El Money, ‘Rent Boys’ and the Starmer Arson Mystery
George Galloway has always had a rare gift for finding the one detail in a news story that respectable people would prefer not to mention. In the case of the Starmer arson affair, he did not so much find the detail as march up to it and invite it onto MOATS as the guest of honour.
The official story is odd enough. Roman Lavrynovych, a Ukrainian national, was convicted over arson attacks on property linked to Sir Keir Starmer. Stanislav Carpiuc, a Romanian national born in the Ukraine, was also convicted of conspiracy to commit arson. Petro Pochynok, another Ukrainian, was acquitted. At the centre of it all sat a mysterious Telegram figure known as “El Money”, a Russian-speaking handler who allegedly directed the fires, promised payment and then vanished into the digital mist.
That version already sounds like something rejected from a bad BBC spy drama. Yet Galloway’s coverage was not interested merely in “El Money”, crypto payments and the geopolitics of alleged Russian sabotage. His eye went straight to the stranger side of the case: the rumours around modelling, homosexual dating apps and the extraordinary reluctance of the mainstream press to linger over any of it.
On Mother Of All Talk Shows and in his social clips, Galloway repeatedly referred to the men as “Ukrainian rent boys”, asked for “proof of life” and mocked what he presented as a media silence around the trial. In one particularly Gallowavian sound bite, he thundered: “They’ve both got Grindr accounts!” before adding, with the theatrical clarity of a man explaining the darker corners of the internet to a town hall in the 1990s, that “some of my gay friends tell me that Grindr accounts are where homosexuals ply their trade” and “tout for partners”, only to append, with sudden diplomatic urgency, “And good luck to them.”
This was Galloway at his most Gallowavian: theatrical, mischievous, half-prosecutor and half-award-winning actor, wielding insinuation with the air of a man who knows exactly which sentence will make a defamation solicitor sit upright.
The important point is not that every rumour is true. They have not been proven. The official court case was about arson, Telegram instructions and payment. But Galloway understood why the story captured attention. The entire affair seemed to arrive wrapped in missing context.
Who was El Money? Why was so little publicly established about the network behind him? Why did the story contain young eastern European men, online aliases, modelling links and unexplained digital trails, only for the press to fall back into their go-to language of “Russian interference” as though reciting a prayer before bed?
The British establishment has a talent for making strange stories seem stranger by demanding that nobody notice their strangeness. It does nothing to reassure the public. All it does is either irritate them or raise suspicion. When journalists appear incurious, alternative media figures only need to ask the question that the official press seems desperate to avoid.
That is where Galloway’s coverage landed. Whether one likes him or not, he made the story impossible to treat as a neat security briefing. His coverage turned “El Money” from a case detail into a symbol: named, central, absent and somehow less investigated in public than the people he allegedly used.
There is a lesson here beyond Starmer, the Ukraine, Russia or Westminster embarrassment. Public trust collapses when responsible people refuse to ask obvious questions. If the official version is complete, it should be able to withstand mockery. If it is incomplete, mockery is often the first form of journalism brave enough to say so.
The Starmer arson case has produced two convictions, an acquittal, a fugitive online handler and a thousand rumours. George Galloway did not solve it. He may not even have been careful with it. But he did what the mainstream press so often fails to do: he noticed that the story had a smell.
Once a story smells this strange, telling the public to hold its nose is not a serious answer.
