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Nigel Farage has returned to hosting on GB News after a hiatus of six months – and spent most of his own programme defending his own party’s mega-donors.
The Reform leader was handed the unparalleled platform to spin his side of the story about the £36 million each that the crypto billionaires Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo’s gave Reform over the weekend – where it comes from, and whether it is legal.
There was no independent presenter or proper cross-examination on the show. It was Farage acting as defendant, prosecution and judge all at once, with long stretches of contestable monologue exonerating his donors and attacking Labour.
He told viewers on his primetime terrestrial show: “I’ve been away for a bit, but I’m back. And today we talk about, you’ll never guess it, there’s a row over party political donations. But where does it all lead? Does it lead in the end to state funding? And would that be any better than what we currently have?”
He added of the “row going on over party funding”: “I seem to find myself somewhere in the middle of it.”
Farage mocked Labour ministers’ claims that donations via trade unions were different to those from crypto billionaires – since most donations from unions come from thousands of members who have actively opted in to contribute to a ‘political fund’, established precisely to shift the balance of power away from oligarchs.
Farage said: “Big donations are fine if they come to the Labour Party. But big donations are not fine, even though they’re legal in every way, if they come to Reform.”
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He thereby skirted over the fact that on March 25 – months before the two £36 million donations to Reform were made – Labour said it would ban donations over £100,000 made from overseas donors, which at the time included Harborne and Delo, then based in Thailand and Hong Kong respectively. Labour said it would apply from that date, implemented through the Representation of the People Bill currently going through Parliament.
Farage also issued a threat to Labour and the unions: “Labour want to attack us. We, in turn, might lash out back at the unions. This actually is a very, very bad place. If this continues…If you end private donations from individuals and companies, you finish up with state funding.”
He also claimed that this would “preserve in aspic the big parties as they are today.” This does not appear to have been the case in Canada or the many European countries which have systems of public funding. In fact, the UK already has public funding for political parties, known as Short money.
He told viewers “these donations are completely legal” and “this is very clean money”; stated flatly as fact by someone who benefits from them.
The Reform leader called the Rycroft Review, the official assessment of foreign interference in UK politics which has bolstered the Government’s proposed electoral reforms, “a total stitch-up by one of the Prime Minister’s mates.” He offered no evidence for the claim about the respected former senior civil servant.
And when a Labour panellist pointed out the legislation actually predates the review, Farage didn’t engage with the correction, he just repeated the “inventing law” framing seconds later.
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Farage never actually directly disclosed that he is, as party leader, a direct beneficiary of the donations he was defending, in that it could help him become Prime Minister.
And he used his airtime to present a bar chart comparing “total party donations since 2021” that shows Reform at £110m against Labour’s …