Report ‘phone hack’ to police or I will do it for you, Labour chair tells Farage

The Labour chair has given Nigel Farage 24 hours to report to security services the claim that his phone was hacked by Russia-linked actors or the party will do it for him. In a letter to the Reform UK leader, Anna Turley said it was “in the public and national interest” to ensure that a suspected overseas hack of a senior politician’s phone by a hostile state was properly investigated. A Reform spokesperson said the incident had been reported to “the relevant authorities”, without saying who these were. Scepticism has continued over Farage’s claim, made in a Sunday newspaper, that “foreign state actors”, most likely serving Moscow, had accessed his phone and leaked information about the £5m gift he received from Christopher Harborne, a cryptocurrency billionaire based in Thailand. In her letter, Turley asked Farage, who has largely avoided media scrutiny in recent weeks, to set out why Harborne gave him the money, in the run-up to the 2024 general election. Farage initially said the sum was intended to pay for his security, but later characterised it as a reward for his campaigning on Brexit. According to an account given via “Reform sources” to the Mail on Sunday, after the Guardian revealed details of the undeclared £5m gift , Farage became suspicious about how the information emerged, and handed over his phone for “forensic analysis by counter-espionage experts”. …