Christopher Harborne has donated another £3m to Reform UK on top of his record £9m last summer.
Nigel Farage’s party, which has been topping the polls for more than a year, brought in £5.5m in the last quarter of 2025 – outstripping all the other parties. It also included a £200,000 donation from JC Bamford Excavators – traditionally a Conservative donor – which gave the same sum to the Tories that quarter.
The Harborne donations will bolster Reform UK’s war chest before the May elections, in which Farage will be hoping to make progress in Wales and across England where council seats are being contested.
Harborne, a Thailand-based aviation and cryptocurrency investor, previously gave £10m to the Brexit party to fund its 2019 election campaign and £1m to the office of Boris Johnson after he resigned.
In contrast, the Conservatives brought in £4m in donations, the Liberal Democrats more than £2m and Labour almost £2m.
The Green party, which won the byelection in Gorton and Denton in February, received just £290,000 in donations, showing them outperforming their financial position, while Your Party, with Jeremy Corbyn as its parliamentary lead, got £670,000.
The huge scale of Harborne’s donations, as well as the £20m given by Frank Hester to the Tories before the 2024 election, have led to renewed calls from MPs and campaigners for a cap on political donations. There is also pressure from several Labour select committee chairs for a ban on donations in cryptocurrency.
As well as the Harborne donations, Reform brought in six-figure sums from biotech entrepreneur David Grainger, a firm owned by double-glazing businessman Gary Dutton, Lebanese-Irish tech billionaire Bassim Haidar, Monaco-based metals broker Ashley Levett, and Isabel Goldsmith, a sibling of Tory peer Zac Goldsmith.
The party also accepted a £11,500 donation from Frederick Hesketh, the son of former Tory peer Alexander Fermor-Hesketh, who later joined Ukip, and a cousin of Farage’s unofficial aide George Cottrell.
Publishing the figures, Jackie Killeen, the director of regulation at the Electoral Commission, said: “Almost £65m in donations was accepted by political parties during 2025. The UK political finance system has high levels of transparency, and we know that voters are interested in where parties get their money from. This publication is an important part of delivering this information for voters.
“However, we know there are parts of the system that need strengthening, and we have been calling for changes to the law for some time. The UK government’s proposed reforms to the political finance regime in the representation of the people bill could strengthen donation controls and help ensure voters can have confidence in the political finance system. We will continue to work with the government so that any changes are evidence based and workable in practice.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
