“We just don’t have British resident donors or British entities that would support us,”
Reform UK’s James Orr told the undercover reporter. “That’s the grim reality.” And a bit of an embarrassment. The ‘party of the people’ gets negligible money from the people. The below shows grassroots donations – of less than £10k – for the first half of the year. Without the millionaire donors, Orr is right: Reform UK is simply not a cause the people want to support financially.
James Orr had been sent out to try to widen Reform’s financial supporter base, by fair means or foul and ended up in all kinds of contortions trying to disguise the sponsorship of an opinion poll. The irony was that Reform, all the time, had crypto sugar daddies who are willing to send huge sums. It would be better if it could raise money from people with no criminal convictions, but the Orr debacle showed just how difficult that would be.
So: Plan B. Go back to the crypto kings, even the one with criminal convictions. Ben Delo was pardoned by Donald Trump and said he moved back to the UK to donate to Farage, has pledged an historic £36 million. Not to be outdone the Thai-based Christopher Harborne, who gave Farage the now-no-longer-secret £5m, has matched it with another £36m taking his total support to £61m excluding the £5m to Farage personally. The sums, together, mean Reform will now be supercharged with more money than any party has in the history of British democracy. Here’s how it would look in the long view:-
Earlier this year I wrote a long essay for The Times on this back in March saying a tsunami of crypto money was heading for the UK, looking for a home. It has already hit America. Just look at the corporate donations so far in the current electoral cycle.
The above sums are trivial compared to the financial value of what crypto wants: respectability. To be seen as part of the financial firmament. Crypto’s use in money laundering and sanctions-busting has seen it win sharp regulatory attention. Trump used to hate it. But then he got in on the act, his family started getting in on crypto businesses (as Farage has done) and the regulatory dividends started to come.
- Prosecutions dropped: The SEC dropped its cases against Coinbase and Ripple, plus Kraken, Uniswap, Robinhood (who were at the dinner for Reform UK’s conference in Birmingham last week) and OpenSea. The SEC has now removed crypto from its 2026 regulatory agenda entirely.
- Pardons. For Ben Delo and his colleagues. For Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht, Binance’s Changpeng Zhao etc.
- Legislation. Trump’s ‘Genius’ Act on stablecoins passed last year, giving the crypto kings the federal legitimacy they have always craved.
But London is the big prize. It’s the world’s biggest currency trading centre and Reform UK has pledged to fling open London’s gates to the crypto kings. Reform UK has literally published a would-be Crypto Finance Bill spelling out exactly what they would do for their paymasters
- Nigel Farage has said in his first 24h as Prime Minister he would order HM Treasury to stop to abandon work on a digital pound. There’s still talk of a digital currency that’s state-issued, trustworthy and democratically overseen: the opposite of crypto, which is why the industry wants it killed.
- Reform would cut tax on crypto profits to 10pc. Tax for other securities would stay the same (18pc to 24pc)
- Reform would “establish a Bitcoin Reserve Fund as part of the UK’s official reserves” and may “reallocate foreign currency reserves” to start it.
- HMRC would be asked by Reform to “establish and maintain systems” to accept crypto and put what it collects into the Bitcoin reserve rather than converting to sterling.
Reform has nothing like this kind of policy detail for any other subject. It doesn’t even have a spokesman on defence.
In politics, it always pays to follow the money – but Ben Delo’s company, BitMEX, closes down later this month. I’m prepared to believe this is not a direct interest for him. This youthful billionaire has been circling the London scene for years, splashing the cash, trying to find a route back after his criminal conviction. Reform UK offers people new identities. It allows the rich to pose as revolutionaries; it lets members of Mayfair clubland reinvent themselves as anti-establishment insurgents.
Harborne is the kind of patriot that would do anything for Britain except live in it (or pay taxes here). “What do I expect in return for my donations” he asks from Thailand. “No peerage, no policy change, just a party that is ready for government.” But as he knows, Reform UK’s policy change for crypto is already published. Ready to be enacted on day one.
How the money may help – and backfire
We now have a very financially-secure Reform Inc. James Orr won’t need to be sent out to do any cloak-and-dagger discussions about dodgy opinion polls for quite some time. Reform UK will be able to increase salaries to retain staffers who are worried at recent opinion polls and now doubt if they’ll get to power.
The £72m may have an effect on the faking of the debate and what you might call Reform paras. Black ops, like the dodgy poll James Orr was filmed arranging. How much crypto cash now will be making its way to, say, groups coming up with research that supports Reform talking points? The funding of groups who post flags on lampposts? Social-media influencers telling us that Afghans are 77 times more likely to rape? Reform wins not (just) by saying “Vote Nigel” but by promoting a certain kind of debate, focused on migration and victimhood. The crypto cash may pop up in ways that the Electoral Commission has not thought about yet.
Against this we have the biggest problem: the rise of anti-Reform tactical voting. About 40pc think Reform is racist. I’m with the other 40pc who don’t, but if you do think a party is racist – and would also be authoritarian, with ICE-style deportations and unelected Cabinet – then your main concern at the next election is stopping them at all costs. So in a seat where Reform looks competitive, Labour supporters would vote Tory (and vice versa) to stop Reform.
YouGov quantified it back in February, asking how voters would vote in their seat if Reform stood a chance of winning.
What’s more worrying than seeing an authoritarian party that you regard as racist close to power? Seeing that party secure £72m in mega-donations. So Reform’s windfall is likely to intensify concern and anti-Reform tactical voting.
I’m sceptical about the ability of money to decide election outcomes. Remain spent twice as much as Leave in the Brexit campaign (£29m to £13m) thanks to government support – but that support ended up being counterproductive. Hillary Clinton outspent Trump $580m to $340m in 2016. The Tories outspent Labour by £19m to £11m in 2017 and still lost their majority.
The optics of Farage taking this crypto money – and the attack lines that will now follow – may come to harm Reform politically more than the cash helps. So yes, these two donations are stunning. Historic. To some, obscene. It will be like Brewster’s Millions in certain parts of Westminster. But my suspicion is that Nigel Farage is about to find out what money can’t buy.