Jared O’Mara’s court case is back underway, and now – unfortunately for gossip-hungry co-conspirators – it’s the turn of the defence to make their case. The first revelation of the day was that Jared won’t be giving evidence for the defence. No surprises there.

The court instead heard from his co-defendant Gareth Arnold, who faces six counts of fraud. He described Jared’s history of sexist and homophobic comments, first revealed by Guido, merely as “some problems in the press”. Arnold added that Jared didn’t feel supported, criticising the media for failing to be accommodating. 

Arnold then expanded on O’Mara’s own media plans. He wanted to start a YouTube channel called “Untied Kingdom” – intended to circumvent his poor public speaking. He also describes his “media consultancy” work with Jared. Arnold said, “We’d role play, I’d be Jeremy Paxman…because he has autism that’d require quite a lot of patience.”

Arnold also claimed secrecy over invoices stemmed from Jared’s fear of leaks to the press, after he had been dubbed the “Uber king of Westminster”. There were then yet more descriptions of O’Mara’s vices, Arnold said he didn’t like visiting Jared’s gaffe because he smoked “60 fags a day”, before a message again pointed to Jared’s cocaine use. The court was then read a text received from Jared:

“If I employ my friend John for UTK he says he’ll go straight and that way I keep a family man with his family and we have a fixer for our business. Anytime we need anything of a grey shade done he’s our guy… We’ve got to do something to keep too much of our money going to the tax man… Nothing will disproportionately affect your annual dividends naturally!”

Arnold simply dismissed the message as “the ramblings of a very drunk man.” It was sent at 3:14 in the morning.