Tim Walker

Mandrake

Out in the Cold

Nigel Farage was conspicuous by his absence among the great and maybe not so good who attended the News Corp boss Lachlan Murdoch’s summer party at Spencer House in London last month.

Although the then PM Keir Starmer and Conservative Leader Kemi Badenoch made the effort to show up, Reform UK was represented by Robert Jenrick, the party’s ambitious Treasury Spokesperson.

The beleaguered Farage has never been as close to Lachlan as he was to his father Rupert, whom he was wined, dined, and protected by around a decade ago. Aged 95 now and in declining health, the patriarch’s grip on his empire has loosened to the extent that no one within it is greatly bothered any more about keeping in with Farage.

“Rupert might have fallen for Nigel, but that doesn’t mean his editors ever did, and resentment built up over the years about how he felt he could order them about,” one senior Murdoch executive tells me. “They are now telling him where to get off and there’s schadenfreude in that, but also good commercial sense. The readers are making it pretty clear they are sick to death of Farage – they complain if they see his picture, irrespective of what the story is about – and it’s clear the £5 million he pocketed has been a sea change in public opinion.”