High Court: secret trial collapses due to confidentiality breaches
On 7 October 2026, I submitted an application withdrawing the secret legal document served on Nigel Farage's Reform UK party/company. Specifically, I lost any remaining confidence in the procedure after discovering a second potential breach of confidentiality.
Before getting into the details, it is interesting to take a step sideways and look at how this type of thing happened in the Catholic abuse crisis. Specifically, on page 177 of the un-redacted report (case study 35) into the Archdiocese of Melbourne, we have the following story:
We heard from BTU, who said that Father Pickering sexually abused him for 12 years, beginning in 1966, when he was 11. BTU described being sexually abused by Father Pickering on numerous occasions, including on holidays with Father Pickering. For some of the time, BTU was an adult.
The first time that BTU told anyone of the sexual abuse was in 1968, when he disclosed to a priest during confession. The priest who heard his confession was Wilfred Baker. Afterwards, BTU had a conversation with Father Baker in the church about what he had confessed. A few months later, Father Pickering confronted BTU and told him that he was stupid for telling Father Baker.
We accept BTU’s evidence that he told Father Baker during confession in around 1968 that he was sexually abused by Father Pickering. It is not surprising that no action was taken in response to BTU’s disclosure given that Father Baker was himself an offender.
BTU said that his sexual relationship with Father Pickering ended in 1978 after BTU saw a naked boy, who he thought was about 15 years old, inside Father Pickering’s bedroom at the Gardenvale presbytery.
In October 1993 BTU approached a solicitor about his complaint and subsequently instructed the solicitor to send a letter of demand to the Archdiocese in relation to the sexual abuse.
On 23 December 1993, the Archdiocese received a letter of demand relating to a claim of sexual abuse of BTU by Father Pickering.
The first transgression occurred on 24 September 2026 when social control media became aware of the secret legal document even before it had been served. This was really unfair to all parties, including both Reform UK and myself as the petitioner.
Now nobody is allowed to say what we are talking about. All I can say is that somebody has been invited to a secret trial with Nigel Farage.
The court order does not prevent anybody talking or writing about the fact Reform UK Party Limited was hit with a winding-up petition in 2022.
On 28 September 2026, at about 3pm, Reform UK's lawyers sent me an application demanding the court aborts the procedure. The lawyers tried to trick me by including links to untrusted web sites to download documents allegedly related to the case. Due to the dangers of the download links, I didn't actually see the attachments until they were eventually sent to me later in the week as proper email attachments.
One of the law firms I spoke to referred me to another firm, 4-5 Gray's Inn Square who have a direct access program which allegedly reduces the cost of instructing counsel. I called them at approximately 6pm.
I told the clerk the names of the parties in the case and he asked me to send him all the documents about the case. He told me he was going to pass the documents around his colleagues in the office and reply to me by 9am the next day to inform me if somebody would represent me.
Click to listen to a recording of the call. The full transcript is below:
clerk: 4-5 Gray's Inn Square
DP: Hello, I've started a debt recovery process and obtained a winding-up petition against Refom. The political party.
clerk: Right.
DP: and I'm looking for some help with that. They're quite mad.
clerk: OK, do you have a hearing date then?
DP: Yeah, the first of October.
clerk: The first October.
DP: There's some good news, I've got another creditor who came forward.
clerk: Silly question I'm pretty sure the.. is it definitely on the first because the ... is definitely, I think they only sit on Wednesdays.
DP: So they've sent me .. they're asking for an urgent injunction to
clerk: OK
DP: stop me publishing in the Gazette. So the actual winding up hearing is the eleventh of November.
clerk: ah perfect!
DP: So the thing is this injunction hearing, I could consent not to publish in the Gazette if we can push that hearing back if that will satisfy them.
clerk: ah OK brilliant I can definitely take a look for you and just seeing you don't have a solicitor on board do you?
DP: No, no I just submitted a statutory demand myself.
clerk: Umm
DP: On the first of September then all this really horrible stuff came out in the news. On the third of September it was the Channel 4 stuff, the undercover reporters. On the ninth of September the Met Police said they're on it. On the eleventh and twelfth it was those huge donations and on the fifteenth it was their leader in Wales on the assault charges.
clerk: Yeah
DP: and then on the twenty third they hadn't responded to my statutory demand so I immediately served the winding up petition.
clerk: OK brilliant! I can definitely have a look for you then. As this is Direct Access I won't be able to confirm on the phone. I'll leave you my email address and if its OK could you send me all the case details, if you've got any relevant papers, and then I'll have a look for you for some suitable options because I'm quite
DP: yeah is that the clerk's email address on your web site?
clerk: I'll give you my one so it's W M O U
DP: go ahead W
clerk: M O U
DP: O U
clerk: R I N O
DP: yes
clerk: so it's W Mourino at four dash five dot co dot uk.
DP: (typing) OK so I'm going to send these attachments right now. I was quite shocked this morning when I got the other creditor. It's British Gas. They haven't paid their electricity bills apparently. So they've got this seventy two million in donations that they're talking about publicly yet they can't afford to pay their bills.
clerk: Yeah so its one definitely look into. So um yeah if you send that over I'll definitely come back tomorrow morning and hopefully got some suitable options for you.
DP: Yeah the winding-up petition, the promise to pay, there are lots of videos online where they... the directors promise to pay people um but I'll just send you the documents to begin with.
clerk: Exactly.
DP: What time tomorrow would you be replying to me?
clerk: So I get in at nine tomorrow and then so hopefully by the time I get in I've got a few responses from different options so hopefully I'll be able to confirm something in the morning.
DP: OK great so what was your first name?
clerk: It's Will.
DP: Will, yeah I'll send that in the next two to three minutes. Actually, just stay on the phone I want to make sure that it doesn't get lost in the spam folder or anything.
clerk: What you can do just to be safe is copy in the one on our web site then. The generic clerks one.
DP: OK (typing) yeah if you haven't received it in five minutes then just check your spam and everything because ...
clerk: absolutely
DP: I've had a lot of problems with this recently sending attachments um and it just ends up in the spam folder.
clerk: so if I don't receive it can I just take down your number?
DP: Yeah its 0 2 0
clerk: 0 2 0
DP: 7 1 3 5
clerk: 7 1 3 5
DP: Seven thousand.
clerk: Seven thousand and may I take your name please?
DP: Daniel Pocock. ...
clerk: ... Brilliant, so yeah I'll look out for that and then if I don't receive it I'll just give you a call.
DP: Great, thank you Will. Bye bye.
clerk: Brilliant. Have a good evening.
On 29 September 2026, the clerk sent me an email:
Subject: RE: CR-2026-007405 High Court insolvency list / Reform UK (Nigel Farage, Richard Tice) Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2026 09:09:50 +0100 From: [ redacted ] To: Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.pro> Good morning Daniel, I hope you had a good evening. Thank you very much for sending everything across. I’ve asked around and unfortunately, we don’t have suitable options with the capacity to assist with this. Would you like me to delete all correspondence given the sensitivity or recommend potential chambers to assist? Kind regards, [redacted] Telephone: +44 (0) 20 7404 5252 4‑5 Gray's Inn Square Gray's Inn London WC1R 5AH DX 1029 LDE
Three hours after receiving that email, I sent an email back to the Reform UK lawyers asking them to send me the missing attachments.
They eventually sent the documents as proper attachments. On 30 September 2026, Wednesday evening, I was looking at one of the documents and at the bottom I saw the name of exactly the same firm I had sent my own documents to on 28 September:
Remember, Nigel Farage asked for the un-necessary by-election on the premise that he was a victim of the Establishment. The exercise cost British taxpayers at least £250,000. What we see in my exchanges with 4-5 Gray's Inn Square is the behaviour of the Establishment and it feels a lot like they are doing a lot more work for Nigel's than for any other candidate.
If the by-election wasn't really about the Establishment then it must be about something else. Maybe there are other secret trials in progress that voters were never told about.
After observing the circumstances involving 4-5 Gray's Inn Square, I immediately sent a letter to the judge in the case explaining I had lost confidence in the procedure.
The following morning, on 1 October 2026, I sent an email to the same clerk at 4-5 Gray's Inn Square asking them to "Please kindly explain why you did not run a conflict check before asking me to submit names and documents to 4-5 Gray's Inn Square."
4-5 Gray's Inn Square never sent any response to this query. It is now radio silence.
I can not prove how many clerks and lawyers in the firm looked at the same attachments. I don't know if the same lawyer assisting Reform UK was accidentally given the opportunity to see my documents. Nonetheless, looking at the transcript of my phone call with these people, their email response the next day and subsequent radio silence when challenged about the affair, I feel there is a real possibility they failed to maintain information barriers, also known as Chinese walls. Whether this breach of confidentiality happened deliberately or by accident doesn't make a lot of difference.
On 7 October 2026, I took the next step and submitted a formal application to withdraw the secret legal document and put an end to the secret procedure.
The cost and potential side-effects of these incidents make the procedure uneconomical and result in an unacceptable risk of a judge making incorrect findings in a dispute.
This was not the first time somebody served one of these secret legal documents on Reform UK Party Limited. I doubt it will be the last time.
Secret trial on Monday, 19 October 2026
It is London's worst kept secret.
British press photographers have been carefully studying pictures of Count Binface so they can recognise the real Count Binface and distinguish him from random strangers wearing bins on their heads.
Court security staff have been briefed on the possibility of journalists wearing bins on their head to try and impersonate a novelty candidate and gain access to the Rolls Building in the Royal Courts of Justice.
MI5 and GCHQ have been working overtime investigating rumours about a plot to smuggle an emergency life raft into the court and inflate it in honour of Lifeboat crews harassed by lunatics from Reform UK.
Lunatics aside, Official Monster Raving Loony Party candidates may be the real winners. In defence of the secret legal claim, Reform UK have argued they don't have to follow through on their promise to pay for the by-election because they never invited any other candidates to participate:
It turns out Nigel Farage told a journalist he wanted the Official Monster Raving Loony Party to participate. He also mentioned the guy who dresses in a fox costume. Therefore, the three Loony candidates appear to have a stronger claim than anybody else. From the Clacton Gazette article:
When asked whether people will take the by-election seriously when Mr Farage’s only confirmed opponent is Count Binface, he said: “Well, I think that’s wrong – I think the Monster Raving Loonies will stand as well, and I’m told this morning that Laurence Fox the actor has announced he’s standing.
“There will be candidates.”
When I discovered that 4-5 Gray's Inn Square had already done work for the other side in this dispute, the story of Father Baker and Father Pickering communicating behind the backs of abuse victims wasn't the only thing that came to mind.
Take a moment to remember the Swiss JuristGate scandal, in particular, the greffiers who work like clerks in the court while simultaneously running businesses on the side.
In Australia, we had the notorious lawyer X, who was officially working for crime bosses while secretly working as a police informer. It was a scandal that went from the bar to the bedroom and back again. The Royal Commission into that affair made a point of asking police who slept with the lawyer (guilty as charged).
It didn't take me long to find reports about other scandals around 4-5 Gray's Inn Square. In one of the more minor cases, a lawyer was cleared in a disciplinary procedure after falling asleep during a trial. Then there was the lawyer Paul Cohen and the legendary $15 billion Sulu arbitration affair. An even darker affair involves Oliver Zachary White, banned from direct access work due to unauthorised handling of client funds.
Read more about the various judgments in the history of Reform UK Party Limited.