Parliamentary standards commissioner due to rule on £5m gift to Farage

Behr argues billionaire spending is provoking voter resistance in US and UK

A verdict is due soon from the parliamentary standards commissioner in the case of a £5m gift that Nigel Farage accepted from Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based billionaire, shortly before Farage ran for parliament in 2024 and did not register once elected, Guardian columnist Rafael Behr wrote on Nov. 11, 2026. Farage denies any wrongdoing. Behr reported that a damning verdict could lead to Farage’s suspension from the Commons and a recall petition, forcing him into another byelection — one he may not bother contesting.

Behr set the gift within money he described as unprecedented and gamechanging: Reform UK and its leader have taken funds from just two individuals dipping into fortunes earned in the cryptocurrency trade. Harborne gave the party another £9m in 2025 and then £36m earlier this year, an amount Behr said was chosen in a competitive flourish to equal the £36m that Ben Delo, another crypto billionaire, had given Farage’s party days before. It skews the political game, Behr wrote, in unpredictable ways.

British politics is cheap by comparison, Behr argued. According to the Electoral Commission, the total combined expenditure of all parties and campaign organisations in the year running up to the last general election was £94.5m, and a shot at becoming mayor of a mid-sized US city might cost twice as much.

Farage’s political fortunes have not been boosted along with his personal finances, Behr wrote. When the scandal of the first £5m infusion broke, Farage tried to pre-empt the standards commissioner’s investigation by putting his case before the “court of public opinion” in a byelection — a contest Behr called quixotic, in which Farage ended up fighting a novelty candidate dressed as a space-travelling dustbin. Farage rarely attends the Commons and does not appear to be enjoying himself as much as he was before his financial affairs came under scrutiny, Behr added; his newly sullen mood has coincided with Reform UK losing its lead in opinion polls.

Behr wrote that the party has fallen behind Labour in all surveys and has dipped to third place, behind the Conservatives, in some. He also wrote that Farage is personally disliked by a majority of voters — deeply enough by some that they form tactical-voting blocs to obstruct Reform UK candidates in byelections — something he said would probably form a formidable barrier to the party’s leader ever becoming prime minister.

Most of that aversion has accrued over Farage’s years of what Behr described as nationalist posturing, he noted: Brexit-induced animus and liberal outrage at his demagogic immigrant-bashing predate the influx of crypto money and his other high-profile scandals. But Behr cited polling evidence that even voters who count as Reform UK’s target demographic, and who might once have accepted the party’s pleas of victimisation at the hands of an establishment conspiracy, are put off by the smell of seemingly dodgy deals.

Research conducted over the summer by More in Common, Behr wrote, found that perceptions of Farage as “sleazy or corrupt” were emerging as an obstacle to support even among “dissenting disruptors” — the polling company’s label for the electoral segment, roughly one in five, that most mistrusts institutions and would gladly see the system torn down by a strongman leader. A lot of those people, he noted, were habitual non-voters stirred out of apathy by the leave campaign in the Brexit referendum; Farage once had a near-monopoly on their allegiance but now faces competition from Rupert Lowe’s even more aggressively far-right Restore Britain party.

Lowe, elected to parliament as a Reform candidate before breaking with Farage, has been elevated from relative obscurity by Musk, Behr wrote, with the X proprietor’s enthusiastic reposting and deployment of algorithmic privileges giving the Restore Britain leader a profile and audience that rivals the reach of world leaders. Behr characterized Lowe’s earnings as those of a “digital demagogue” demanding expulsions of non-white migrants from Britain — income that potentially matches Lowe’s £98,599 annual salary as an MP, and that is only visible because parliament demands a declaration.

Farage appears to be trying to buy his way back to social media primacy, Behr wrote. Research by Who Targets Me, an organisation that campaigns for transparency in digital political advertising, shows Reform UK outspending the rest of the field on the platforms for which data is available: over the past month the party poured £301,433 into Facebook and Instagram ads, an unusual volume sustained at unusual pitch for a period with no elections — more than four times as much as the Conservatives and six times more than Labour. The return looks poor so far if a polling bounce is the goal, Behr wrote, though it is too early to know what a prolonged campaign could achieve, and it is pretty much impossible to know what happens in the murkier depths of monetised online influence, especially on TikTok and X.

A bill ostensibly tightening the rules on political funding, currently in the Lords, barely skims the surface of that trade, Behr argued. It includes a moratorium on donations made in cryptocurrency, which he said should be a ban given how vanishingly few reasons there are for an eligible donor to want to avoid paying in old-fashioned sterling. The government rejected an amendment that would have capped individual donations at £100,000, apparently for fear that future trade union funding would be put in jeopardy — a peril Behr suggested would be smaller than the one unions would face under a far-right government that came to office on a tide of billionaire cash.

Behr wrote that this is a fight Labour can pick with some confidence, citing encouraging evidence that swing voters are sensitive to the hypocrisy of pseudo-radicals whose anti-establishment postures are choreographed to serve a plutocrat agenda. When Persuasion UK, a not-for-profit research agency, tested campaign messages for and against Reform, the lines that most effectively shaved points off the party’s support and depressed its leader’s favourability ratings were those highlighting its sources of income and how they appeared to correlate with policy positions, Behr wrote. Farage says his donors expect nothing in return for their gifts; Behr called his well-documented enthusiasm for deregulating crypto, in that case, an “uncanny coincidence.”

Behr cautioned that comparisons between US politics and Westminster are made too often and are never wholly reliable, given the different regulatory regimes and countless cultural disparities. He noted that Democrats were the underdog challengers in battleground states in last week’s midterms, while Andy Burnham faces a populist threat as the incumbent. But one common factor holds, he argued: British voters do not like the idea of democracy getting warped to the will of arrogant oligarchs any more than Texans do.

The midterms supplied Behr’s starting point, and the lesson he took from them: electorates are repelled by the arrogant mega-rich buying democracy. He opened with the arithmetic that $224m (£168m) is a lot of money for most people to spend and get nothing in return — but no one is richer than Elon Musk. As the wealthiest of the US’s tech oligarchs, Musk could afford to blow huge sums on a failed bid to prop up Republican candidates in Texas, his adoptive home state, in last week’s midterm congressional elections, and he is reported to have spent a further $250m failing to engineer results in other races. Behr said Musk’s riches plausibly swung voters the other way in Texas. James Talarico, who became the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in the state since 1988, made defiance of what Behr called Musk’s meddling a rallying cry in his campaign. Behr acknowledged that, as in other forms of marketing, it is not always easy to know what kind of spending moves the dial or how far — but donors would not donate, he argued, if they thought the result was beyond their powers of procurement, in a US market he described as out of control, with sums he called “bonkers.”

The standards verdict and the political-funding bill in the Lords both remained unresolved when Behr’s commentary was published.