Farage's £5 million
What the investigations will actually be about
Reform UK’s leader Nigel Farage is in trouble because he omitted to register a gift of £5 million from Thailand-based billionaire Christopher Harborne, who has also made seven figure donations to Reform UK itself. The donation is now being investigated by the House of Commons Commissioner for Standards and, separately, the Electoral Commission is considering a request to look into the matter.
Farage’s various public defences of his failure to declare this enormous gift are threatening to obscure the basis on which these investigations are taking place. I want here to offer more detail than has so far appeared in the media about the rules that apply to Farage and to suggest why his explanations might not be working.
Farage initially suggested that Harborne’s donation was not regulated because Harborne gave the money before Farage was elected as an MP and even before he became a declared candidate. The problem with this excuse is that the House of Commons’ rules on donations apply to benefits obtained in the twelve months before the relevant election and the law that the Electoral Commission operates under, the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 (’PPERA’), applies not just to donations to political parties but also to donations made to any member of a political party. Farage was not just a member of Reform UK when Harborne gave him £5 million before the 2024 election. Until 2025 he controlled the company that constituted the party.
Farage’s explanation then changed to an assertion that the gift was “purely personal” and not “political”. But that also fails to exonerate him. The House of Commons’ regime covers donations of any type, exempting in express terms only “purely personal” gifts from “partners or family members”. As far as we know, Harborne is not a member of Farage’s family, and in any case £5 million in cash is not in any way a personalised gift, such as an expensive watch or a car with a personalised number plate. It is just cash.
On the Electoral Commission side of the investigation, PPERA contains no exemption at all for “personal” gifts. Donations to individual party members are just as registrable as donations to parties. What matters is the nature of the gift. The legal test as to whether a gift is registrable is whether it was “for his use or benefit in connection with any of his political activities as a member of the party”.
Was the £5 million for Farage’s “benefit in connection with any of his political activities”? To bolster his claim that it was not, Farage added a further layer of explanation. He claimed that the purpose of the £5 million was to pay for personal security. Farage complained that he was under constant physical threat but qualified for no publicly funded protection. That claim, however, provides Farage with no defence. The Act gives some examples of relevant political activity, such as standing for office within the party, but they are only examples. The issue will be whether Farage used his donor-paid-for personal protection in his party political activities. That might well include, for example, speaking engagements and media appearances in which Farage, as a member of Reform UK, was advocating support for the party or setting out his role within it. The evidence on this point is yet to appear, but no doubt enterprising journalists will be seeking it out.
Farage’s personal protection argument also fails to ward off the Commissioner for Standards. The House of Commons rules as applied to gifts from outside the UK, which this one was, apply to “Any benefits which relate in any way to … membership of the House or parliamentary or political activities”. If the purpose of the donation was to provide personal protection, and Farage is still receiving the benefit of that protection, it is difficult to see how it does not relate to his current political and parliamentary activities. If he had given up his protection on being elected, which as far we know he did not, he might have had a better case, although even then he would have benefited from the donation as a candidate during the election campaign.
Farage then came up with yet another explanation. The gift, he says, was backward-looking not forward-looking. Harborne was rewarding Farage for having spent a quarter of a century in politics promoting Brexit. The implied argument is that the gift itself was nothing to do current or future politics and that any decision to use the money for personal protection or anything else was Farage’s decision not the donor’s. But that fails too. The House of Commons rules provide, in their final section, that members must register any gift that “might reasonably be thought by others to influence a Member’s actions or words as a Member”. In other words, what counts ultimately is not what the donor intended but whether the public might reasonably think that an MP might shape their parliamentary behaviour to please the donor. That might come about because of the MP’s feeling of gratitude to the donor or, more cynically, because the MP hopes for a further donation either to the MP personally or to the MP’s party.
As for PPERA, Farage’s “reward” explanation looks less like a defence and more like an admission. Farage is openly admitting that the gift was “connected with” his political activities, namely his Brexit campaigns. PPERA nowhere says that the connection has to be with future activities or that connections with past activities do not count. And even if the Electoral Commission were to interpret the law as confined to connections with future political uses, the donor placed no restrictions on Farage, confining the use of the £5 million to non-political purposes. Farage has no obvious answer to the point that a reasonable person in the position of the donor would have foreseen that at least some of the money would be used for Farage’s political purposes.
Farage’s most recent pronouncement attempts to close off objections to his “reward” explanation by asserting that the gift was “unconditional”, but lack of conditionality makes no difference to the main Code of Conduct issue, which is whether a reasonable observer would think that an MP in receipt of a £5 million gift might be influenced by the prospect of a further gift or by gratitude for a past one. And it would also make no difference to the main issue under PPERA, which whether the donation was “connected with” a party member’s “political activities”.
This is not going well for Farage. Presumably he continues to talk about it because he is following the Trump playbook of claiming that every accusation against him is a politically motivated conspiracy and that all he has to do to convince his own supporters of his innocence is to say something, no matter how implausible it might sound to other people, that those supporters can hang onto to maintain their favourable view of him. In a normal political world, his advisers would long ago have told him to shut up and possibly to fess up. But we no longer live in a normal political world.