Extract from Carole Cadwalladr's latest - Aaron Banks sued her and the Guardian didn't help to defend her

Posted: 10th August 2026

The man who sued me in the High Court is back in the news.

Emily Lawford at the New Statesman revealed on Friday that Arron Banks had paid for private intelligence agents to spy on a Sunday Times journalist who’s been investigating Nigel Farage’s finances. A spate of articles followed over the weekend including one in the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times on the threat to free speech this rightly poses. But what unites them all (apart from a Substack by the ex-editor of the Financial Times, Lionel Barber) is that all these articles treated Banks – the funder of Nigel Farage’s Brexit campaign – as if he was a brand new character to appear on the national stage not someone who has actively sought to silence and intimidate not just journalists but government officials too.

Quite apart from what spending years and hundreds of thousands of pounds trying to bankrupt me and end my career, he also spied on journalists, spied on the UK’s official data regulator, threatened parliament’s intelligence and security committee, the Information Commission, Netflix and the Electoral Commission after it referred him to the police.

He reported me to the police too, an incident considered so serious by the Guardian’s lawyer that I was given a full briefing on what I should do in the event of an arrest.

But there’s nobody as invisible as a middle-aged woman. I woke up to this message from a friend.

The problem with this wilful denial goes way beyond me. It’s not me who’s being gaslit here, it’s the Great British public. Anyone who’s followed any part of this story knows about Banks. They know, too, that the questions about Farage’s funding haven’t come out of nowhere.

And they know that these questions have been ignored by our overwhelmingly right-wing print media and, as a consequence of that, the BBC. What’s so dislocating is that we’re all living in at least two parallel information spheres simultaneously.

This wilful denial of the long, dark hinterland of this story isn’t doing a disservice to me, it’s doing a disservice to the facts, to readers, to anyone with eyes and ears. Two weeks ago, I wrote a long piece for the Nerve about the UK media’s “decade of denial” about who Nigel Farage is and – most especially – where his money comes from, but it only scratched the surface.

But now Arron Banks is back. He’s re-inserted himself into the story and it creates a massive headache for the pack. They’re going to continue to pretend this has nothing to do with Brexit? Really? That the questions about Farage’s finances have sprung from terra incognita? Well, they can. But no-one will believe them.