Nigel Farage today denied he is the anti-lockdown 'entrepreneur' who wanted to bring down 'hypocrite' Matt Hancock, telling MailOnline: 'It wasn't me'.
The former Ukip and Brexit Party leader, who helped set up Reform UK to oppose the Government's Covid restrictions, spoke out after it was claimed a ‘highly successful' businessman was trying to expose the former health secretary.
The mystery whistleblower is said to have been part of a politically motivated plot to oust him, spearheaded by an anti-lockdown campaigner who was angry about his handling of the pandemic.
It came as the company responsible for security in the building on Victoria Street confirmed for the first time it was helping the Department of Health and Social Care with its probe into the leak.
But Emcor UK – which has provided security for sensitive buildings including the top-secret Porton Down laboratory – refused to say if any of its staff had been questioned or suspended.
Nigel Farage (pictured in August 2019) today denied he is the anti-lockdown 'entrepreneur' who wanted to bring down 'hypocrite' Matt Hancock, telling MailOnline: 'It wasn't me'
The leak of CCTV footage exposing Mr Hancock’s affair could have been part of a politically motivated plot to oust him spearheaded by a ‘highly successful' businessman and anti-lockdown campaigner who was angry about his handling of the pandemic, it emerged today.
And in a dramatic twist, it was claimed that an entrepreneur had allegedly offered the compromising images to prominent political journalist Isabel Oakeshott because he 'relished his part in exposing Hancock’s hypocrisy’ - five days before they were published.
It raises the prospect that the leak of the footage – which showed the former health secretary breaking his own social distancing rules – could have been motivated by opposition to his stance on Covid.
The source of the images has been the subject of fevered speculation since they were first published at the end of last week.
The CCTV footage, apparently from a camera inside Mr Hancock’s private Department of Health office, showed him kissing his adviser Gina Coladangelo at a time when hugging anyone from outside your household was banned.
It had been speculated that the images came from a rogue security guard or ‘whistleblower’ employee at the department who had access to the footage and then contacted the national newspaper that published them directly.
But last night political journalist and broadcaster Ms Oakeshott revealed she had been sent a grainy shot of the CCTV clip by ‘an anti-establishment figure with a dim view of politicians in general and a particular disdain for the architects of the lockdown policy’.
Writing in The Spectator, she described this person as a ‘highly successful entrepreneur’ who ‘would have relished his part in exposing Hancock’s hypocrisy’. But she said she mistakenly dismissed the footage as fake and that the ‘contact’ who offered it agreed that the original seller was ‘probably a chancer’.
The leak of CCTV footage exposing Matt Hancock’s affair could have been part of a politically motivated plot to oust him, it emerged last night
Political journalist Isabel Oakeshott, left, who is in a relationship with leader of Reform UK, formerly the Brexit Party, Richard Tice, right, feared that the footage may have been fake or doctored - and her partner agreed
Miss Oakeshott is in a relationship with Richard Tice, a founder of the Leave Means Leave campaign. There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by Mr Tice, who leads Reform UK, a party that campaigns to restore pre-Covid freedoms.
He revealed last night he had examined the clip after Miss Oakeshott passed it to him but he believed it was ‘doctored’.
Mr Tice said: ‘The footage was doctored, there is no question. If you look closely you see a pair of hands when he is not touching her. It’s not his hands.
‘We saw that and thought something is not right. The footage came to Isabel and we both agreed it wasn’t right. The affair is clearly right but there is something not right about that footage.’
Victoria Newton, Editor of The Sun, has also described how the scoop came to them, describing the mole as a 'whistleblower' - but not linking them to any anti-lockdown movement.
She wrote in the New Statesman: 'The news desk had been contacted by an angry whistle-blower. They claimed to have irrefutable evidence that the married Secretary of State for Health was breaching his own lockdown rules by having an office affair with an aide. My first thought was – bloody hell, what a story, it can’t be true.
