The more Reform leader Nigel Farage talks about his financial affairs, the muddier things appear to get.
Last week, it emerged that Farage had bought a £1.4m Surrey property in cash shortly after receiving his controversial £5m gift from Thailand-based billionaire Christopher Harborne, which the Clacton MP had said was to pay for his personal security. Farage then let it be known that the house purchase had nothing to do with Harborne’s massive donation, but in fact had been paid for with the fee he received for appearing in the 2023 series of reality TV show I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here.
Yet corporate accounts for his company Thorn in the Side Ltd obtained by the Financial Times appear to show that the TV payment remained on its balance sheet after the property purchase was completed, meaning that the money was not used to buy the Surrey gaff after all.
It is the latest twist in an affair that threatens to damage the far right politician’s man-of-the-people image, an affair that is already the subject of an investigation by parliamentary authorities.
When a Guardian investigation first revealed that Farage had been given the £5m in 2024, he claimed Harborne had handed it over specifically to pay for his security after watching his friend get hit by a milkshake during campaigning.
Farage said he the enormous payout – the biggest single donation to a political figure in British history – did not have to be declared to parliamentary authorities because it had nothing to do with political matters. At the time he got the money, Farage was officially “retired”, though he unretired swiftly afterwards.
He then told the Daily Telegraph that the payment was necessary as “I have tried and failed in the past to get security funded by the Home Office and I don’t think the state will ever help me.” But this claim was curious, since it was only last October that Reform complained that Farage’s publicly funded security detail had been cut by 75%. A big drop – but it does rather contradict the idea that he had never received state funding.
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Farage then told the Sun’s Harry Cole another story about the £5m, saying: “It’s very unusual for someone to give up 27 years of their life to campaign for something. And this was given to me on an unconditional basis… But frankly, it was given as a reward for campaigning for Brexit for 27 years.”
Yet if it was given as a reward for his contribution to the Brexit campaign, it contradicts Farage’s argument that he was under “no obligation” to declare the gift because it “wasn’t political in any sense at all”. Perhaps all this will be examined in the parliamentary standards commissioner’s forthcoming investigation into the affair. And perhaps by the time that starts, Farage will have a new story altogether.
