Why crypto-billionaires love Reform

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, why are the super-rich giving away millions to reform?

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0:58On Friday, Ben Dello, a 42-year-old businessman and convicted criminal, donated£36 million to reform. That works out to£1 million for every month between now and the latest possible date until the next general election. It brings the total Delo has donated to the party this year alone to£44 million. Not to be outdone, less than 24 hours later, Christopher Harbourn, remember him, the 63-year-old billionaire based in Thailand, pitched in with another£36 million donation. I mean, this is essentially unprecedented in British political history as far as I know. So even though they've had big donations in the past, that's£72 million over a weekend.

1:46This is potentially a game-changing amount. It's more in total than the big four or five parties spent altogether in the 2024 general election. So this is huge amounts of money. Both donors are Oxbridge-educated businessmen who made their money in cryptocurrency and have largely been living abroad. Both say they're doing it to level the playing field in UK politics. These two splendid gentlemen who are just trying to help save Britain and fix Britain and make us more prosperous again through Reform UK, they're not making any demands. And there's no ask and there'll be nothing given in return. So we're the honourable ones here.

2:25So what could that money buy? And what will reform do with it?

2:33From The Guardian, I'm Noshie Nick Bahl. Today in Focus, could the super rich sway a general election?

2:46Peter Walker, you're a senior political correspondent at The Guardian. Now, Today in Focus listeners will be familiar by now with Christopher Harbourn's name. He is the billionaire primarily based in Thailand, made a lot of money in crypto and gave an undeclared£5 million to Farage back in 2024. he generated no end of trouble for Farage and the party since the Guardian revealed the existence of that gift earlier this year. He's now donated an additional£36 million to the party over the weekend. He justified his position in the Sunday Telegraph. What did he have to say? He essentially had to say that he thinks that the UK needs significant change, including to generate growth.

3:30and he thinks that Reform UK are the only, well, certainly the best, but probably the only way to do that. And he said he wanted to donate such a significant sum because it would actually make a difference to them that he likened Reform UK to a kind of startup and making the point that the big parties have their established funding streams, whereas reform don't. He also said, as only someone extremely rich can say, that he's basically got enough money and he wants to improve the lot of not only Reform UK but humanity as a whole as he wrote. But he also says he wants reform to be ready for government because there is a concern even amongst some of Reform's backers that they're not completely ready to essentially go from a start-up with a handful of MPs to running the entire country.

4:14So he thinks that this money would help with that. So Harbourn matched a£36 million donation, which had been made 24 hours earlier from Ben Dello. Peter, who is he and what did he have to say about it? Ben Dello is another crypto billionaire. He was Hong Kong based for quite some time. He's now, we're told, back in the UK. I've always been a problem solver. And if someone tells me, no, you can't do that, or it's impossible, I see that as a red rag to a bull, as a challenge to try and solve it. And I may have been expelled from a few schools as a result. In this case, it was how do you hedge cryptocurrency risk?

4:54How do you offer? The one kind of biographical detail that's worth pointing out was that he was convicted in the US over banking secrecy laws and got a 30-month probationary sentence, which he largely served, but then President Trump pardoned him. President Trump is also a big crypto fan. That's quite the detail. Well, it is quite the detail. And he also, he gave quite similar arguments. He was very much saying that he thinks that Reform UK have got to be able to both get themselves ready for government, but also compete in the same way that the Conservatives and Labour do. And it's worth pointing out, the Conservatives for decades have had this stream of rich donors of their own who've donated, you know, millions here and there, if not quite as much, whereas Labour have got a lot of trade union funding.

5:37So his argument is he wants to make it as fair a fight as he possibly can. and he's got the resources to give such a big sum. Strikingly similar characters. It does make you wonder, Peter, what is it that crypto billionaires, or why is it that crypto billionaires would be so keen to give money to reform? I mean, I know Harbourn said, I want nothing for my money, for instance, but why? I mean, I think there's two things going on. One you could cast as murky, one perhaps less so. You know, crypto billionaires, to an extent, enjoy a kind of more economic wild west in which regulations are low, it's easy to accumulate money in which taxes on the wealth aren't that great.

6:16And as such, they're going to be inevitably leading towards a more right-wing populist party. And Nigel Farage is going to be a very appealing person for that. In terms of their specific vested interests, reform, they don't actually have a definite policy on this currently. But in the past, they've said they would hugely liberalise the way that cryptocurrency is regulated in the UK. they would lower the taxes paid on gains for it. And this kind of stuff would make people like Ben Dello and Christopher Harbourn most likely even richer than they are now. And Nigel Farage has been on the record for quite a long time as saying he supports cryptocurrencies and thinks more should be done about it.

6:57The reason that I was the first prominent person in British politics to adopt crypto, to talk about crypto, to try and legitimise crypto, which was in 2020, is I could see this is the way it was going.

7:20As we've sort of discussed, neither of them seem to have been living permanently in the UK in recent years. And so does that affect if these donations are even allowed? Can you be a Brit living overseas and make vast donations to parties back in the UK? This is where it gets slightly complicated. You can, under electoral rules, you have to be just residents for electoral purposes, not necessarily for tax purposes. And the distinction between that is often how much time you spend in the country and things like that. It has got slightly more convoluted in that there is a new elections bill going through Parliament at the moment, which is going to introduce a cap of£100 ,000 on donors who are registered as being able to give money.

8:05Because basically, if you're based overseas entirely, you cannot give any money at all. And Sir Philip Rycroft, the former senior civil servant who led the review into whether overseas funding of UK politics is a problem, he thinks that if you're living overseas, and you're not paying tax in the UK, then perhaps you don't have the right to influence politics in a sum beyond, you know, £100 ,000. Well I think the most important thing and the reason why we've got a bill going through Parliament at the moment is that we need to have secure elections that are for the people and that you can't buy your way into our democracy and that's why the Rycroft review was set up and we've already taken action.

8:43This is where it gets slightly tricky and the Reform UK are insisting that in accepting the money they've taken into account not only the current laws but also this new law going through the Commons, which is going to be retrospective, and said that anybody who donates money would have to have been resident in the UK for electoral purposes, not just when the bill is passed, but for at least 12 months from March 2026. And this was, Minister Say, to stop overseas donors looking at this and thinking, blimey, I need to donate now. And it's not entirely clear how long these two men have been resident for electoral purposes in the UK.

9:19Both these donations are 100 % compliant with the law today. Of that there is no question whatsoever. Today, were they both residents in the UK by the 25th of March this year? I'm not going to go into their particular details. All I'm going to say is with the law of the land as it stands, they are both compliant. Now, there is talk, and Angela Lorena was talking about this yesterday. There is talk of them retrospectively declaring donations illegally. Well, that simply, that simply cannot be. The conversation, as you said, around capping the amount that can be donated by any one figure to a political party has been running on for decades.

10:05And regulating political donations was one of the very first things that Burnham was expected to tackle. He didn't. Why? Well, another feature in this elections bill, officially called the Representation of the People Bill, was this idea which was proposed in an amendment put forward by Labour MP to cap all donations at£100 ,000. And to an extent that would simplify and arguably take some of the sleaze out of politics because£100 ,000 to almost everyone is a lot of money. But for a political party, it's not a game-changing amount of money. this wasn't included in the bill and ministers said there were a couple of reasons one of which they want to get the bill through at a reasonable time period i mean there's a vested interest for labour in that this bill will also allow 16 and 17 year olds to vote in westminster elections and labour would like them to be able to do that before the next election comes but there's also the thing that the trade unions who've traditionally financed labour often give more than that.

11:08And there was a worry that if this cap was put in place, even though it's alleged, it's kind of a collective donation rather than an individual one, it could fall foul of this and make Labour's financial position more tricky. But obviously, since the weekend of £72 million, a lot of Labour MPs and some trade unions are starting to think of this and think, you know, maybe we do need to act. And this is a much, much wider question that donations have been murky for a long, long time. I mean, it's been an open secret for years that if you donate enough money to the Conservative Party, a peerage is not inevitably in the post, but your chances of getting one are overall pretty good.

11:44It has to be a lot of money. Peter, for context, how are parties in the UK traditionally funded and how much money do they normally have in their coffers? They are funded mainly by donations, which is a combination of the membership dues from the people who joined them, which actually for a smaller party can be a lot of money. The Greens, for example, have trebled their membership in the last year, and they've suddenly got a lot more money, even though no big donors are going to them. But the bigger parties are traditionally reliant on bigger donors. And it completely varies. I mean, Labour have had the Sainsbury's family donate many millions of pounds to them.

12:22And in terms of the sums, it completely varies. I mean, a good metric is in the 2024 election, the total spend by the big four or five national parties was about 60, 65 million pounds. And the interesting thing is that when reforms say they want to level the playing field, only about 10 % of that money went to Nigel Farage's party. So certainly in the past, they were lagging slightly, but they're obviously lagging now. Wouldn't it tell you something about how terrified this socialist government is of Reform UK if they completely change the way that we understand things are done in the United Kingdom and that they retrospectively introduce legislation in order to significantly disadvantage another political party that's merely trying to get on a Labour playing field with the sort of vast sums that Labour receive from their own union paymasters.

13:15They get about£10 million a year.

13:22Peter how do you expect reform will use this money? No one really knows exactly what they're going to do with it but if you're an election planner for them this is a good problem to have you suddenly have£72 million falling into your lap you know if you do the calculations it would be enough say to have a new campaigner on a decent salary in every one of the 650 seats around the country but they're not going to do that because they're going to be targeting, I don't know, maybe 100 or 200 seats. And they can focus resources on that. And quite a lot of it is going to be this kind of boring but incredibly important ground game stuff of understanding the constituency, having people on the ground who are paid, who make sure the leaflets go out, make sure the right voters are targeted, make sure the right doors are knocked on.

14:06But at the same time, they can also target their advertising, whether it's paid for mail advertising or online advertising, to the voters that they think are most likely to switch over. And they're already quite slick at that. I mean, if you think of their social media operation and the way that they make videos targeted to specific audiences on Facebook and what have you, I mean, they're already pretty good at it. They are quite good at it, but this allows them to kind of drill down and do this on a not quite individual level, but a kind of district by district level in every one of the constituencies that they're going to target.

14:39And a lot of parties for this kind of stuff, particularly knocking on doors, who are reliant on the goodwill of the volunteers. To have the money to employ people who can say where the volunteers need to go and to make sure before a door is knocked on, these people have already had their Facebook feed full of almost personalised ads is an incredibly powerful thing. There was this extraordinary detail in our colleague Jessica Elgott's piece in which she said that Reform UK could end up recruiting some of the best legal and constitutional experts to help it find ways of implementing some of its most radical and controversial policies, including mass deportations and evicting non-UK citizens from social housing.

15:17I mean, that stuff is terrifying. So is there a world in which they could buy this? I mean, you can't buy an election, but the difference is if you are elected into power, then your plans have to make sense. You can buy good policy. Well, you can. I mean, with this, it's more constitutional proofing the policy, as it were, to make sure it's not held up by delays in the courts or civil servants saying, well, actually, no, there's all sorts of reasons why we can't do that. And that kind of stuff is incredibly complicated. And the big part is they've got the institutional knowledge of MPs and ministers who've served in government and lots of other people who know what they're doing.

15:55Reform lack that. So that would be an incredibly useful thing. But I think the key thing to point out is to do any of that, You have to win the general election in the first place. And they have to come up with hundreds and hundreds of candidates which will stand up to scrutiny. And their records on that thus far is not very good. At every general election they've competed in and at all the council elections, there's always a certain proportion of their candidates. And even people who get elected into office who turn out to have slightly off-piste views generally connected to race and gender and things like that.

16:29And it's in the dozens and dozens that people are being booted out of their jobs. Well, it is. It is. And this looks really bad. This always looks bad. And Nigel Farage's big boast is that we are a professional party ready for government. If you're standing in elections saying that and a lot of your candidates or even a reasonable portion look like they have views that voters won't like, then that is not good. But vetting is incredibly expensive. You have to go through the social media histories and other histories of people in great detail. You can't just rely on them to say that they're a good person.

17:04Coming up, what is all this doing for Nigel Farage's polling?

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17:55Peter, how much do you think this money could influence the next election if we assume that it's about three years away? This is an unprecedented amount and we don't quite know how much money can influence things. I mean, there are cases in the past of significant sums of money not helping people. In the 1997 general election, way back there, there was a slightly strange party called the Referendum Party, a precursor to UKIP, set up by the financier James Goldsmith. And it was his party, but he donated tens and tens of millions of pounds to it and ended up getting only a couple percent of the vote.

18:31He stood candidates everywhere. and it didn't help because people weren't really interested in the offering. Because reform have already led in about 150 polls, you know, they've now slipped a little bit, but they're still always in a top two or three. They already have what voters see as a credible offering. So this just helps to kind of target it and get it in people's minds. So it could potentially make more of a difference this time. And what about, I mean, stay with me here. And what about if Burnham decided to call a snap election? I mean, that constrains the amount of money that then can be spent during the campaigning period, right?

19:05It does, because the spending limits for a general election are retrospective over 12 months. And I mean, the kind of nightmare scenario for Reform UK is that they've already spent huge sums kind of on targeted advertising, say ahead of one set of elections. And then, you know, like local ones. And Andy Burnham calls a slap election and they suddenly have almost nothing left to spend. You know, some people are saying that makes it more likely Burnham will call an election. I don't think that's the case. So, Peter, how can other parties fight back? Are they just going to have to ask their donors to step up?

19:39They are asking people to step up. There was a slightly plaintive email from a Labour Party to members later on the weekend, which said, you know, please fight back. And it says, you know, click here to donate£3 or£5. And, you know, it would obviously take a lot of those clicks to go to£72 million. But I think more than that, they're going to try and turn the money back on reform. UK and point to it an example of a party being bought by these rich people whose money and lifestyles are completely unfathomable and disconnected to almost any voter in the UK. And they will basically be saying, look, these are the people who won't reform UK to be in government.

20:18Are you one of them? And that could in some ways be quite a powerful message. I mean, it's one thing to say that to Labour voters, but what about reform supporters? How will this be playing out with them? What do we know about that? I think there's two things going on. There is a core of reform voters for whom this kind of stuff doesn't really matter. I was at the reform conference and this was obviously directly after this Channel 4 broadcast expose of supposed wrongdoings, which reform say didn't take place, of donors from overseas. And if you talk to the supporters there, they didn't care. They said, oh, it's a stitch up.

20:52It doesn't matter. You know, we have to do what we have to do. They're all the same. Well, yes, exactly. But the problem for reform is that there's not enough of those people. They are maybe 23, 24, 25%, which is roughly what reform is on now. To actually win an election, they need another 8 to 10 % of voters who might not be diehard reform fans, but who might like what they're doing and more importantly, not think that they're kind of weird. and the other important factor too is to win an election you don't have to have your own supporters you also have to have a bigger mass of people who kind of don't care that very much if you win I mean one of the ways that Keir Starmer won the 24 election was by partly energising the base but also having a lot of people say well you know he'll do he'll do for a change whereas reform have got a problem is that there's quite a lot of voters who really really really dislike the idea of Nigel Farage being a number 10.

21:47And, you know, Nigel Farage's personal ratings are going down all the time. The latest YouGov one, this was polling done after Reform UK's conference. And the number of people who said they have an unfavourable view of Nigel Farage was the highest they've ever seen. So it's 69%, up from 67 % before the conference. And if you have over two thirds of voters who dislike you, it becomes harder to win an election. So the problem for Nigel Farage is that every time there is a story like this, which kind of looks a bit sleazy or it looks a bit odd or not corrupt, but a bit funny, then the views of people who will do anything they want, you know, anything they can to keep the form of power potentially harden.

22:29And I think a sum of£72 million from two people in 24 hours has got the potential to land and British voters are getting increasingly good at working out not only who they want to win, but who they don't want to win. And some polling shows that a third of Green supporters would vote Conservative to keep reform out. This is stuff we've never seen before. Peter, thank you so much for your time. Thank you.

22:59That was Peter Walker, Senior Political Correspondent at The Guardian. My thanks to him. And that's it for today. This episode was presented by me, Noshin Iqbal. It was produced by Eli Block and Guy Suffman. Sound designer was Rudy Zagadlo and the executive producer was Humo Halili. We'll be back this afternoon with the latest.