Start with the indisputable facts: two billionaires have each given Reform UK £36m. This double donation is more than was given to all political parties over the whole of last year. Each handed over four times the single previous biggest gift to a British political party by any living person – and that came from one of this pair last year, who donated £9m to the same political party.
This same man also gave another £5m to its leader Nigel Farage as a personal gift, supposedly as reward for inflicting Brexit on our nation. And both of this very rich pair of men made fortunes in the Wild West world of cryptocurrency trading while living abroad.
These are huge and potentially transformative sums for British politics, whatever nonsense is spouted about levelling the playing field. The scale smacks of one of the darkest aspects of United States politics, badly corroded by floods of cash from wealthy people and powerful corporations. Ironically, corruption of their system helped fuel the rise to power of Farage’s friend Donald Trump with all his talk of draining a Washington swamp that he has made even more sordid, not least with his blatant self-enrichment and cronyism.
Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo’s combined £72m of gifting followed the launch of a criminal investigation into allegations that Reform broke funding rules, after an undercover television sting exposed two key aides alleged to be fishing for illegal foreign donations with apparent connivance of their boss. The party, for its part, said it received no money itself and denies any wrongdoing. Nonetheless, this ruined their annual conference.
It came after Reform’s lead in polls slid following months of controversy over Farage’s acceptance of that undeclared gift, and two further donations of £250,000 each from the mother of George Cottrell, another close ally who is mostly based in Montenegro. He moved to this Balkan country – notorious for cleaning Russian cash – after eight months in an American jail following an FBI investigation into Dark Web money-laundering. Cottrell brokered a plea deal and admitted wire fraud.
Needless to say, everyone involved in these donations insists their motives are pure. The mega-donors talk in similar terms about aiding a start-up trying to save Britain. Harborne claims his “competitive spirit” led him to match Delo’s donation as if they are kids playing Monopoly.
Delo – pardoned last year by Trump, after a conviction and hefty fine for flouting US financial rules – admits he gave one lump sum, instead of £1m a month until the next election, to thwart any government efforts to curb his funding. He argues that it would be “anti-democratic” if an elected government tried to stop a billionaire making political donations of such magnitude; even Alastair Campbell might be proud of such absurdist spin.
The donations seem mysterious if you follow the duo’s own logic for lavishing vast sums on Reform. Delo claims to be “a reluctant philanthropist” motivated by the fight for free speech, complaining about creeping “authoritarianism” in Britain that involves “policing of opinions and policing of thought”. Yet he has just returned to our shores to evade a new cap on donations from Britons abroad. Before, he was living and building his fortune in Hong Kong even as China’s dictatorship – operator of the world’s most intense surveillance society, and stifling free speech for almost one in five people on our planet – strangled democracy in the territory.
Harborne set out his stall in The Telegraph for anyone wondering why a tycoon based in Thailand – where he goes by the name Chakrit Sakunkrit – throws such sums at Reform. He starts by saying “Britain needs to regenerate after more than a decade of decline” – a period that matches the Brexit debacle. Then he says education, healthcare and social care “are incredibly important to me” but only Farage and his party can get our nation back on track.
Yet Reform has no detailed plans for social care while claiming it can cut £50bn from welfare partly by slashing disability payments. Though the party says it would keep the NHS free at the point of use for UK citizens, Farage has flirted with ripping up the National Health Service for replacement with an insurance model. And his ideas on education seem to focus on forcing schools to fly flags, stop diversity initiatives and teach plumbing.
Follow the money, not the words. In the US, we saw Trump flip from fierce crypto opponent to major fan after its cash poured into his 2024 campaign – dropping prosecutions, issuing pardons and loosening regulatory controls. At the start of his first term, the combined value of all cryptocurrencies was less than $20bn; today it is about $2.6trn. And now we have a party in the UK on the cusp of power with no defence spokesman or social care plans, yet by strange coincidence it has firm proposals to cut tax on crypto trading, order the Bank of England to stop creating its own digital currency, and force it to hold Bitcoin reserves – all of which would boost the sector.
Two more facts. First, London is the world’s biggest centre for foreign currency trading with turnover roughly twice the size of the US. And second, while I accept many Bitcoin devotees are genuine anti-state libertarians and know it can be a helpful tool for dissidents under repressive regimes to evade fiscal controls, since untraceable, it is also used to hide flows of filthy money. So it aids both criminals and dictatorships fighting democracy with disinformation, division and proxies.
Yet Labour and the Tories have only themselves to blame for this toxic situation after their failure to clear the stench of corruption that hangs over Westminster, despite a string of funding and lobbying scandals. Which other nation, after all, rewards big political donors with a fancy title and lifetime seat in Parliament? The Tories exposed their own cronyism by opening up lucrative “VIP” lanes for well-connected figures to win big contracts in the pandemic, and Labour pays back unions for their cash with helpful legislation and bumper pay deals.
Both have tinkered at the edges of real funding and lobbying reforms. Now Reform threatens to wash them both away with a tide of cash from a couple of billionaire crypto kings.
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