Cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne said yesterday he had donated £36 million ($49m) to Britain’s anti-immigration Reform UK, matching an already record contribution to Nigel Farage’s party a day earlier as it prepares for the next election.
The donation gives the veteran Brexit campaigner’s party £72m from two donors in less than 48 hours at a time when it is confronting allegations about irregularities in its funding, which it denies.
The figure exceeds what either the governing Labour Party or the opposition Conservatives spent during last year’s election campaign, according to Electoral Commission figures. The funds will help Reform, whose lead in opinion polls has slipped over the funding allegations, win over voters before the next election, which is due by 2029.
Harborne, already Reform’s biggest donor, disclosed the contribution in a Telegraph newspaper article, saying fellow crypto investor Ben Delo’s pledge a day earlier had inspired him to match it.
“What do I expect in return for my donations? Nothing. No peerage, no policy change, just a party that is ready for government,” Harborne wrote in the article.
Delo’s donation on Friday had already dwarfed the previous record of £10m that British businessman John Sainsbury, who died in 2022, had left to the Conservatives, according to the Electoral Commission’s online database.
Reform has said that if it comes to power, it would propose a law to boost crypto adoption, including by cutting capital gains tax for digital assets and creating a bitcoin reserve fund at the Bank of England.
The donation comes little more than a week after Reform was hit by allegations that two senior aides to Farage had helped arrange for a foreign donor to fund political polling, claims which the party denies.
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