Is Farage accusing the Guardian of hacking him over his £5m crypto cash?

As he celebrated local election gains on Friday, Nigel Farage tried to say as little as possible about the £5m handout he got from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne. But he ended up saying something intriguing about the supposedly no-strings gift.

When Reform’s leader turned up to Havering, where his party had just taken control, he was asked about the donation three times and deflected each query. “We’ll talk about that any other time you like,” he told one reporter, dismissively waving his hand.

When that will be is unclear. He ducked sit-down interviews in the last few days of the local election campaign, including pulling out of the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show at short notice rather than defend himself. Farage did give a brief interview to broadcasters on Tuesday, in which he claimed the extraordinary gift was “purely private”, “wasn’t political in any sense at all” and was purely to pay for his own security, saying “it will ensure I can be safe for the rest of my life.”

But during a tetchy phone interview with LBC’s Nick Ferrari on Friday, Farage said something interesting – that people only knew he had received the biggest-ever single donation in British political history from Thai-based Harborne in the first place because he was hacked.

Farage said: “If you want to have a discussion at some point, Nick, with me about illegally obtained information that shouldn’t be in the public domain, we can talk about it.”

Ferrari then asked, “Was it illegally obtained?” Farage replied: “Oh, yes, as was other things that have happened over the last few weeks – computer hacking, you know it, I’m afraid. But, you know, we can discuss it another time. Right now, we’ll discuss the election.”

The donation was exclusively revealed by the Guardian’s City editor Anna Isaac on Wednesday, April 29. So is Farage accusing Isaac, or her newspaper, of hacking him, or of receiving hacked information? Has he reported this to the police? And has he asked his security team – surely the best that money can buy – how they allowed him to be hacked in the first place?

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Alas, the answers to these questions are likely to prove as elusive as the ones to the questions we asked about the donation on April 30, which included: “You have stated that the £5m personal contribution… was for your personal security. Do you plan to disclose top-line expense receipts to show the funds have not been used for any other purpose, including but not confined to your recent £215,000 investment in a cryptocurrency company operated by the former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, or for the £885,000 house in Clacton bought in late 2024 by your partner Laure Ferrari?”

Reform have not replied directly to our questions, though this week the party has insisted that he will not provide any evidence that the £5m is being spent on security and none of it has been used for any other purpose.