The churchwarden who gave Reform £200,000

Forget wanting to be an influencer, YouTuber or Premier League footballer – it’s becoming a churchwarden young people should set their sights on for the big bucks, at least according to reports of a very generous donor to Nigel Farage’s Reform.

The Sunday Times reported at the weekend that the man behind a whopping £200,000 of donations to the party was John Richard Simpson, a 59-year-old Anglican lay leader from Potters Bar in Hertfordshire. He is the owner of Interior Architecture Landscape Limited, which made seven payments to Reform last year.

The company, apparently originally owed via a trust in the British Virgin Islands, is so small it does not have to file professionally audited accounts, did not display any contact details until recently and was almost wound up by HMRC last year over a tax dispute.

Simpson also works for Sasan and Yasmin Ghandehari, a married couple described as “clients” of Interior Architecture, and who also sponsored Farage’s pass to the World Economic Forum in Davos last month and paid for his hotel room. They are so secretive their nationalities are not clear, and they have been described as “Iranian-born” and “British” in media reports.

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It is illegal for a foreign national to donate directly to a UK political party, but a British company is able to donate, and there are no rules to stop a foreign investor depositing funds in a British company which then donates to a party.

The Ghandeharis are said to derive their wealth from Sasan’s mother, Hourieh Peramaa, a Kazakh-born property developer who fled to Iran as a child and, as the Sunday Times said, “so secretive there is almost no verifiable information about her and it is not known if she is still alive”.

A spokesman for Simpson, who refused to give the Sunday Times his name, said that the churchwarden “as the company’s sole director and shareholder, was responsible for approving and authorising the company’s political donations in the ordinary course of the company’s governance.

“No third party, client, agent, or other external person conceived, instigated, directed, or authorised the donations, and no such person was involved in the decision-making process.”

Curiouser and curiouser. Alas, though, lack of space meant that none of the newspapers which last year devoted reams of newsprint to Rachel Reeves’s failure to arrange a licence for renting out her home in South London were able to follow it up.