In late January, Nigel Farage stood in front of a packed Reform party fundraiser in Oswald’s, an exclusive private members’ club in Mayfair, central London. Farage encouraged the 100-strong crowd to dig deep as Reform prepared for the party’s biggest test so far: May’s local elections. “If you give us the ammunition we will do incredibly well,” Farage said. He ended his speech with a rendition of the Village People’s “YMCA”, which Donald Trump has appropriated as his victory anthem.
Farage had plenty to celebrate. Among the Reform crowd drinking champagne and what the Times described as “jeroboams of white burgundy and double magnums of Tempo d’Angelus” were a host of minor celebrities. The heavyweight boxer Derek Chisora was there, as was former soldier Ant Middleton, who was dropped from the channel 4 series SAS: Who Dares Wins after controversial tweets and remarks about the pandemic and Black Lives Matter; and racehorse trainer Andrew Reid. There were big donors, too. Bassim Haidar, the Nigerian-born Lebanese entrepreneur who gave the Tories more than £670,000 under Rishi Sunak, was there, as was Arron Banks, the former Ukip donor who spent millions campaigning to leave the European Union. Farage was given a rousing introduction by Oswald’s owner, clubland impresario Robin Birley, who donated £25,000 to Reform a few weeks before the general election.
Reform reportedly took in more than £1m that night at Oswald’s. The event was part of a wider strategy of attracting big money. In December the former Conservative donor, property developer and billionaire Nick Candy was appointed party treasurer. A few weeks earlier, newspaper reports had suggested that Elon Musk wanted to make an unprecedented $100m donation to Reform. The story, which both sides denied, sparked concerns about foreign interference in British politics. But it does not seem to have put off prospective Reform donors.
“Reform is where the money is going now,” says former Conservative donor Mohamed Amersi. Having paid £25,000 to attend the Oswald’s fundraiser, Amersi says he is speaking to “various people in Reform” about funding a thinktank to develop policies. “Without policies, funding will be a problem.”
The challenge for Reform, Amersi tells me, is whether it can raise enough money to become a serious force in British politics. “The question is: can we light the fire and make things happen?” he says. The answer to that lies, at least in part, in who has funded Reform so far. It also comes down to whether a party whose leader is better known for starting political fires than building political movements will be able to translate money into electoral success.
Reform’s rise has been rapid. At the start of last year, the party, then led by Richard Tice, was polling at less than 10 per cent. Now opinion polls routinely show it on a quarter of the vote. Reform won five seats in the general election and claims to have more than 220,000 paying supporters. Farage is hopeful of making gains in councils and mayoralties across England in May. Party infighting grabs headlines, but is unlikely to dent Reform’s support.
As Reform’s supporter numbers have increased, so has the party’s bank balance. In 2023, Reform raised £155,000 in donations. Last year, the party took in £4.75m. A third of that total came from people who have previously given to the Conservatives, mainly from the party’s Brexiteer wing. Among them is Richard Smith, who owns a Georgian townhouse on Tufton Street that has long housed a slew of influential—and opaquely funded—right-wing thinktanks; Fitriani Hay, the biggest donor to Liz Truss’s 2022 Tory leadership campaign; and hedge fund manager Crispin Odey, who in March was banned from working in the UK financial services industry and fined £1.8m by the Financial Conduct Authority, which said he showed a “lack of integrity” in his conduct following allegations of sexual harassment. (Odey has denied the allegations and said he will challenge the decision.)
Many big donors have followed a well-trodden path from Conservative to Reform
Other donors have followed the well-trodden path from Conservative to Reform. Reform’s largest donation in the last quarter of 2024 was £100,000 from former Lehman Brothers banker and Monaco-based investor Roger Nagioff. Peter Hall, a London-based Australian financier who has been credited with bringing the flat white coffee to the UK, has given Reform £60,000. Hall, who previously donated £500,000 to the Conservatives, has said that he wants to stand as a Reform candidate. Charlie Mullins, another former Tory donor better known as the founder of Pimlico Plumbers, says he plans to stand as a Reform MP, having been urged to do so by Farage. Mullins was a business adviser to prime minister David Cameron before becoming a vocal critic of Brexit. (In 2023, he was suspended from X for posting that someone “should kill” London mayor Sadiq Khan over ultra-low emission zones.)
More money has allowed Reform to expand its operations. The party has opened hundreds of constituency offices, many in Labour-held seats that will be key targets at the next general election. Opposition parties report seeing full-time Reform staff coordinating council byelection campaigns in inner cities far from would-be Reform heartlands. Growing donations and supporter fees have paid for a cadre of young male advisers to curate Farage’s social media image, part of Reform’s wider bid to attract the young, right-wing and very online male vote. A small team of press officers has been hired to field burgeoning media interest.
The contrast with the Conservatives could not be starker. Where Reform has moved its HQ to Millbank Tower, a short walk from Westminster, the Tories are widely reported to be on the verge of leaving their offices on nearby Matthew Parker Street because the rent is too high. Under Kemi Badenoch, the big money that bankrolled the Tories during almost a decade-and-a-half in government has largely disappeared. “The Conservatives are struggling financially. They are raising less comparatively than they have after previous elections,” says Sam Power, an expert in political finance at Bristol University. A pre-Christmas Tory fundraiser in Raffles hotel on Whitehall barely made a profit. The Times reported one donor who was there as saying: “In the past, the ticket price would have been very expensive. This time, it wasn’t.”
Nick Candy, himself a former member of the exclusive “Leader’s Group” of top Conservative funders, has promised to build a war chest for Reform. His goal as treasurer is to convince 20 donors to pledge £1m each. “I won’t do it overnight, but I think I can get it there in 18 months,” he recently told the New York Times. Candy has promised to donate a “seven-figure sum” too, but his personal fortune is less important than the image he projects to other prospective donors, says Gawain Towler, who was a press officer for Ukip, the Brexit party and, until last September, Reform. “It’s the confidence he gives [other donors],” Towler told me. “It means that when you want to talk to Reform about donations, you get to talk to someone who is a public billionaire, rather than someone you’ve never heard of.”
In political fundraising, success breeds success, says Towler. “Money begets money. It has its own gravity. When you haven’t got any [money], less comes. The problem the Tories have is that they are broke. Significant earners are moving ship. If you’ve got money, it would be a very quixotic thing to do to give more money to the Tory party.”
Towler contrasts Badenoch, who has only been Tory leader since November, with Farage, who “has been fundraising for 30 years”. “Nigel knows how to throw a decent party, he knows how to get on with people from all walks of life,” Towler says. “Most of the money we get is entrepreneurial money, it’s not institutional money. It’s people who have set up businesses, created businesses, it’s the entrepreneurs. Because they see in Farage that he is a political entrepreneur.”
Two-thirds of Reform’s donations in 2024 came from millionaires and multimillionaires, according to the New York Times. More than half of its donations were from people with homes in low-tax jurisdictions or with offshore business interests; 40 per cent came from those who have questioned climate change or have investments in fossil fuels. Farage’s party is vocally opposed to net zero. Reform’s critics like to point out that the party’s well-heeled donors are at odds with the party’s populist messaging, but Power says this is not unusual. “The radical right often speak the language of the very rich—in private, but even in public. Reform is able to speak to that constituency very well.”
Of £17m given to Reform since 2019, more than 80 per cent came from just five people
Political fundraisers often talk of the “80/20” rule: 80 per cent of your donations will come from 20 per cent of your donors. But with Reform that metric is even more skewed: since it was founded in 2019 as the Brexit Party, the party has reported more than £17m in “registered donations” (that is, donations over a certain amount—£7,500 until 2023, and £11,400 since). Of that £17m, more than 80 per cent came from just five people, according to my exclusive analysis of Electoral Commission data for this magazine.
Reform’s biggest donor, by some distance, is Christopher Harborne. The British-born, Thailand-based aviation enthusiast and cryptocurrency investor gave an unprecedented £10m to the Brexit Party in the lead-up to the 2019 general election. If Harborne’s name is familiar, it might be because he hit the headlines in 2023 after donating £1m to outgoing prime minister Boris Johnson’s private office. Before Brexit—which Harborne strongly supported—he had also been a member of the Conservative donors’ “Leader’s Group”.
Harborne has re-emerged as a player in the Reform orbit in recent months. After the general election, Farage registered £32,000 in costs associated with a trip to the US for the Republican National Convention; it was Harborne who footed the bill. The investor was also part of the Reform contingent at Trump’s inauguration, alongside party chair Zia Yusuf and Brexit donor Arron Banks. Harborne’s business interests have sparked press attention. In December, a Delaware court ruled that a defamation case Harborne has taken against the Wall Street Journal over its reporting of his crypto interests could go ahead.
Reform has also received more than £1.7m from hedge fund boss Jeremy Hosking, including a quarter of a million pounds last year. Hosking has emerged as one of the biggest funders of populist-right causes in Britain in recent years. He donated millions to the Vote Leave campaign ahead of the Brexit referendum and has given more than £4m to Reclaim, the serial deposit-losing party fronted by actor-turned-culture warrior Laurence Fox. Hosking gave millions in loans to former MP Andrew Bridgen, briefly Reclaim’s only MP after he was expelled from the Tories for comparing Covid-19 vaccines to the Holocaust. The financier also bankrolls dyspeptic political magazine The Critic and owns a private museum in Margate, Kent that houses the old, long Euston station departures board that was replaced in 2022.
David Lilley, a former Tory donor and investor in metals and mining, has given Reform £364,000. The party has also received £500,000 from Fiona Cottrell, whose son, George, is widely seen as a key figure in Farage’s inner circle. Known as “Posh George”, the 31-year-old businessman and high-stakes gambler has no official role in the party but often accompanied Farage during the general election campaign and was at Reform’s Oswald’s fundraiser in January. Cottrell previously served eight months in a US jail for wire fraud after posing as a money launderer to rip off drug smugglers, and reportedly lost £16m in a Montenegro casino last year. According to Tatler, Cottrell has a habit of referring to Farage as “Daddy”. In December, Cottrell paid £15,000 for Farage’s trip to Florida, where the Reform leader and Candy met Musk at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
Reform has also been heavily dependent on support from property developer and former party leader Richard Tice. The Boston and Skegness MP, who stepped aside to make way for Farage’s return two weeks into the general election campaign, has been keeping the party afloat with loans since 2020. He also donated more than £1.7m to Reform through Leave Means Leave, a company he founded with Tory donor John Longworth in 2016 to push for a hard Brexit following the referendum. Since rebranded as Britain Means Business, with Tice as its owner and sole director, the company’s donations to Reform include half a million pounds in the run-up to last year’s general election.
Tice’s financial contributions to Reform have raised eyebrows, given that he was in the highly unusual position of being a party leader funding his own party. Leave Means Leave was formed as a cross-party campaign group, and was supposed to be separate from the Brexit party, in the view of Leave Means Leave’s other founder, Longworth: “They were two separate things as far as I’m concerned,” he told the Financial Times last year. Tice, one of Reform’s four sitting MPs, is also still owed more than £1m by the party for the 50-plus interest-free loans he has made since 2020, through his company Tisun Investments Limited.
When I spoke to Tice before the general election, he said his loans had been used to bootstrap Reform in its “startup” phase, but were no longer required. “What’s happening now is former Tory donors or ‘never donors’ [people who have never donated to a party before] are phoning up or emailing in and saying, ‘You guys are serious. Can we help?’”
Reform’s reliance on a handful of rich donors is not unique. Across the spectrum, British politics has become increasingly dominated by a small cadre of mega-donors. Of the £85m worth of private donations received by parties in 2023, two-thirds came from just 19 donors each giving more than £1m each. This was the highest-ever share of such large donations, according to research by Transparency International.
There are mega-donors, and then there is Elon Musk. Some inside Reform say that the whole story of Musk’s putative $100m donation is a fantasy, a headline dreamed up by the Conservatives to damage its rival on the right. Others expect Musk to provide support, even though the X owner has publicly criticised Farage for his refusal to support far-right leader Tommy Robinson, and said that Reform “needs a new leader”. The prospect of a South-African-born US citizen giving or lending unprecedented sums to a British political party has sparked fears about foreign influence. In theory, our electoral laws are supposed to prevent donations or funding from overseas, but the legislation is riddled with loopholes. Almost one pound in every £10 reported to the Electoral Commission by political parties since 2001 came from unknown or dubious sources, according to Transparency International. Foreign citizens can easily funnel money into British politics through intermediaries or British-registered shell companies.
Cleaning up political finance to prevent the threat of electoral interference posed by the likes of Musk should be comfortable ground for Labour. Keir Starmer was elected on a manifesto that pledged to “protect democracy by strengthening the rules around donations to political parties”. But the government has been skittish. Anonymous briefings that Downing Street was considering caps on political donations after reports of Musk’s interest in Reform surfaced were quickly walked back. Starmer’s timidity has frustrated many in his own party. In March, backbench Labour MPs forced a debate on political funding, during which Stella Creasy described a possible Musk donation as an “existential threat to our country’s democracy” and a “national security threat”.
Some action is likely. An elections bill is widely expected in the next King’s Speech. Rushanara Ali, whose communities brief includes election policy, has said that the government is looking at a “series of policy interventions”. New legislation is widely expected to include greater fining powers for the Electoral Commission, increased transparency requirements for unincorporated associations and a stipulation that companies can only donate from UK profits—the latter a plan that Labour reportedly dropped ahead of the general election following opposition from donor Waheed Alli (of freebiegate fame).
Experts are doubtful that minor reforms will make a significant difference, or even prevent Musk from funding Reform. “If you are Elon Musk, or any billionaire, you can find ways to give money in the current system, or in a system that is only slightly more robust,” says Power. A source close to the discussion on political finance reform inside Labour says that, while new legislation “won’t reduce the volume of money in British politics”, it will be a step in the right direction. “Halfway is better than no way.”
Even if Reform does succeed in raising tens of millions from donors, some doubt the party could spend it effectively
Even if Reform does succeed in raising tens of millions from donors, some doubt that the party could spend it effectively. “The question is: can Reform put together a ground operation?” says Henry Hill, deputy editor of Conservative Home. “Even if they can raise the money, would Reform have the discipline to set it aside and spend it on regional organisers for 10 years?”
One way to judge this might be to look at how Reform has spent money it has previously raised. But this isn’t easy. British electoral law does not mandate that parties must file standardised accounts, and Reform’s are particularly light on detail. In 2019, when still the Brexit Party, it received £17.3m in donations in total for the year. (This figure includes more than £11m in large donations as well as millions in donations under £500, much of which were given through PayPal—a practice that the Electoral Commission warned left the party at risk of receiving illegal donations.) That same year the party declared £18.9m in expenditure, mostly on staff and campaigning. But more than 40 per cent (£7.8m) was listed simply as “other expenditure”, without explanation.
In this, Reform is not like other parties: in 2019, Labour listed £1.5m in “other” expenditure among a total spend of £57m; the Tories recorded “other” expenses of £2.5m out of a total of nearly £55m. Power says this “black hole” in Reform’s 2019 accounting return “is wholly exceptional in British politics”. He adds that, under the present system, “people with little interest in being open about finance arrangements can abide by the rules, but in such a way that it doesn’t tell us anything about what was actually going on. The Reform accounts 2019 are a really good example of this”.
Reform is an anomaly in other ways, too. The party was founded as a private limited company, with Farage the majority shareholder. Earlier this year, Farage announced that he had given up ownership of Reform. Party chairman, entrepreneur and former Goldman Sachs executive Zia Yusuf hailed the move as “an important step in professionalising the party”. Former co-leader Ben Habib, who left Reform in November citing concerns over the party’s lack of internal democracy, disagrees. “Contrary to all the protestations [Farage] has been making about democratising the party, he hasn’t done anything. He’s still in complete control,” Habib told me. “Any political party should have checks and balances in it. It can’t be owned and controlled by one man. But if it were owned and controlled by one man, Nigel Farage would be a particularly bad individual to give that control to.”
Farage’s leadership style has certainly grated with some in the party. In January, 10 Reform councillors in Derbyshire resigned in protest at Farage’s “increasingly autocratic manner”. Then, in March, Reform expelled Rupert Lowe for allegedly threatening violence against party chairman Yusuf. The Great Yarmouth MP denied the claim, saying that he had been singled out for being a “tall poppy” after he said in an interview that Farage had a “messianic” style of leadership. Habib predicts that these public conflagrations will have electoral—and financial—implications for Reform. “The donors are going to be upset. The grassroots are upset, and it will seep through to the electorate. All of this is bad news.”
In the wake of Farage’s spat with Lowe, press reports suggested that Musk was considering funding a populist-right alternative to Reform. These rumours were dismissed by party insiders I spoke to; “Nonsense,” says one. For former Conservative donor Mohamed Amersi, the row was a “storm in a teacup” that should have been kept behind closed doors. “If I was the leader of the party I would not have let this come into the public domain,” he tells me.
All the same, Amersi does not believe that the negative headlines about Reform will put off prospective donors, especially those, like him, who have crossed over to the party. “My earnest hope is that by the next election we find a way to merge the Tories and Reform. That is what so many of us want to see.”
