Farage's Florida flight doubles cost in just two days

The ongoing war in Iran and its impact on fuel prices is having a massive knock-on effect on the cost of flights – although it’s probably not responsible for one taken by Nigel Farage appearing to double in the space of two days.

Last month the Reform leader used the final weekend before the Gorton & Denton by-election to fly 5,000 miles to the Maldives on a £45 million private jet for an absurd publicity stunt.

Farage was attempting to get on to the Chagos Islands in protest against the government’s plans to transfer control of the barely-inhabited territory to Mauritius. Alas, he was not allowed on to the atolls – something he attributed to political pressure, rather than the fact that nobody is permitted to just rock up and visit the isolated isles.

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The flight was provided by Reform backer and Thai-based businessman Christopher Harborne, and on March 9, Farage registered the trip – which he laughably described as a “humanitarian aid mission” – with the parliamentary authorities as costing £12,500. Weirdly, though, he amended this just two days later to £25,000.

Small change perhaps to moneybags Harborne, who has handed £13 million in donations so far to the party, but the cost of the flights may stick in the throats of Farage’s hard-pressed constituents, whose absentee MP has now declared a total £111,000 worth of free flights since they elected him to Westminster.

Farage also just declared a £9,466 trip to Palm Beach, Florida – flights costing £8,126 and a room for two nights at £1,340 – for a “speaking engagement”. That jolly, for which Farage had already declared an up-front £27,856.88, was paid for by the Club for Growth. It is a deep-pocketed pro-Trump organisation funded by billionaires Jeff Yass and Richard Uihlein, that seeks to “exert maximum pressure on lawmakers to vote like free-market, limited government conservatives”.

On top of his freebies, moneybags Farage has also recently revealed he has invested £215,000 in Kwasi Kwarteng’s bitcoin firm Stack. The investment, made by his Thorn in The Side business, has not yet been reported in the Commons’ Register of Members’ Interests. With £3.4 million in assets at the latest count, Farage’s long-standing firm, like its £1 million-plus-earning owner, can well afford to back Liz Truss’s woeful chancellor.