Reform UK has received a second record donation inside 48 hours, with cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne giving £36m to the party, matching a gift of the same size announced by fellow crypto tycoon Ben Delo on Friday, Reuters and the Guardian report. The pledges leave the party with £72m in cash injections in a single day, jointly the largest donations ever made to a UK political party.
Nigel Farage said he was honoured and humbled by the payments. Reform said it would spend the money hiring around 400 campaign managers in target constituencies, declaring itself on election footing. The party trails Labour in most polling but has been treated by rivals and commentators alike as a serious contender at the next general election, and money on this scale sharpens that assessment considerably.
The donations arrive while Reform’s finances are already under two formal scrutinies. The Metropolitan Police is conducting an inquiry into the party’s funding, and Mr Farage faces a parliamentary standards investigation over an earlier £5m gift from Mr Harborne, made before he was first elected an MP in 2024. Reform and Mr Farage have denied any wrongdoing. Mr Harborne’s latest announcement was accompanied by a statement addressing media speculation about his giving.
Opposition parties moved quickly on the politics of it all. Bridget Phillipson, chair of the Labour Party, said Farage could not buy his way out of the sleaze and scandal she said surrounds Reform’s finances. Labour MP Stella Creasy has tabled an amendment to the representation of the people bill aimed at capping individual donations, a proposal that has gathered momentum in both houses. Green Party figures also took a shot at the prime minister, accusing Andy Burnham of flip flopping after he appeared open to a cap and then faced lobbying from unions that fear restrictions on their own giving to Labour.
Any cap faces awkward arithmetic. The £72m Reform has just banked exceeds the combined annual donations of most of its rivals, and existing electoral law imposes no upper limit on what a single permitted donor may give. Regulators can check the legitimacy and origin of funds, as the Electoral Commission does, but they cannot reduce the cheque. That gap between what is legal and what looks defensible is exactly what campaigners are exploiting.
For the wider party funding industry the weekend resets expectations. Consultancies, data firms and field operations that serve elections of this size have long complained the UK runs underfunded compared with the US or France. A £72m war chest from one party invites matching behaviour elsewhere, and the two largest parties both hold substantial reserves of their own.
The last general election cycle was defined by a Conservative squeeze on donor cash and Labour’s small-donation resurgence. This one may be remembered for something different: the moment two crypto fortunes, made largely offshore, rewired the funding of British populism in a single afternoon, and left every regulator chasing the rules that allowed it.