What Else Don’t We Know About Reform UK’s Money?

Channel 4 has uncovered one alleged route for undisclosed political funding. The obvious question is whether there are others.

As a rule, I do not write in the evenings anymore.

I put this in place earlier this year, just as a bit of a backstop for not spending so much time on my phone. Now, I have failed on multiple fronts with the not-being-on-my-phone thing, because Instagram is an actual app on my phone, and also if I need to know something I am always going to pick it up and obsessively try and learn as much as possible about the longest bridges in the world, or the full timeline of feline domestication. Yes, my life is immensely exciting.

Tonight, however, is an exception, and I think everyone would agree that my breaking my no writing in the evenings rule is completely justified.

If you haven’t seen it yet, Channel 4 News has just published an explosive investigation into Reform UK’s funding, and I’m going to link to the full report below.

The investigation, carried out by undercover journalists from Verbatim and independently verified by Channel 4 News, appears to show senior Reform figures arranging for what they believed was foreign money to pay for polling commissioned by the party, without that funding appearing publicly as a donation to Reform.

That is an incredibly important point, because a former chief executive of the Electoral Commission now says the evidence warrants a criminal investigation.

Exclusive: Nigel Farage filmed undercover celebrating secret new foreign donations

In the report, an undercover journalist pretends to want to donate to Reform and has a couple of meetings with James Orr, who I’ve written about previously, and who has some very strong links to some very dodgy American groups related to Project 2025. The meetings took place in the swankiest, fanciest restaurants and establishments in London, where there are discussions about, of course, all of this not quite being illegal.

Discussions that included phrases from Orr like “Is anybody gonna find out?” and that “they could easily get away with it” and how the electoral commission was “completely useless” and “dumb and ineffective”.

These, if you were unsure, are phrases that don’t go quite hand-in-hand with things being above board.

The long and short of it is that Reform UK handed nice big invoices to the tune of £32,500 to the undercover journalist to pay for polls conducted by JL Partners - that could then be presented as being completely independent.

Bob Posner, a lawyer and former chief executive of the Electoral Commission, told Channel 4 that what he had seen warranted a criminal investigation and said “serious criminal offences” may have been committed.

And these polls became news.

One appeared on the front page of the Telegraph. Another was reported by The Times. They were circulated by senior Reform figures as irrefutable evidence of public opinion without readers being told that Reform had commissioned them or helped arrange how they would be paid for.

So we’re not just talking about where the money came from, we’re talking about information presented to voters as independent evidence of public opinion.

This is all coming off the back of Nigel Farage’s the current investigation by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner related to the £5m donation from Christopher Harborne, the Thailand-based billionaire, and being linked to convicted fraudster George Cottrell, a longstanding Farage ally with some serious question marks around donations from his mother, Fiona Cottrell.

I can’t help but feel like things really are heating up for Reform and Co, and I am, for one, so grateful to Channel 4 for actually doing this, because for years now it has felt like Reform has had an easy ride, and it feels like over the past couple of months that has come to a complete end.

There will, of course, be some exceptions, and the Chris Mason interview with Nigel Farage just yesterday was another extraordinary softball cupping by the BBC, where there should have been a much harder push and challenge on the money that has been coming into Reform.

To be honest, I am actually quite pissed off about this, because Farage takes us all for fools. He takes his supporters for fools - nothing about him is real, everything is a front, the biggest façade being that he’s probably only in it for the money, and that he is not in any way, shape or form working for any of his constituents, who have now voted for him twice after he called his hissy-induced by-election just a few months ago.

What I’m also increasingly struggling to understand is where exactly his constituents fit into any of this, because so much of the Farage operation seems to revolve around Farage himself:

His money. His media profile. His donors. His interests. His ambitions.

There’s also another loose end here for me - and this comes courtesy of Dan Jukes, Farage’s mate, who appeared to tell the undercover journalist about numerous donations that he claimed had been given through British children.

Who are these people? How much did they give? Where did this money come from? How much don’t we know about yet?

There are so many, many more questions that have been opened by this report, and proper investigations now need to be launched into the foundations of Reform. This needs to go all the way back to its inception as the Brexit Party and there needs to now be proper scrutiny placed on Nigel Farage and everyone in his inner circle.

Nathan Gill, the former Leader of Reform UK in Wales went to prison last year for over a decade for taking money from Russia to parrot talking points in the European Parliament in his time as a UKIP MEP.

We are now at the point that we need to know exactly who took money from whom and just how deep this goes.

I will say the timing of this is convenient, especially with the Birmingham NEC hosting party conference season, and the first party conference being Reform’s. I imagine it’s going to be a spectacular show of constant flip-flops and reverse ferrets, and I can’t help but think I should probably watch what’s happening this weekend, especially now that it’s been confirmed there won’t be any horrific singing from Dame Andrea Jenkyns in a repeate of last years’ disastrous performance.

I would love to get your thoughts on everything. Let me know what you think, but this does feel absolutely monumental. On that note, I am going to open my little secret alt account on Twitter and go have a look at just how people are trolling Nigel Farage, knowing about illicit donations and saying “thank you, both of you, thank you” for an offer of another hundreds of thousands of pounds in donations from a friendly foreign donor.

You can watch the full report below: