By Ann Higgins
After the jollity of the summer silly season and the appearance of a new character on the political scene, albeit one who keeps his identity masked behind a bin, we return to more serious matters, although I can’t leave the subject of Count Binface without giving a plug for the excellent interview he gave to Jonathan Agnew on Test Match Special’s View from the Boundary on Thursday 10th September, which I hope may soon be available on BBC Sounds.
He’s not the only public figure to have been grilled by “Aggers”; many politicians have sat in the hot seat including, so it turns out, Nigel Farage, whose interview I’m not that sorry to have missed. And it is to Mr Farage and his party that I find myself turning, following the generosity of two recent donors to Reform UK, totalling £72 million. Both crypto currency billionaires, Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo, have been based overseas, in Thailand and Hong Kong respectively, for a number of years. Reform deputy leader Richard Tice (who reputedly spends a great deal of his time in Dubai) has said that “his party is only trying to get on a level playing field” and claims that the Labour Party “gets tens of millions” every year from affiliated unions, though a BBC Fact Check found that it received £6 million, £12 million and £5 million in years 2023, 2024 (an election year) and 2025 respectively – hardly equivalent to the recent boost to Reform’s coffers. As Nick Robinson asked Reform UK’s deputy leader Richard Tice on a recent Today programme, “What do you think first attracted two crypto currency billionaires to give tens of millions of pounds to a party promising to cut their taxes, to limit regulation of their business, and limit competition for them as well?” You can imagine Tice’s discomfiture.
This largesse on the part of just two donors coincided with the second reading in the Lords of the Representation of the People Bill 2026 which aims, among other things, to limit overseas political donations exceeding £100,000. During her introduction of the Bill to the House for the Government on 13 September, Baroness Taylor said: “The Bill caps donations to registered political parties by overseas electors at £100,000. This also applies to individuals who were formerly resident outside the UK, who are subject to the cap for a minimum of a calendar year after arrival here. That responds to concerns identified by the Rycroft review: first, that the origin of funds from overseas donors can be harder to trace; and, secondly, that democratic fairness may be put at risk if individuals are able to make unlimited donations into the political system while having only a limited connection to public life in the United Kingdom.”
It is perhaps no coincidence that these two large donations suddenly arrived while a bill that could affect their legitimacy was being debated. Indeed, some on the right are somewhat ironically seeking to rely on Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights (our membership of which many of them strenuously oppose) which forbids retrospective legislation, perhaps not having read it sufficiently thoroughly to spot that it only applies to criminal cases, which are not what is involved here. Nonetheless, there is a valid point to be made that the government needs to ensure that it appears to be even-handed in changing the law to protect our democracy from foreign and malign influences. I think that the whole of the Baroness’s speech is well worth reading but she perhaps puts it best in her introduction to the bill:
“When I catch the 6.15 am or the 6.31 am train from Stevenage to London in the mornings, I share the carriages of that train and then the underground with people whose interests are at the heart of our community: tradespeople, in their steel-toecap boots; public sector workers, including those in blue light services, heading for their early shifts; and small business owners getting an early start to prepare for their day. It is a fundamental principle of our democracy that every one of their votes is exactly equal to the votes of millionaires, crypto bros and industry magnates. It is that which sits front and centre in this Bill.”
This is not the total of Reform’s present woes: apart from the renewed Parliamentary Standards Commissioner’s inquiry into Nigel Farage’s failure to disclose the £5 million “gift” from Christopher Harborne, there is an internal Reform Party review of the actions of its now sacked staff following the undercover Channel 4 exposé of dodgy polls they paid for themselves but pretended were independent. And finally, the Met Police have started an official investigation into the potential foreign funding revealed in the programme and earlier concerns about donations from a concealed donor in the lead-up to the 2024 general election, when funds from the mother of a convicted fraudster were channelled through Richard Tice’s company, allegedly without the origins of the money being transparent.
Which brings us back to the subject of political donations and how important it is that we all know who is trying to influence our politicians and why. And that the rich do not hijack our democracy by buying power. Is it a coincidence that after receiving his undisclosed “gift” of £5 million from Christopher Harborne, Mr Farage was lobbying the Governor of the Bank of England against the Bank’s plan to create its own crypto currency, Britcoin, which, once launched, could seriously damage the crypto business in which Mr Harborne has a substantial interest? At that time, his donations to Reform itself already totalled some £25 million.
