Two senior Reform UK aides have resigned after a Channel 4 News sting appeared to show them trying to circumvent electoral law. Dan Jukes and James Orr were approached by an undercover investigator, working with Verbatim, a journalistic offshoot of the Centre for Climate Reporting. He posed as the British son of an American would-be donor. Together, they hatched a scheme to avoid foreign-donation rules by funnelling the father’s money through his son. An initial donation appears to have been used to commission polls on Reform’s behalf, with the party’s involvement left undisclosed. Footage suggests a six-figure donation could have been in the offing, too.

The sting undoubtedly raises important questions for Reform: about the party’s professionalism and, above all, about whether the law may have been broken. But, of course, as we’re talking about Reform, the questions being raised go well beyond that. The scandal has been seized on as ‘proof’ that Nigel Farage is corrupt, that Reform is essentially a criminal enterprise, and that both the leader and party must be kept as far away as possible from the corridors of power.

We need to regain some perspective here. Of course, none of this is an especially good look. The footage of Orr quipping that ‘We could easily get away with it’, and Jukes’s reference to ‘those little clandestine projects’, in particular. But the scandal itself is not exactly explosive.

After all, Reform is far from unique in failing to declare donations, or in trying to find grey areas to get around donation rules. Indeed, there is no major British party that hasn’t at some point faced a similar scandal – often ones much larger in scale than this one.

We need only go back to the scandal involving Labour Together, the think-tank that helped Keir Starmer rise to the leadership of the Labour Party, and prepare his 2024 General Election manifesto. In 2021, it was revealed to have taken £730,000 in undeclared donations. Then, in February this year, it emerged that Cabinet Office minister Josh Simons, a former Labour Together director, had paid a PR company to smear the journalists who uncovered the donations. The Makerfield MP eventually gave up his seat to enable Andy Burnham’s return to parliament.

The Labour Party itself was also fined for donation-declaration failures relating to the 2017 General Election. In 2016, Labour was handed what was then a record fine of £20,000 for its undeclared spending in the 2015 election. Party officials had failed to record multiple expenses, including the more than £7,000 spent on the now-infamous ‘Ed Stone’, a giant stone slab on which the party’s main manifesto pledges were carved.

When the Conservative Party failed to properly declare its spending during the 2015 General Election and three 2014 by-elections, it was fined £70,000 by the Electoral Commission. A Tory official, Marion Little, was even convicted, fined and handed a suspended prison sentence for falsifying accounts on behalf of her party. Ironically, in light of the Reform row, the judge described her as having been ‘carried away by her conviction’ that defeating Nigel Farage – then the leader of UKIP – was an ‘overwhelmingly important political objective’, apparently leading her to lose sight of the rules.

If we go back further to the New Labour era, Reform’s major players look like rank amateurs in the sleaze stakes. Lest we forget ‘Tony’s cronies’ – the various donors who were lavished with baubles, titles and peerages. In 2007, the ‘cash for honours’ scandal led Tony Blair to become the first sitting prime minister to be interviewed by police under caution. Later that year, the ‘Donorgate’ scandal broke. The Mail on Sunday uncovered that a wealthy property developer had been gifting six-figure sums of money to the Labour Party via proxies, including a builder, a secretary and a lollipop lady, to avoid being named as a major donor. And that’s before we even mention the dodgy deeds of the scandal-magnet Peter Mandelson.

What this goes to show is that the reaction to the Reform donations scandal, the obvious glee with which it’s being seized on, has little to do with the scale of the alleged wrongdoing itself. Reform’s critics clearly hope this will be the scandal that does it for Farage. That this will be what makes the scales fall from the eyes of his supporters. That even the very ideas Reform stands for will come to be seen as tainted. This is scandal-mongering as a substitute for politics.

It’s worth dwelling on how strange this is. Nobody believes that ‘cash for honours’ should have brought an end to the Labour Party. Nobody believes the Tories should have been cast out of office forever for even criminal breaches of election rules. Only the populist Nigel Farage and his upstart Reform party are expected to bow out from public life at the earliest whiff of trouble.

Investigate Reform by all means. Hold any rulebreakers to account. But let’s not pretend this is a scandal that deserves to bury an entire movement.