Who Funds Reform? The Missing Millions

0:00Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therestispolitics.com. That's therestispolitics.com.

0:19Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alastair Campbell. And we have very exciting news about a four-part mini-series that we are doing on the funding of Reform UK. And we're doing it with The Observer, and it's been an amazing piece of work. The series is put together by Kat Nealon, who's The Observer's Whitehall editor. In episode one, we begin the story of who funds Reform UK. So it's something that Alistair and I have been fascinated by for a very long time. And of course, we get glimpses of it. Many people will have heard that Nigel Farage received a£5 million contribution towards his, inverted commas, security from Chris Harbourn, who is a crypto billionaire based in Thailand.

1:05But as this investigation shows, the story of reforms funding is much, much more complicated. And they've got some unique interviews here. They've interviewed Ben Habib, who was very close to Nigel Farage and is now beginning to talk much more openly about where some of this funding is coming from. We're talking about Tory donors crossing the aisles. We're talking about the kinds of motivations that drive them in. And above all, we're talking about how opaque it is and how mysterious it is and what on earth you have to do to save your democracy from a few very wealthy people putting in sums of money, which are colossal.

1:39I mean, so much larger than anything that you and I would have seen in politics. One of the reasons why we were interested in doing this is because we've seen what has happened in other countries where money is just allowed to flood in to the parties, to individuals. We're seeing it now with Trump in America. We saw it recently with Orban, who when he lost, his wealth was exposed. We've seen it with Putin, who has gone from being the guy who took over, saying he was going to lead Russia in a more modern Western direction, who's becoming allegedly one of the richest people on the planet. So I think this is going to be an important series.

2:18I think it's timely because reform are on the march and a lot of people who support them, I suspect, do see them as on their side, men of the people, women of the people, who in fact are becoming hugely wealthy through politics. It's an audio-only series, so something to listen to rather than to watch. We'll also be putting out links and more details in the Trip newsletter, which you can please sign up to by going in the episode to the description box and clicking on the link. So here is episode one of Who Funds Reform the Missing Millions. This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy. Fuse has introduced the tracker tariff designed to give customers what matters most from their energy supplier, savings clarity, and a bit more control.

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4:00Now, for me, Brexit being completed, albeit not perfectly, but being completed, marks the end of nearly 30 years of standing in elections and leading political parties. March 2021, a year into the Covid pandemic, and Nigel Farage makes a big decision. It's now time for somebody else to take the lead. The man who spent nearly 30 years campaigning for and helping to achieve Brexit has decided that he has had enough. Nigel Farage hands over the reins of his political party to Richard Tice, an ally and fellow Brexiteer. Reform UK is ambitious. Our country can indeed have a great future. But to achieve this goal, we are absolutely clear that the country needs real reform.

4:53Richard Tice is going to inject new energy and lead the newly named Reform Party, while Farage rides off into the sunset. This isn't the first time Farage has stepped away from frontline politics, but he'll be back, perhaps sooner than anyone anticipates. Because just as Richard Tice steps forward as the new leader of reform, the Conservative establishment begins to crumble. Let me say immediately that I've paid the fine and I once again offer a full apology. I am here to say to you, hand on heart, that I did not lie to the House when those statements were made. Clearly now the will of the parliamentary Conservative Party that there should be a new leader of that party and therefore a new Prime Minister.

5:47I have therefore spoken to His Majesty the King to notify him that I am resigning as leader of the Conservative Party. As the Conservatives disintegrate in a series of unforced errors, reform becomes a magnet for figures across the right. I'm delighted to announce that I have found that champion of the Red Wall for Reform UK. He's also, coincidentally, going to be Reform UK's first Member of Parliament in the House of Commons. He is, of course, a person of great integrity, no nonsense, and is the Member of Parliament in the County of Nottinghamshire for Ashfield. Please welcome Mr Lee Anderson.

6:36The party starts to attract not just Conservative MPs, but former donors too. And then, on the 22nd of May, 2024... Now is the moment for Britain to choose its future. To decide whether we want to build on the progress we have made, or risk going back to square one with no plan and no certainty. Standing behind a lectern in Downing Street, a rain-soaked Rishi Sunak announces a snap general election. The combination of an unpopular Conservative Party and a disaffected British public presents Nigel Farage with an opportunity too good to miss. I'm coming back as leader of Reform UK, but not just for this election campaign.

7:24I'm coming back for the next five years. And a 30-year dream finally comes true for the man who said he was done with standing in elections. I therefore do hereby declare that Nigel Paul Farage is duly elected as the Member of Parliament for the Clacton constituency. Reform wins five seats. Labour wins a big majority. And the Conservatives suffer their worst electoral defeat in parliamentary history. But those five seats are just the start. Over the course of the next year, there's a steady stream of Conservative defections. and, as the shine wears off the Labour government, reform inches ahead in the polls.

8:10For the first time in his career, people are starting to talk about Nigel Farage as a possible future Prime Minister. Reform's rise isn't just a tale of how Nigel Farage has disrupted a century of norms. It's also the story of how reform has done this and who helped them get there. And it's a story about a system which allows people to buy their way into British politics. I've been a political journalist for 12 years. I've covered Nigel Farage in all his guises, from UKIP to the Brexit Party and now to Reform UK. Farage is a very particular politician and one who looks set to shake up the usual run of things.

8:54In the past year, I've been looking at his and Reform's relationship to money and where they get it from. I want to know what it tells us about the man who could become the next Prime Minister, the type of government he might run, and the type of people he'll bring with him along the way. I'm Kat Nealon. From The Rest is Politics and The Observer's slow newscast, this is Who Funds Reform? Episode 1, The Missing Millions.

9:28Reform doesn't operate like other political parties It has a start-up mentality and shuns the establishment That means the party's attitude to money is different too So when journalists try to make sense of how they're funded Sometimes we're left with more questions than answers Looking back at their first year of operating there's one big question which stands out. But to understand why reform works the way it does, you have to go back to 2014. The word Brexit is still barely in use. But already, the battle to secure a referendum on the issue is hotting up. Nigel Farage is leader of UKIP. And a brash, multi-millionaire insurance magnate from Bristol makes a big entrance to the UK political scene.

10:20This businessman Aaron Banks, whom nobody'd heard of, was giving£100 ,000 to UKIP. This is Michael Crick, the political journalist and author of One Party After Another, which chronicles Nigel Farage's life and early political career. Until this point, Aaron Banks has been a Conservative supporter and donor. His defection to UKIP is memorable. When William Hague, then Conservative leader of the House, is asked about Aaron Banks, he dismisses him as a nobody, which doesn't go down well. Journalists were summoned from the Conservative conference, which was still going on, I think, in Birmingham, to this manor house just outside Bristol, at one of Aaron Banks' homes.

11:05I was among them, and we turned up, and we assumed they were going to announce a new defector. But no, there we were, we were greeted by Aaron Banks. And Aaron Banks announces that he is now donating£1 million to UKIP. Perhaps the most expensive thing that William Hay ever said. Aaron Banks quickly becomes not just a donor to UKIP, but a close confidant of Nigel Farage. Banks was the only political person you could say who ended up being a close friend of Nigel Farage He's a very engaging character, you know, he's always got a grin on his face He's always got something to say, he's a sort of baraboy personality His financial support for Brexit goes beyond the party too He becomes an active campaigner in the Brexit referendum running and funding the unofficial Leave campaign, leave.eu.

12:06Working together with Nigel Farage, the campaign becomes a haze of stunts, billboards and slogans. Although they're not part of the formal Brexit grouping, they can fairly claim credit for having helped to secure the result. The British people have spoken and the answer is we're out. But in around 2018, Aaron Banks starts to become a reputational hazard for Nigel Farage. The problem was that there were lots of allegations about where did Aaron Banks get his money from and how rich was he really? Well, it was pointed out that Aaron Banks had had several meetings with Russian diplomats in London.

12:46He said it was a couple of boozy lunches. The Electoral Commission and the National Crime Agency launched separate investigations into Aaron Banks' finances. Banks vehemently denied that he was funded by Russian money. Eventually, in 2019, both investigations conclude there is no evidence of any foreign interference in the loans that Aaron Banks gave to Leave.eu. But that is sometime into the future. By late 2018, Nigel Farage is approaching a crossroads. British politics is in a volatile place. Theresa May is running a minority government and struggling to clarify what the referendum result really means.

13:27Prime Minister. Yes, can I say to my honourable friend, there has been much sort of jocularity around the term Brexit means Brexit, but it does mean Brexit. People want to ensure. After two and a half years of negotiating, the Cabinet agrees a deal which immediately angers both Remainers and hardline Brexiteers. There are resignations from May's Cabinet and people plotting to oust her from Number 10. Nigel Farage is watching Brexit unravel and his main backer, Aaron Banks, is causing unwanted attention. After that, I think that Farage deliberately distanced himself from Banks for quite a while.

14:06So if he wants to keep campaigning for Brexit, he's going to need a new party and some new financial backers. It's late December 2018 and Catherine Blakelock is at home. She's recently left UKIP, the party that had been her political home for years, concerned about Tommy Robinson's involvement. Anti-immigration is still my big thing. I think it would destroy the country, and I think it is destroying the country. She sits down to register a number of entities, small companies or organisations that could germinate into a political party. But it's not a party she thinks she can lead. I know my position in the world, if you like.

14:51I'm a sort of, you know, tier three person and unknown, not very well known. She's acting, if not on instruction, then at least in agreement with veterans of the Leave campaign. So I bought the Brexit Party as a name and Nigel liked that. So very quietly, the Brexit Party is born. Well, it was always the idea that Nigel would be leader. That was agreed. Like many people we spoke to for this story, having given time and energy supporting Nigel Farage's political goals, she's since fallen out with him and with the party as a whole. Remember, the Brexit party simply rebrands when it becomes reform.

15:33So the rise of the former and how it got its money is inextricably linked to the latter. By 2019, Nigel Farage has been out of frontline politics for nearly three years, having quit as leader of UKIP after the 2016 referendum. But, ever the political opportunist, he suddenly announces he's back. We're going to use these elections to change things. I said many years ago that I wanted to cause an earthquake in British politics. Well now, what I'm fighting for, and with your support, what we will attempt to achieve is a democratic revolution in British politics. At the public launch of the Brexit party in April, Nigel Farage unveils a raft of candidates to stand in the following month's European elections.

16:20These were the elections the party said shouldn't be happening. But because of the status in the House of Commons, Nigel Farage says he's left with no choice but to return. I did say that if I ever had to come back into the political fray, next time it'll be no more Mr Nice Guy. And I mean it. I mean it. This new Brexit party is a departure from Nigel Farage's old machine. Gone is UKIP's signature purple and gold, replaced with an icy cool blue. But this party is not just cosmetically different. It's set up as a business. A business with a mystery at the heart of it. That is just an absolutely huge figure.

17:04And for a new party, albeit with a history, it is a huge figure. This is Dr Sam Power, one of the UK's leading experts in political finance. By the end of its first year, the Brexit party has raised millions. In fact, a lot more than you would expect for a party of its size or age. But if you wanted to know who has given them all that money, you'd struggle to find out. There's very little public information. There is just so much that we don't know. There are numbers here which just operate like a black hole. The donation income, the other expenditure. This mystery is a useful place to start because it's also the starting point for reform and some of the key people involved then are playing important roles now.

17:56Word is getting out that Nigel Farage has a new project. I was mouthing off in our boardroom about my frustrations in February, I think, 2019. This is Ben Habib. He's a businessman who, until this point, has been a supporter of and donor to the Conservative Party. And there was our PR guy was there who knew Farage and he said, do you want to meet Farage? He's setting up this new party called the Brexit Party. And in those days, I thought Farage was a sort of racist, xenophobic, swivelized lunatic. because that was the portrayal of him, you know, through mainstream media. But I went to meet him and found him to be a perfectly reasonable, affable, charming guy.

18:39So he signs up. I offered to donate and I offered to help in any way I can. If you're setting up a party, Ben Habib is exactly the kind of person you might want to have around. He's a wealthy businessman with experience of working in politics already. But the Brexit party isn't after his money, which is weird because establishing a brand new party isn't cheap. So I became an MEP. I think I donated a small amount of money to the Brexit party, a few thousand quid, but, you know, nothing substantial. Did you get the impression that they were like, they weren't short of money at that point? They weren't.

19:13That's my producer, Poppy Bullard, speaking to Ben Habib. So why wouldn't a small party be on the hunt for as many donors as it could find? This is where the party's money gets interesting.

19:32How many party things like this do you think you've looked at? Far too many than I would care to admit on record. That's between me and my God, how many of these that I have looked at. So you're pretty much like a connoisseur of a party financial statement. It's certainly not something that I would find myself boasting about in the pub. But if you will, I am a connoisseur of party accounts. Yeah. That's Poppy Bullard again. She's speaking to Sam Power at the Observer offices. They're looking at the Brexit Party's financial statement from the end of 2019, essentially its first year of operating.

20:09And it's a peculiar document. When I was looking through this, and I know that when you look through it too, something really jumped out to both of us. And that is the amount of donations that the Brexit party got in the first year of its running and i'm just going to get the page up here so we can have a look at this and when i saw that it struck me as being just in the most enormous number not a number that i'd necessarily seen reported out and about and a number that doesn't seem to match up particularly with necessarily all the things that we know publicly about the party so what did you think when you saw this you know this statement that is just an absolutely huge figure The number they're looking at is a single number in the donations column.

20:51It's£17.2 million. There isn't really much more detail than that. No information about who the money came from or what it was spent on. In terms of donations, we know that around£11 million was declared to the Electoral Commission. And according to Nigel Farage,£5 million came from small donations. But that doesn't account for it all. And the number in the expenditure column is even bigger, nearly 19 million pounds. Even accounting for the fact there were both European elections and a general election that year, Sam Power says the numbers just don't stack up. What that expenditure is, is just, is bizarre more than anything else in that there is no good reason why the Brexit Party need to raise 17 million pounds.

21:43there is no really good reason that I can see that they would need to spend nearly£19 million. We can see from the document that they spent£1.2 million on staffing costs and£9.3 million on campaigning. But there's another mystery figure in the spending column too. There is just so much that we don't know. There are numbers here which just operate like a black hole. The other expenditure. Yeah, other expenditure up at like£7 million. £7 million, which is what we might expect that in a conservative return of a conservative account when they are accounting for£30,£40,£50 million, for example. That's£7 million spent on, well, we have no idea.

22:30And short of someone telling us, no way of finding out. For a new party, albeit with a history, it is a huge figure. So a generous reading of it is that it is a startup cost. An ungenerous reading is that it is just an awful lot of money, which we don't really know the provenance of. We can look through the Electoral Commission database to see. But we don't really know why they have and why they need that much money. And then if you move on to the accounts immediately following this, they go back to looking like a niche party again. They go back to looking like a party that raises one or two million pounds, if that.

23:12I think in one year even, it's not even in the millions. And the most important thing to note about the Brexit party's accounting in 2019 is that it's completely legal. The party isn't required, outside of an election period, to log what it spent all that cash on, nor is it obliged to say where it came from. No one we spoke to during the reporting of this story wanted to, or could, tell us what the money was spent on. Nor did reform respond to our request for clarification. But there are a few things we know about that enormous sum. We know that around£10 million of it came from the man who will go on to define the prospects and trajectory of reform.

23:56Christopher Harbourn. He was propelled into the headlines last year when he made the biggest single political donation in British history to reform,£9 million. He's since topped that up with a further£3 million. But the truth is, he's been part of the project from the early Brexit party days. I met Christopher Harbourn in their office during those initial meetings. And he had been a Conservative donor himself. This is Ben Habib again. You know, we had a kind of shared history with the Conservative Party and we both discussed how we loathed the way the Conservative Party had ceased to be Conservative.

24:34But I had no idea how rich Christopher Bourne was when I first met him. I knew he was richer than me, but I didn't realise how considerably, how considerably, you know, how much more considerably rich he was than I am. Ben Habib is making an important point. To us mere mortals, the thought of giving away tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds seems enormous. For the donor class, which includes people like Ben Habib, these figures are small change. But even amongst the donor class, there are scales of wealth. And Christopher Harbourn, he's in a league of his own. Ben Habib claims that Harbourn was responsible for donating far more during 2019 than has been made public.

25:18I think the reported figure is£10 million donated to the Brexit party by him during that six, nine-month period that the Brexit party sort of functioned. But I think the figure's bigger than that. I think it's more like 14. And I know Tice and Farage were flying up and down the country in helicopters and things, you know, for the campaign during the general election, even though we stood down against the Conservatives, even though Farage has stood us down against the Conservatives. What's interesting about Harbourn is, at this point, he doesn't seem to have just been donating money. The enigmatic billionaire was plugged into the party machine.

25:54One source told The Observer that when they visited the Brexit party offices during the run-up to the European elections in 2019, it seemed like Christopher Harbourn was there full-time. He had a desk, the source said, where he was working on the algorithms. Christopher Harbourn is a difficult person to get close to. He doesn't do interviews or make statements. So to get an idea of what he wants, and whether he's loyal to a cause or a particular party, you have to read between the lines, or at least down the columns of the Electoral Commission declarations. After this enthusiastic involvement with the Brexit party, He doesn't appear in the Reform Party accounts again until 2025.

26:39And what was he doing in the interim period? But one thing Harbourn used to say to me in 2019 is that Boris is biddable. Boris Johnson is biddable. Ben Habib was suspicious of Harbourn's generosity at the time. After the 2019 general election, Christopher Harbourn stopped donating to the Brexit Party and gave more than£1.5 million to the Conservatives. In the months after Boris Johnson stepped down as Prime Minister, Christopher Harbourn donated£1 million to him, the man who by then had become a backbench MP. According to The Guardian, the pair dined together twice in Singapore that same month.

27:21Christopher Harbourn later joined Boris Johnson on a trip to Ukraine. Christopher Harbourn's lawyers told the paper he had no expectation of personal gain when he donated the money. But his proximity to power, even if it is party agnostic, is worth considering as we look to the future. Harbourn wants to see Brexit done? Support the Brexit party. Want to shape the Brexit deal? Support the Conservatives as they thrash it out. Which begs the question. In the year 2026, a decade on from Brexit, what is the vision of Britain that Harbourn thinks reform can deliver? And what are his other passion projects?