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The weekend saw the largest donations to UK political parties ever made: £36 million each, from Reform-backing crypto billionaires Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo.
Both were reported as living – until very recently – overseas. Delo was based in Hong Kong and Christopher Harborne in Thailand.
This matters because the Labour Government’s current Representation of the People Bill going through Parliament places a cap of £100,000 a year on donors living overseas.
Crucially, this will be retrospective. Under the new bill, an individual is not a permissible donor if when the party receives the donation, they are an “overseas contributor” and their donations for that whole calendar year exceed £100,000. Assuming the bill passes as it is, this largely kicks in from when the changes were announced, 25 March 2026.
From my reading, under the Bill, anyone who moved back to the UK during 2026 remains capped at £100,000 until 1 January 2028. The clock starts ticking from the start of the calendar year before the donation, not from the date of return*.
Reform UK have cried foul, claiming that the policy is an attack on them and their latest donations. This appears to give the Government credit for inventing a time machine.
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The retrospective element was already there in the bill, and runs back to the point of the Rycroft review into foreign interference.
The rationale is that without it, donors would have rushed money in, ahead of the legislation. Which seems to be what Reform UK are trying to do.
The 25 March is of course well before these donations were made over the weekend. That’s linear time for you.
It is quite odd then that Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne each made £36 million donations to Reform over the weekend.
Reform and the mega-donors almost certainly knew this law was coming (they would have to have been ignoring legislation that clearly affected them to have not).
Reform and in particular Robert Jenrick MP has been insisting that Harborne and Delo are living in the UK, and that the overseas donor cap supposedly won’t affect them.
In April 2026, while still apparently based in Hong Kong, Delo wrote in The Telegraph that he would move be moving back to Britain early so he could contribute more to Reform, framing Labour’s £100,000 cap on donations from Britons living abroad as a “rigged game”. If he was still living in Hong Kong in April, that is clearly after the 25 March donation cap implementation date.
And a claim form filed by Harborne in the High Court only this June lists his address as (still) being in Bangkok.
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There is a very narrow route in the bill where Harborne’s donation could be legal. From our reading, it requires three things to have happened by three dates.
1. Firstly, his removal from the register as an overseas elector on or before 25 March 2026, when the cap was announced.
2. Unbroken (not even for one day) UK residence from 6 July 2026 onwards.
3. And registration as an ordinary UK elector by the date of the donation.
That means Harborne would have had to deregister as an overseas elector before the £100,000 was even announced, which suggests foresight that is unlikely to have existed. We know Harborne was registered to vote in February this year, as on the 19th he donated £25,000 (as a benefit in kind) to Nigel Farage for a trip to the Maldives, on a “humanitarian aid mission.”
And we know he gave a Bangkok address as recently as 9 June, from the High Court filing — so he surely cannot have returned before then. We also know that Companie…