A few months ago I was half-watching the news with the sound down, doing something else, and Richard Tice came on. You can usually tell it’s him before you turn the volume up. He has a particular look in a television studio, slightly flushed, slightly braced, like a man whose collar has just been adjusted by a producer he doesn’t entirely trust. He was denouncing the government’s approval of a large solar farm. When I did turn the sound up the line was the predictable one. “Appalling.” “A massive con.” It is the kind of phrase you’ve now heard a hundred times if you spend any time in the orbit of British political news, and which has the virtue, from Mr Tice’s point of view, of being both memorable and impossible to falsify. A con, after all, is in the eye of the beholder.

What I couldn’t quite stop thinking about wasn’t the rhetoric. It was that I happened to know, because someone had sent me the link a fortnight earlier, that Mr Tice’s own property company has been quietly sticking solar panels on the roofs of its industrial estates for years. The Ferret had dug out the Quidnet Reid accounts and found a chairman’s note from the firm congratulating itself on installing solar at three of its sites: the initiatives, said the note, would save hundreds of tonnes of CO2 every year, help occupiers with lower electricity bills, and provide an attractive return to shareholders. Income from things other than rent had gone from about £5,000 the year before the panels went up to over £150,000 the year after. A farm and racing operation Mr Tice owns has, apparently, also benefited from solar and battery storage.

This is, on one level, a small thing. People are inconsistent. Politicians especially so. I spent twenty-odd years in financial services as an IFA before I went anywhere near politics, and one of the things you learn doing pension reviews is that everybody has a private balance sheet that doesn’t quite match the story they tell about themselves at dinner. Half the cabinet ministers I’ve had reason to read about over the years have been at war, in their own private accounts, with the policies they shouted from the despatch box. So I don’t, on the whole, find hypocrisy a very interesting accusation.

What is interesting about Mr Tice is something else. It’s that he is part of a broader political project, the Reform UK project, which has over the last six or seven years evolved into something genuinely strange: a working-class populist insurgency whose policy on the cheapest source of electricity Britain has ever had is, more or less, to break it.

I want to try to explain why, because it has been bothering me for a while.

How a solar landlord ended up running an anti-solar party

Mr Tice’s day job before politics was property. He chaired CLS Holdings, then ran Quidnet Capital, and then Quidnet Reid. If you have a passing interest in mid-market industrial estates you may have come across him professionally. He is, by temperament and training, a man who likes a margin. The solar panels at Quidnet Reid are, in that sense, completely intelligible. They are a yield play. Cheap electricity for tenants is sticky tenants. Surplus generation is revenue. I would have advised a client to do exactly the same thing.

The strange bit is the politics. Reform UK’s stated programme is to scrap the legally binding 2050 net-zero target, abolish the Contracts for Difference auctions that have brought offshore wind costs down by something like seventy per cent over a decade, slap a windfall tax on wind and solar generators, end the ECO levy that funds insulation, and pour money into licensing rounds for new North Sea exploration. The New Economics Foundation has costed the package at something north of £90 billion in lost output and tens of thousands of jobs by the end of the decade. I’d take any single number like that with a pinch of salt, but the direction of travel is not in dispute. In July 2025 Mr Tice wrote to British energy companies warning them that a Reform government would seek to tear up their renewables contracts, which is the kind of letter that, if you actually own a power generation business in the UK, you read twice and then you ring your lawyer.

You can read this in two ways. The first is that Reform genuinely believes renewables are too expensive, that net zero is “the greatest act of negligence”, and that the salvation of the British economy lies somewhere offshore Aberdeen, in a barrel of oil that hasn’t yet been pumped. The second is that the policy is, in large part, downstream of who is paying for it.

I’ve come to think the second reading is the more useful one. Not because the first is impossible. Mr Tice does seem to believe his own arguments, and even Reform’s harshest critics tend to agree he is sincere about that much. But the donor pattern is too consistent and too concentrated to ignore.

A note from the council chamber

On 19 September 2025 I sat in the chamber and watched Reform councillors vote, 50 to 21, to rescind KCC’s climate emergency declaration and to scrap the council’s 2030 Net Zero target. The supporting motion described anthropogenic climate change as an “unproven view”, said the previous declaration had “scared numerous young people”, and dismissed the science as “alarmist”. Even the wording of the motion was a tell. You don’t write a sentence like that unless you have decided in advance that you are not really arguing with anyone in the room.

I have heard a lot of bad arguments in council chambers. Eight years on the borough council and a chunk of a year now at the county will do that to you. These were genuinely something else. One Reform councillor told the chamber that, as someone who had been involved in award-winning sustainability projects for twenty-five years, he had never seen such nonsense as “the anthropogenic global warming hoax”. I made a note of the line at the time because I wasn’t sure I’d heard it correctly. Another councillor suggested the £40 million in claimed savings from rescinding the targets justified the vote. The £40 million figure has since been picked apart in some detail and turns out to have related largely to capital projects that were never actually funded in the first place, which is the kind of saving you can claim from any policy you like, including not having a moon programme.

What was striking, sitting through it, was that nobody on the Reform benches was particularly interested in defending the figures. The vote was the point. The arguments were decoration. The Reform whip arrived in the chamber pre-counted.

I mention all this not to relitigate a vote my side lost, but because what I watched in Maidstone that afternoon turns out to be a small-scale rehearsal of the national argument. The same lines. The same disinterest in the numbers. The same conviction that the policy itself is the enemy. To understand why a party would vote like that, you have to look at who is funding it.

Where the money comes from

The biggest of those people is a man called Christopher Harborne. If you haven’t heard of him, you are not alone. Mr Harborne is the very rare thing in modern public life, a person who manages to deploy enormous sums of political money while remaining, in every other respect, almost entirely invisible. He doesn’t give interviews. There is a Wikipedia entry on him and a handful of carefully managed references in the financial press, and that is about it. He is a British–Thai national, lives in Bangkok, holds a Thai passport in the name Chakrit Sakunkrit, and made his fortune in two distinct ways. He is a long-standing crypto investor, with a stake in the stablecoin Tether sometimes put as high as twelve per cent. He also owns AML Global, a jet-fuel brokerage that supplies private aviation across more than a thousand airports.

I will admit I had to read the Tether part twice. As an ex-IFA my instinct around stablecoins is roughly the same as my instinct around timeshares, which is to put the brochure down and slowly leave the room. It is the sort of asset class designed to look very stable and turn out to be very not. Anyway. Mr Harborne owns a lot of it.

In August 2025 Novara Media and others reported that Mr Harborne had handed Reform UK a single donation of £9 million, the largest single gift from a living individual to any British political party on record. DeSmog’s running tally of his lifetime giving to the party and its predecessors is now around £22 million. It is genuinely difficult to overstate what those numbers mean for a small insurgent party. Reform isn’t competing with the Conservatives’ member-and-association funding model, or with Labour’s union money. It is, to a first approximation, the political vehicle of about half a dozen donors, and disproportionately of one.

The runner-up, and one suspects the temperamental opposite, is Jeremy Hosking, a Mayfair fund manager whose firm Hosking Partners has expanded its declared fossil-fuel holdings to around $300 million across oil, gas and coal, up from the $130 million figure flagged by openDemocracy back in 2023. Mr Hosking has given Reform something like £1.7 million since 2019. He has, to be fair to him, been quite open about disliking net zero. He also owns The Critic magazine, which has become a reliable venue for scepticism about British climate policy. He has previously told DeSmog that the fossil-fuel positions on his firm’s books belong to clients rather than to him personally, which is the kind of distinction that is true in the strict legal sense and not very illuminating in any other.

Then there is the apparatus of fundraising itself, which is run by the property developer Nick Candy. Mr Candy was made Reform’s treasurer in late 2024 and went on what can only be described as a world tour. He told the New York Times, and later the Financial Times, that the party would hold “huge fund-raisers” in Monaco, the United Arab Emirates and Switzerland. Not Stoke. Not Doncaster. Monaco. He was specifically targeting British nationals living in low-tax jurisdictions, plus oil and gas executives. openDemocracy has been tracking this strategy since the spring of 2025, and DeSmog in April that year put the oil-and-gas pivot on the record when Mr Candy confirmed an energy executive had handed over £100,000 with up to £1 million more pledged.

None of this, I should say, is illegal. UK electoral law is unusually generous to overseas donors. Any British national registered to vote can give. Any foreign individual with a registered UK business can give too. There is a respectable case to be made that this is fine, although I have never quite managed to make it myself. The point is what you actually get when you write the rules that loosely. What you get is a populist party that, on its own treasurer’s account, raises money in Geneva, Monaco and Dubai, in significant part from people who sell jet fuel and who own oil and gas, and whose flagship policy is to dismantle the part of the British power system that doesn’t depend on the things those people sell. As Byline Times put it, it is a strange way to fund a movement that claims to speak for the embattled British everyman.

Farage himself

Nigel Farage is the figurehead, but he is also, on the public record, the through-line. He has been on this question, sceptical of climate policy, deeply suspicious of “the alarmism”, attached to the idea that British deindustrialisation is the fault of green levies rather than offshoring or the gas market, since long before Reform existed. He told GB News, in his typically jovial register, that he was “very much an environmentalist” but couldn’t abide “this complete obsession with carbon dioxide… based on dodgy predictions and science”. He has campaigned for a referendum on net zero, Brexit’s restless cousin, and has called net zero “the prime reason for the deindustrialisation of Britain”, a claim that requires you to believe that the gas spike of 2022 either didn’t happen or didn’t matter.

What Mr Farage has not done, ever, is provide a coherent positive case for what would replace the policy he wants to scrap. The Reform manifesto talks about new licensing rounds, lifting the fracking moratorium, and ending the renewables subsidy regime. It is silent on what fills the gap when, as the North Sea regulator’s own forecasts show, domestic gas production falls by half this decade and by ninety per cent the next. DeSmog has mapped Mr Farage’s personal income since he became MP for Clacton in 2024 and the figure of around £1.8 million on top of his Commons salary, mostly via GB News, after-dinner speaking, and a contract as a brand ambassador for a gold bullion firm. Byline Times reported that this made him by some distance the highest-earning MP in Parliament. Whether or not you find that disqualifying is a matter of taste. What I find interesting is that the man who tells voters that net zero is the cause of the cost-of-living crisis has, since being elected on that platform, been doing extremely well personally, which is fine, while continuing to insist that the policy is the thing keeping ordinary people poor.

And then there’s Zia

The newest, and to my mind most psychologically peculiar, character in the cast is Zia Yusuf. Mr Yusuf is the British-born son of Sri Lankan Muslim immigrants who, by his late thirties, had built and sold a luxury concierge app called Velocity Black for £233 million. DeSmog described him in a profile last year as the “butler to billionaires who became Reform’s DOGE ringleader”. That is harsh but not, I think, unfair. Velocity Black was, in essence, an app for people whose net worth started at $7 million and went up from there. Mr Yusuf’s stated mission with the company, before politics, was to make the lives of the very rich slightly more convenient.

He arrived in Reform in 2024 as the largest declared donor to the 2024 election campaign and rapidly became the party’s chairman. He resigned theatrically in June 2025, said he no longer thought working for a Reform government was a good use of his time, and then, four days later, returned in a new and stranger role: head of “UK DOGE”, a Musk-aping efficiency unit aimed at Reform-controlled local councils. He is now, as of this year, Reform’s frontbench Home Affairs spokesperson.

What is striking about Mr Yusuf is the language. Most of Reform’s energy critique is dressed in the cosy clothing of “common sense” and “British jobs”. Mr Yusuf does not bother. He has called net zero a “catastrophe” and a “catastrophic act of self-harm”, described UK energy policy as the work of a “religious cult of climate alarmism”, and, in one quote that I keep turning over because it is so very telling, referred to North Sea oil and gas as a “gift from God”. I don’t know what Mr Yusuf’s theology is, but I will say that as someone who has spent quite a lot of time looking at the cathedrals of northern Italy, I have rarely heard a depleting hydrocarbon basin compared favourably to the works of providence in such confident terms. The DOGE unit’s most-publicised early “wins” have been the discovery that some Labour and Conservative councils employ people with titles like “net zero officer” or “sustainability lead” on perfectly normal local government salaries, which Mr Yusuf has presented as evidence of a vast hidden green graft. The £40 million figure from the KCC vote is part of this same accounting tradition. DeSmog has followed the unit’s actual, audited savings record, which is, let us be polite, modest.

I do not believe Mr Yusuf is paid by anybody to say these things. He has £31 million of his own, by most estimates, which is the kind of number that buys you a great deal of independence from anyone except yourself. What I think he illustrates is the cultural logic of Reform’s anti-renewables stance, which is partly about money and partly about a story that some very rich people have come to find emotionally compelling: that Britain has lost its way through a kind of feminised, university-educated, climate-obsessed timidity, and that the cure is to start drilling again, build nothing that produces electricity from the wind, and stop apologising. It is not really an energy policy. It is a vibe.

The fracking that was never coming

The most common Reform line on energy is some variant of: we are sitting on hundreds of years of cheap gas in our own shale rock, and timorous green liberals are stopping us from extracting it. It is comforting and it is wrong. The British Geological Survey did its big estimate of the Bowland-Hodder shale, which sits under most of northern England, in 2013, and put the gas-in-place at somewhere between 23 and 65 trillion cubic metres. That is the number you still occasionally hear repeated by Reform spokespeople. It is also a number the BGS itself, in a joint paper with Nottingham in 2019, revised down by an order of magnitude. The current best estimate is closer to 4 trillion cubic metres of recoverable gas. About a tenth of the original figure. That is not because the geologists became more cautious. It is because, having actually drilled some test wells, they discovered that British shale doesn’t behave like American shale.

The geological reasons are dull but conclusive. American shales, the Marcellus, the Permian, the Bakken, are vast, brittle, silica-rich layers in geologically simple basins. They crack cleanly when you fracture them. British shales, as the UK Energy Research Centre has set out, are clay-rich, plastic, and deform rather than crack. They sit in small, geologically complex basins. And they are buried beneath some of the most densely populated countryside in Europe. To get even modest commercial volumes you would need to drill thousands of wells across Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Sussex Weald. This is not a politics problem you can solve by being braver. It is a country problem you can’t solve at all.

I’m conscious, writing that sentence, that I am leaning on geologists I will never meet, and I should be honest that I don’t have the technical training to argue with them. What I will say is that the seismic record looks like the kind of evidence even a non-geologist can read. Cuadrilla’s first attempt at Preese Hall in 2011 was suspended after the operation triggered a magnitude-2.3 earthquake that damaged the well casing. Its second attempt at Preston New Road in 2018 produced 56 separate seismic events in three months, including one of magnitude 1.5 felt at the surface. The Conservative government, not, you will notice, a Greenpeace front, imposed a moratorium in November 2019. Liz Truss briefly lifted it, in the manner of someone briefly doing many things, in September 2022. Rishi Sunak put it back six weeks later. Reform now wants to lift it for a third time. The geology, you’ll be unsurprised to learn, has not in the meantime undergone any change.

And the economic argument is, if anything, worse than the geological one. The price of gas in Britain is set on the European market. Even in the wildly hypothetical scenario in which British shale could be brought to commercial volumes, it would be sold into the same continental pool at the same continental price. UKERC has been explicit about this. Even a successful UK shale industry would not meaningfully reduce British household bills, because the bill is not set by where the molecule comes from. The molecule, like Mr Harborne’s jet fuel, is fungible.

So when Reform tells you that we should lift the moratorium because British shale will save your gas bill, the kindest thing you can say is that this is wrong on both counts.

The North Sea, in numbers your local MP doesn’t want to share

The single most useful piece of journalism on this subject is Carbon Brief’s factcheck of the most common claims about the North Sea, which is dry, technical, and unanswerable. New licences do not lower household bills, because the price is global. They do not improve security of supply, because the UK has been a net importer for years. And they cannot reverse geological decline, because the basin is mature and the remaining fields are smaller, deeper and more expensive.

Mr Yusuf can call the basin a gift from God if he likes. The regulator calls it depleted.

What renewables are actually doing

The story Reform tells is the inverse of all of this. It is that renewables make electricity expensive, that gas makes it cheap, that the North Sea is bursting with oil if only we’d drill, and that the cost of living will fall the moment the wind farms and solar arrays are taxed into oblivion. None of it is true. Some of it isn’t even close to true. And yet it polls.

I think it polls for two reasons. The first is that wind turbines are visible and oil platforms aren’t. A populist movement built on the resentments of the visibly disrupted will always find more to say about a pylon than about a depleting basin two hundred miles offshore in deep water. The second is that the costs of the transition fall today, on identifiable people, in concrete places. Planning rows. Transmission lines. Retraining. The benefits are diffuse and slow. A party promising to make the costs go away by shooting the policy in the head is offering a real political product. That the product is internally incoherent and disproportionately benefits its largest donors is a problem for Reform’s second-term manifesto, not its first-term campaign.

A coda

The best version of the populist case on energy is not stupid. There are real grievances about the way the British transition has been done. Costs imposed on rural communities for benefits that accrue elsewhere. The strange feeling that climate policy is something agreed in Whitehall and London by people who will never bear it. The way “consultation” can mean almost nothing. I have sat in enough planning meetings on enough quietly furious evenings to know that none of this is a phantom. A clean-energy politics that ignores those grievances will keep losing seats it ought to win, and probably deserves to lose them.

But the political project that is actually exploiting those grievances right now is not, in any honest sense, a movement of the disrupted. It is a movement of an offshore class, in a country whose disclosure laws happen to permit them to fund it. It is led by a media personality who has personally enriched himself enormously on the back of the policy he opposes. Its policy on renewables is dictated, more or less openly, by people who sell jet fuel and own oil. Its plan for British energy is to drill a basin that the regulator says is mostly empty, and frack a geology that the BGS says is the wrong shape. And its most-quoted convert is a luxury-app entrepreneur who calls a depleting hydrocarbon basin a gift from God.

I think about the KCC vote sometimes. Fifty hands going up in a council chamber in Maidstone to declare anthropogenic climate change an “unproven view”, on the strength of arguments that would have embarrassed a sixth-form debating society. I sat there making notes I knew I’d never use. The politics of that vote did not originate in Maidstone. It was bought wholesale, somewhere between Mayfair and Bangkok, and shipped down to the county hall in a manifesto.

Mr Tice’s industrial-estate panels will keep turning the sun into income. The donors will keep wiring the money. The party will keep telling everyone else that the problem is the sun and the wind. And in the meantime British wholesale electricity will keep getting cheaper, slowly, unevenly, and almost in spite of itself, every year that the country installs another gigawatt of the things that, in the populist telling, are supposed to be ruining us.

It is, when you stop and look at it, one of the strangest political stories in the country. I am not sure how it ends. I am fairly sure it doesn’t end with cheap shale gas under Lancashire.

The views expressed here are my own, drawn from publicly reported facts in the linked sources and elsewhere in mainstream UK coverage. Where claims about individuals or institutions are made, they are reproduced as reported by the relevant publications. No allegation of unlawful conduct is made or intended against any named individual.