Nigel Farage knows all about veteran investigative reporter John Sweeney who worked at The Observer and the BBC’s current affairs programmes, Panorama and Newsnight, for more than 30 years.
The leader of Reform UK, who has been consistently ahead in the opinion polls for more than a year and who made a dramatic breakthrough in the recent local and regional elections, once wrote that Sweeney had “caused me more misery than any other” in what at the time had been a 25-year political career.
The remark was triggered by a Sweeney Newsnight report about the killing of Polish worker Arkadiusz Jozwik in Essex in August 2016 after he and friends were attacked because they were speaking Polish.
The report covered the killing in the context of rising hate crime following the Brexit referendum. It carried interviews with friends of the dead man saying that anti-immigrant rhetoric from political figures such as Farage had contributed to a hostile environment and his death – something that Farage denied.
Sweeney’s relationship with Farage could become even more fraught later this year.
The investigative journalist has just completed what he describes as a “no-holds barred” biography of the Reform UK leader – The Real Nigel Farage – to be published in September in time for the party conference season.
Sweeney promises his book “is going to be full of new stuff”.
There is already what Sweeney concedes is “a brilliant and very funny book” on Farage, Michael Crick’s One Party After Another.
But that, Sweeney says, was when Farage was merely “a pretender to power”, a gadfly albeit it a powerful one, who had campaigned successfully for Brexit.
Everything changed when Farage was elected MP for Clacton, took his lead in the polls and became someone who could well become prime minister of the UK.
“I believe it is now entirely right and proper to look at Nigel Farage with an entirely different level of scrutiny. Now, this is deadly serious,” Sweeney explains.
He adds that, in line with his “bad Catholic” Irish heritage, the book is not so much a conventional biography of Nigel Farage “but an examination of his immortal soul”.
There are times, he says, when Farage reminds him of L. Ron Hubbard the founder of Scientology, an organisation that Sweeney also controversially tackled with typically robust television reports.
“Farage has charisma and he has something that ordinary people really admire and like. Farage has charisma but to what end?” asks Sweeney.
He is concerned about the £5m gift to Nigel Farage from the Thailand-based crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne.
“It’s a ton of money and Reform is backing crypto like no-one else. We can have a great big argument about what to register and what not to, but I think it looks fishy,” Sweeney concludes.
The failure of mainstream media
How well does Sweeney think the mainstream media has dealt with the Trump and Farage phenomena, and the rise of the rest of the far right across Europe?
“Catastrophically. Appallingly badly. It’s been a disaster for democracy,” says Sweeney who believes the systems in the UK and US are too dependent on personal honour and Trump has no sense of personal honour.
As for Farage, Sweeney has talked to people who once again accuse Farage of antisemitism and of being a bully at school.
“I don’t want a school bully to become prime minister,” the now freelance journalist observes.
Sweeney is intrigued by the fact that while the elderly tended to vote for Brexit and now often support Reform, the really old, those who either took part in the Second World War or had memories of the aftermath as children, had very different views.
His father who was a ship’s engineer in the Royal Navy during the Battle of the Atlantic believed in the European Union and political moderation.
“They didn’t vote for Brexit because they knew where hatred of the other ends up, whether it’s Trump or across Europe,” says Sweeney who believes passionately that the media has not properly held those responsible (for such views) to account.
Although he is a supporter of the BBC and its licence fee and believes it is a million times better than the “guff” put out by “the Tech Bros” and their social media, he is a very critical friend of the Corporation.
He is a critic of what he sees as the “atrociously timid” former BBC director general Lord Tony Hall, and his failure to investigate properly the Martin Bashir scandal surrounding that famous interview with Princess Diana.
He is equally critical of Lord Hall’s apparent reluctance to see the BBC accused of re-opening the Brexit debate after the referendum result.
Sweeney says he was effectively made redundant from Panorama but ended up on Newsnight.
Making films about Arron Banks’ involvement in Brexit was “like pulling my own teeth and very difficult to get to air”.
Then he was sent to Brexit voting towns as a state grammar schoolboy to film vox pops in an apparent attempt to counter perceptions that the privately educated BBC was pro-Remain.
“I could do it in less than an hour but it wasn’t journalism,” says Sweeney who also notes the failure of the American media, and Fox News in particular, to hold Trump to account.
Interestingly, Sweeney, an unsuccessful Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate in Sutton Coalfield in 2024, believes the one thing that is holding Trump to account better than the media is “the workings of the free market”.
He worries that Farage as prime minister will damage the pound with his support for crypto currency but the mainstream media is too afraid to spell out such consequences.
The danger is that Reform “get into power and screw things up but by then, it’s too late.”
Support for Ukraine
John Sweeney has sprung to renewed prominence in recent years by his heroic, daring-do personal support for Ukraine.
He says he is passionate about the war because he watched bodies, including children, being removed after a Russian attack on Kyiv’s television tower.
He arrived in Ukraine on February 14th, ten days before the main Russian invasion after which many Western journalists left, leaving coverage to local correspondents.
“I have been to a lot of sieges such as Sarajevo and I said to myself, Sweeney, all you need is a hole in the ground and a bottle of whisky. I’m not leaving,” says the intrepid reporter who by then had left the BBC amid controversy over offensive remarks made privately about far-right activist Tommy Robinson. His documentary investigating Robinson had been shelved by the BBC.
“He is a nasty piece of work but I was the author of my own misfortune. He had more power on social media than I had as a Panorama reporter,” says Sweeney who insists he feels almost grateful to Robinson for messing up his BBC career, thereby giving him the freedom to stay in Ukraine.
Without any of the usual organisational journalistic back-up, Sweeney stayed for ten weeks doing a daily video diary covering the war wearing his trademark orange beanie hat – some getting as many as one million views on YouTube.
He can’t really go to Ukraine anymore because, as he says himself – irony of ironies – he slipped on black ice while delivering crutches to Ukraine and did serious damage to his leg.
He now believes that Ukraine is winning the war, partly because Vladimir Putin has embarked on a war of choice, not a war of necessity and because Ukraine is fighting a righteous war in the same way the UK was fighting a righteous war against Germany. He also notes how clever Ukraine has been to target with drones vital and virtually irreplaceable parts of oil refineries.
Sweeney accepts that Trump’s “stupid war” against Iran has helped Putin and that not enough has been done to support Ukraine.
“But I understand that the war in Gaza became a bigger story,” he says regretfully.
His view on the appointment of former Google executive Matt Brittin as BBC director-general is an initial “let’s see” but quickly questions whether taking someone from Silicon Valley is the answer when “we have surrendered control of the digital public square to American Tech Bros and the Chinese Communist Party and they don’t care about democracy in Europe.”
Sweeney adds that as a Liberal Democrat, he thinks we should risk re-joining the European Union.
The prolific Sweeney has not just finished what could be a very timely book on Nigel Farage but he is close to finishing a novel about the battle of Kyiv.
There was a moment, he says when “I was shunned by a BBC crew. They turned their backs on me.”
Why?
“Because I had crashed out of the BBC and I was a bit embarrassing or something. That moment is the thing that launches my book,” says Sweeney who admits being upset about leaving the BBC.
As an unusually passionate journalist, it is hardly surprising had Sweeney has ruffled a few feathers along the way, not just Tommy Robinson, the Church of Scientology and senior BBC management.
There were also complaints about him joining, as an undercover reporter, a party visiting North Korea. A number of tourists complained they had not been told about the reason for Sweeney’s presence.
Supporters will argue such blemishes simply go with the Sweeney territory.
Over the years, he has given us some great television moments such as the time on the Channel 4 programme Hard News when Sweeney doorstepped then Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie and tried to interview him through his letterbox.
The camera panned and caught MacKenzie legging it round the side to his waiting car.
But that was not John Sweeney’s most famous doorstep. Not by a long way.
In 2014, soon after Malaysia Airlines MH17 was shot down over Eastern Ukraine on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, Sweeney saw that Putin planned to open a new museum devoted to hairy mammoths in the Siberian city of Irkutsk.
Posing as a professor specialising in mammoths, Sweeney got close enough to Putin to ask who shot down MH17.
Two or three hours later a man in a suit approached him and punched him in the stomach and disappeared.
So, when the American Vice-President JD Vance “complains about freedom of the press in Europe I think of the people who have been shot and poisoned by Putin and I want to say to Vance. Fuck You.”
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
