbook that was run during the first impeachment, and almost certainly represents a botched trial run for new impeachments come November 2026, if the Republicans lose the House.

With TrumpRx launching this week, immediately bringing down the costs of America’s new favorite medication, GLP-1, the knock-off merchants are surely panicking. Hims and Hers will spend millions of dollars during America’s other favorite medication, the Super Bowl, to hawk a new concierge service rooted in left-wing populism.

Predictably, the ad only uses white actors for the scenes depicting the out-of-touch, moneyed elite, while every scene about ordinary people has an ethnic minority portraying America. But in Hims’ case, that’s beside the point.

The firm that was referred to the Department of Justice today, and its commercial has rightly raised eyebrows for its use of Galleri cancer detection, which “missed more cases of cancer than it found,” according to Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute.

Based on a review of the applicable facts, earlier today @HHSOGC referred Hims & Hers Health, Inc. (“Hims”) to the Department of Justice for investigation for potential violations by Hims of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and applicable Title 18 provisions.

— HHS General Counsel Mike Stuart (@HHSGCMikeStuart) February 6, 2026

Voiced by ‘conscious rapper’ Common, who himself is worth a very uncommon $20 million, the ad implies Hims and Hers will be the Robin Hood of the healthcare industry, giving ordinary people access to things only rich people (like Common) have.

Rich people get concierge IV drips, customized peptides, preventative care, and specialists on call. And you’ll basically get the exact same thing if you download their app! Except you won’t. You’ll get what companies like Hims are really good at providing: cheap knockoffs and left-wing politics.

“It’s all about democratizing access to the things that are available to the super rich, and we’re bringing them to people,” said Hims’ chief design officer, Dan Kenger.

It is no surprise the ad copy sounds like it was written by a Bernie Sanders staffer. It probably was.

Hims’ CEO Andrew Dudum is a repeat donor to members of the far-left “squad” or “Justice Democrats” such as illegal immigrant Ilhan Omar, Islamist loudmouth Rashida Tlaib, as well as Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Cori Bush. His list of political donations makes for very interesting reading, and of course concludes with the same Bernie Sanders he’s seeking to channel in Hims’ Super Bowl ad.

Last year, Dudum offered to hire “Gaza Solidarity” protesters after writing about the “Nakba” – an Arabic term for the “catastrophe” of the founding of the State of Israel, on his Medium page. The company famously lost almost $210 million in stock value after his woke tweet.

“As a father whose children are both the descendants of Palestinian refugees who fled the Nakba in 1948, and the descendants of Holocaust survivors from Poland, I have a deep consideration for nuance in my life,” Dudum wrote in 2023.

If only he had deep consideration for the nuances in the world of medicine.

The centerpiece of the ad campaign is a new $49 oral semaglutide pill. It is positioned as an alternative to Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy pill, which launched just weeks ago after years of development, testing, and regulatory review. Novo’s product relies on a patented system designed to protect the active ingredient during digestion and ensure absorption.

Hims does not have that patent, nor do they disclose how their pill survives the digestive process.

They are effectively launching a product using an unproven technology, with no publicly available evidence that the active ingredient is even bioavailable.

Novo’s CEO, Mike Doustdar, was blunt in his reaction. “You’re wasting $49, in my opinion,” he said, explaining that Novo’s patents exist precisely because protecting semaglutide through digestion is the hard part.

Some biotech investors have labeled Hims’ product a “scam.” Hims is effectively conducting a mass experiment without transparency, regulatory approval, or proof of effectiveness, and laundering their untested pharmaceutical behavior through the Super Bowl and a ‘conscious’ (read: woke) Grammy-winning rapper.

Trump-appointed FDA Commissioner Marty Makary issued a pointed warning on Thursday, writing on X: “FDA will take swift action against companies mass-marketing illegal copycat drugs, claiming they are similar to FDA-approved products.”

Hims doesn’t disclose where it sources its active pharmaceutical ingredients. The company says they come from “FDA registered” facilities, but registration is not approval. When a drug itself lacks FDA approval, sourcing becomes even more important.

As we have previously noted, much of the knockoff drug supply chain runs through China, where quality control and oversight are persistent concerns. American consumers have no way of knowing what they are taking or whether it will have any effect.

In practice, Hims is selling leftist populism using America’s collective waistline as its hook. They’re quite explicit about it, in fact, with Kenger telling Variety: “There’s probably going to be a lot of weight loss commercials this year, and they’re probably going to try to be funny and they’re probably going to be relatable and they’re probably going to have a celebrity, right? And that’s great,” he says. “I think we’re past that conversation. You know, we did that. We talked about it. The prices are down. Now let’s talk about something else.”

That “something else” appears to be peddling a pill with no track record of success. Thankfully, the TrumpRx launch this week means fewer Americans will risk whatever it is Hims is putting in its knockoff Wegovy.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said the stupid part out loud, recently opining on how the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) state-sponsored digital yuan will soon be paying out “interest.”

Now the central bank digital currency (CBDC) argument has to be had all over again.

Armstrong heaped praise on the CCP’s approach: “China has decided to pay interest on its own stablecoin, because it benefits ordinary people, and they recognize it as a competitive advantage.”

Alarm bells toll. The guy with all our crypto accounts at his fingertips has developed a taste for putting the blockchain in government hands. It would be bad enough if it were a U.S. central digital bank. It’s all the worse for being China.

The CCP is not running some stablecoin marketing gimmick. It is building a state-administered financial control grid. The digital yuan is a central bank digital currency in its purest form: programmable, surveilled, and designed to bring money flows closer to government oversight. Interest payments are not altruism – they are bait.

Critics online saw it immediately. One replied: “China’s version is a CBDC at best. Not a stablecoin.”

Interest-bearing digital currency changes virtually everything, by the way. The moment a token starts paying yield, it stops acting like neutral digital cash and becomes a deposit account. And deposit accounts always come with a supervisor, a regulator, a central bank, and eventually the long arm of the Federal Reserve.

Central banks have long wanted the ability to reach directly into consumer monetary behavior, to reward saving, punish spending, impose negative rates, or distribute stimulus with conditions attached. A CBDC makes that possible. The Cato Institute has warned that CBDCs could give governments sweeping power over individual financial activity, including surveillance and control that would make cash obsolete. That was never the point of the blockchain.

Bitcoin was born in the shadow of the 2008 financial crisis as a rejection of centralized monetary authority. Satoshi did not design a system in which governments could pay you interest in exchange for total visibility into your transactions. Crypto was meant to remove middlemen, not replace them with something worse.

China’s model makes the intention clear. Commercial banks are subsidizing digital yuan interest payments because adoption has lagged. The state wants citizens using the official wallet, inside the official rails, under official monitoring. And once people accept yield as the hook, they accept the architecture behind it.

In the United States, stablecoin policy is already becoming a battleground. The GENIUS Act passed in July 2025 opened the door for platforms like Coinbase to share rewards with users, and banking lobby groups are now fighting to shut it down, warning it will pull deposits out of the traditional system.

But the deeper issue is ideological. Once stablecoins become savings instruments, the distinction between private digital money and government digital money collapses. Regulators will argue that anything paying interest must be treated as a bank product. Central banks will argue that only state-issued money should carry the weight of monetary policy. The path leads in one direction.

That is why President Trump, early in his second term, issued an executive order to protect Americans from the risks posed by central bank digital currencies. He was right to do it. A CBDC is not financial progress. It is financial consolidation.

Armstrong may think praising Beijing is pragmatic. It is not. China is the clearest example of what digital currency becomes when the state holds the keys: a tool of centralized power dressed up as modern convenience. The crypto industry should remember what it was built to resist.

Interest-bearing stablecoins are not the future of freedom. They are the opening act for state-run digital money.

And once that door is opened, it does not close again.

Housing affordability is one of the defining issues in American life. President Trump waxed lyrical about it from the stage at Davos this week, decrying major corporations for gobbling up U.S. housing stock.

“Homes are built for people, not for corporations, and America will not become a nation of renters,” the President told the World Economic Forum (WEF). “That’s why I have signed an executive order banning large institutional investors from buying single-family homes. It’s just not fair to the public. They’re not able to buy a house.”

The numbers are pretty grim. The frustration is palpable and widespread. The sense that the system is now rigged beyond salvation grows stronger year by year.

America’s median homebuyer is now 59 years old. That is not a functioning housing market. That is a country where adults are being shut out of homeownership.

Trump’s comments, as well as his actions, are a direct negation of the WEF’s 2016 slogan: “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.”

But one executive order and one speech do not a summer make.

If the Trump Administration wants to ratchet up its pursuit of affordability for Americans, it should take a long, hard look at another powerful actor shaping the housing market in ways most do not comprehend. It may be sitting right on your phone as you read this.

It’s Zillow.

For many, Zillow is just a harmless app where you can scroll through listings and daydream. In practice, the company has become something much bigger. Zillow is no longer just a platform that shows you what is available. It has grown into a vertically integrated housing company with its own internal ecosystem. That ecosystem now includes its own mortgage operation, called Zillow Home Loans.

Now, Zillow is not just a participant in the housing market. It has become one of the market’s gatekeepers. It can influence what buyers see, who they contact, and how quickly all these pieces can move. When a company has that kind of sway, it can shape consumer behavior without ever having to announce it.

According to a new lawsuit, that power may be getting used in a way that hurts buyers at the worst possible time, when every dollar counts.

Reuters recently reported: “Online real estate platform Zillow is facing a new consumer lawsuit in federal court in Seattle that accuses the company of pressuring homebuyers into using its mortgage lending division. The proposed class action filed on Friday, claims Zillow operates programs in which its affiliated real estate agents receive high-value sales leads only if they meet internal quotas for securing pre-approved mortgages from Zillow Home Loans.”

Now factor this into the equation: Zillow Home Loans’ mortgages cost $4,600 more than its competitors, on average.

If the allegations in the lawsuit prove accurate, they point to a system designed to steer buyers toward Zillow’s more expensive mortgage products through behind-the-scenes incentives. Agents who want access to valuable leads are pressured to meet internal targets. Buyers who think they are simply shopping for a home may be nudged toward a specific lender without realizing how the machinery is working around them.

What may seem like a minor detail is, in practice, a form of gouging American homebuyers at a critical juncture.

Georgetown professor Steven Salop dug into this late last year, analysing nearly 11,000 Zillow Home Loans from 2022 through 2024, and comparing them against other mortgages in the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) database.

He concluded: “This study provides empirical evidence that Zillow Home Loans charged higher prices than other mortgage lenders for conventional 30-year fixed-rate purchase mortgages during the three-year 2022-2024 period, after controlling for a set of borrower, loan, geographic, and temporal characteristics available in the public HMDA data.”

Zillow’s overcharge was $4,579 on an average loan size of $337,000.

That is real money for a working family. It is money that could go toward repairs, moving costs, childcare, savings, or simply staying afloat in an economy that has already punished them with higher prices across the board. It also makes it harder for buyers to compete in the first place, because every extra cost pushes the monthly payment higher and narrows the range of homes they can afford.

The study also found that veterans were hit especially hard.

For VA loans in 2024, the Zillow overcharge was $7,279 on an average loan size of $407,860. At a time when the country talks endlessly about supporting veterans, Zillow is heinously treating them as a premium revenue stream.

This is why Zillow presents such a clear opportunity for the Trump Administration.

With the President returning to his populist economic instincts this year, not only with his proposal on single-family housing but also with ideas like capping punishing credit card interest rates, the public mood is scarcely pro-corporate monopoly. Voters want someone to take on the greedy institutions that have made ordinary life more expensive and more unsettled.

The FTC and the DOJ have the authority to investigate and enforce the rules, and they should do it without hesitation.

Housing is not just another consumer product. It is the foundation of stability for families and communities. When homeownership gets pushed further out of reach, the country becomes less rooted, less secure, and less confident about the future. Americans feel that decline in their own lives, and they are done being lectured by the same people who helped create the mess.

If the goal is to restore the American Dream, then we have to Make America Affordable Again. That starts with breaking the grip of players who treat families as data points and neighborhoods as cash cows. Zillow is towards the very top of that list.

Ukraine’s long-standing reputation as one of the most corrupt countries in Europe has only gotten worse under President Volodymyr Zelensky, especially during the war with Russia. Very recently, a top ally of Zelensky fled to Israel after being accused of taking part in a $100 million corruption scheme. Despite previously being close to Zelensky and his right-hand man, Andriy Yermak, Timur Mindich is now claiming he never was.

It’s the same situation over and again in the embattled nation.

Political corruption is now so common that the country was forced to create a National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) in 2015. While NABU was intended to be independent and non-partisan, Zelensky and his allies attempted to bring it under their direct control just last year, sparking protests across the country. Once again, they backpedaled when caught out.

This smash-and-grab culture is as responsible for the nation’s fortunes as its misplaced trust in Brussels.

The military fares no better, with countless stories of bribes from men who wish to avoid being sent to the front lines against the Russian armed forces. In 2023, Zelensky and his regime fired conscription officials and promised criminal cases against at least 30 people, some of whom were accused of accepting cryptocurrency bribes to help men avoid military service. The problem has not disappeared, however, as another corruption case involving a lieutenant colonel was reported just this month.

The corruption in Ukrainian media, however, is rarely discussed, but appears to be just as prevalent as in other sectors of society, from pay-to-play articles to outright coercion from the Zelensky government.

It’s not a new phenomenon, but it does appear to be worsening.

JEANSA.

In 2013, the European Journalism Observatory (EJO) decried a phenomenon known in Ukraine as “jeansa,” a term for media bribery in which politicians, companies, and others pay journalists or outlets for favourable coverage disguised as traditional “unbiased” news.

“Unlike direct advertising, “jeansa” disguises itself as traditional news, with money or other benefits received by journalists for publication going into their jeans pockets – hence the name “jeansa” bribery, as the urban legend suggests,” the non-profit stated. The EJO claimed that as much as $2.5 billion was spent on “jeansa” bribes in 2012, and that some journalists could be bought off for as little as $1000.

The Institute of Mass Information (IMI), a media watchdog created by Ukrainian and Western journalists in the 1990s, states that this form of bribery is still relatively common in 2025. That politically motivated bribes account for around 26 percent of paid influence in online media, most of which comes from corporations.

Regarding specific political figures, the head of Zelensky‘s Servant of the People Party, Olena Shulyak, appeared to be most fawned over by material showing signs of jeansa bribes, according to the IMI. Paid attacks on activists and other politicians were also reported. Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko has also reportedly been a major beneficiary of jeansa.

It is not only Ukrainian businesses, organizations, and individuals paying off journalists for favourable coverage. On a much larger scale, Ukrainian journalism, almost entirely, was beholden to funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under the Biden government.

IMI stated that up to 90 percent of Ukrainian media relied on USAID funding, claiming that actual regular advertising accounted for as little as 3 percent of revenues. President Donald J. Trump overhauled and reformed USAID earlier this year, canceling billions of dollars in taxpayer funds spent on various woke projects globally.

While some journalists are bribed to give favourable coverage to politicians and government figures, others face active coercion from the government and other authority figures, particularly when reporting on government corruption.

Sevgil Musayeva is the editor of Ukrainska Pravda, one of Ukraine’s largest online news websites, and claimed in July of last year that Zelensky and his regime were actively threatening the website’s advertisers, telling them not to pay the site.

“I don’t like what is happening with people that criticise the government. In this terrible time, with all these Shahed [drones hitting Kiev], Zelensky still has time to pressure journalists,” Musayeva stated. She claimed the presidential office pressured large businesses to drop their ads, resulting in a loss of over $240,000 to the website from just six major companies. According to Musayeva, the pressure was related to investigative work done by the outlets’ journalists regarding corruption.

Ukrainian authorities have also put pressure on individual journalists for exposing corruption. In one case, investigative journalist Yevhenii Shulhat claimed that soldiers handed him a draft notice in a shopping mall after he had published a story about corruption within the country’s secret intelligence service, the SBU.

“I regard this as intimidation and obstruction of my journalistic activity,” Shulhat said.

Ukraine’s corruption problem is not confined to politics and procurement. It extends into the information space itself—where paid narratives, foreign dependence, and alleged government pressure risk turning “independent media” into just another managed institution.

After decades, you still can’t trust much coming out of Ukraine, and President Trump and his State Department would do well to ensure that any funding that has landed in the pockets of corrupt individuals–politicians, reporters, or otherwise–is not just highlighted, but also clawed back.

Chris Tomlinson and Raheem Kassam contributed to this editorial.

Nigel Farage’s Reform Party has landed its most significant defection to date: former Conservative Party MP and Shadow Cabinet Minister Robert Jenrick. If you’re a Farage fan, you might think this sounds like a good thing. But as someone who considers Farage a personal friend and mentor, as well as a future Prime Minister, I urge him to exercise extreme caution with so many Conservative Party (Tory) members now flooding Reform.

In 2014, when Robert Jenrick was first elected at the Newark by-election (special election), I commissioned a piece by one of our Breitbart London columnists, Alex Wickham, now the Political Editor of Bloomberg UK. Wickham, then a libertarian-right-leaning gossip blogger, identified some critical flaws in the man he labelled “Robert Generic.”

Jenrick, he argued well, represented a special kind of carpetbagging, establishment politics. He paraded around with the likes of former Chancellor Ken Clarke, who to this day speaks only vituperatively of Nigel Farage and the Brexit movement. He lived in multi-million-pound dwellings in London, rather than the constituency in which he was running. And perhaps worst of all, he wholeheartedly endorsed David Cameron and George Osborne’s Conservative Party platform – the spark that lit the fuse of how and why Britain is in such dire straits today.

Naturally, Jenrick won. Beating off stiff competition from Farage’s then potential Member of Parliament, Roger Helmer, who himself had left the Conservative Party three years prior, in 2011.

Robert Jenrick, to my knowledge, is no Roger Helmer. He opposed Brexit in the 2016 referendum and has been widely ridiculed for championing the Conservative Party’s weak immigration policies.

Jenrick’s motivations for drastically altering his public platform over the past few years are more likely borne of frustration at bleeding votes to Farage’s Reform and at losing the 2024 Conservative Party leadership election than a more Helmer-esque philosophical consistency.

Indeed, old Generic has recently been badmouthing Farage, with the Reform leader appearing all too happy to throw it right back at him.

Just eight months ago, Jenrick told TalkTV’s Julia Hartley-Brewer: “I want to put Reform out of business. I want to send Nigel back to retirement.”

I believe this part of Jenrick will never change. Unable to oust Tory Leader Badenoch, he will undoubtedly make a run at Farage when he feels the time is right. Farage has been through this a dozen times in his career. I personally helped him put down several internal coups within UKIP, and I’d be more than happy to swing the axe again in case Jenrick (or anyone else) gets lairy.

One month prior, Farage had told Sky News: “Don’t forget… this is Robert Generic. This is Robert the Remainer. This is the Robert the ‘I don’t stand particularly for anything at all’ who suddenly appears to be … on this Damascene conversion.”

That was the astute reading of the man. Today’s embrace of him into the Reform Party is the astute realism of a Nigel Farage whose entire political strategy often hinges on just one word: momentum.

Farage’s embrace of Jenrick isn’t an endorsement of the man, or of his sudden Damascene conversion. It’s a daring — and dangerous — tactic in his three-decade war against the Conservative Party machine.

He should exercise maximum caution with politicians like Jenrick, Zahawi, and Dorries. These aren’t just converts. They’re also potential infiltrators. And they’re exactly the sort of people you never turn your back on. Not for a second.