Just how hard up was Nigel Farage when a pal handed him £5 million?

The Reform leader said that the cash was for his personal protection and that he was the victim of a previously unreported petrol bomb attack on one of his many homes the previous year. Harborne, however, a large chunk of whose wealth derives from a 12% shareholding in Tether, a cryptocurrency, appeared to contradict him, indicating that Farage needed the cash because he was brassic.

Suggested Reading

The Reform candidate who says Brexit reduced the UK to a “state of disarray”

Matt Withers

“I gave him the money because of my great admiration for the decades of work he had done to achieve Brexit,” the Thailand-based businessman told the Daily Telegraph. “He had stood down from politics and barely had any income before he went into the [I’m a Celebrity…] jungle,” he said. At the time he made the gift, he added, “I never thought he would go back into politics.”

But if Farage really did need the money at the time, he might need to put a calculator on his MP’s expenses – because it sits at odds with the riches banked by the absentee MP for Clacton in his money-spinning private company Thorn in The Side.

His firm, set up way back in 2011, held just under £3.1 million in assets around the time of Harborne’s gift. The firm’s balance sheet, dated May 31, 2024, disclosed £1.7 million in cash reserves, with its net worth reported at £2.6 million after bills, a bumper £1.2 million up on 2023 when the cash-strapped Farage held a meagre £1.3 million in his firm.

Suggested Reading

Meet Reform’s heavyweight new business backer

Rats in a Sack

In fact, Thorn in The Side has always been a bulging piggy bank for Farage – its earnings really taking off in 2018, the year after he first complained about being broke. Figures for the year to May 31, 2018, filed at Companies House, reported a £326,965 increase in capital and reserves, with its balance sheet value increasing in all but one year ever since. Farage sat on £554,130 in 2019, £731,482 in 2020, £666,529 in 2021, £1,147,065 in 2022, £1,359,162 in 2023 and £2,609,512 in 2024, the year Harborne felt obliged to come to his rescue.

Meanwhile, does Reform home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf’s threat to “carpet bomb” the constituencies of MPs who voted against a motion for Keir Starmer to face an inquiry into whether he misled them over the appointment of Lord Mandelson as US ambassador also extend to those MPs who failed to vote at all?

If so, residents of Clacton and Newark should be worried – neither Farage nor his ludicrously titled ‘shadow chancellor’ Robert Jenrick managed to make it to the voting lobbies, having presumably found something more important to do. In Farage’s case, that is hardly a surprise – the Reform leader currently ranks a lowly 595 of 650 MPs for voting participation.