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Who funds Nigel Farage? The year is 2026. It’s 10 years since Farage played a pivotal role in changing Britain’s constitution and its place in the world. And the UK press has finally woken from its decade-long stupor.
It’s the most basic of all questions: who is funding the man whose party was, until very recently, ascendant in the polls and looking like the possible next prime minister?
Last month, I wrote about my own decade of frustration and fear, the years I spent trying to draw back the curtain on the money men behind him. That included George Cottrell, the convicted fraudster and money laundering expert who’s recently been thrust on to the national stage, even as those questions were ignored by Britain’s overwhelmingly rightwing media and I was pilloried.
I always wondered if that would ever change. And now it has. The highly influential Murdoch press, led by the Sunday Times reporting team, is now finally on Farage’s case and it’s a game-changer.
Farage has never known anything like it. There are now questions which even he can’t dodge. Questions even the BBC is finally asking. And his luck seems to be running out. A hasty plan to throw off a parliamentary investigation by quitting parliament before he could be sanctioned has spectacularly backfired in the biggest own goal of his career.
It’s high summer, Farage is fighting a pointless byelection against a bin, and, still, the questions keep coming. Central to our mission at the Nerve is public interest accountability journalism, and that’s why, back in May, we threw ourselves into a new investigation, the Harborne Receipts. Today, we set out everything we’ve learned so far.
How it started
When the name of Christopher Harborne first surfaced in April, in Anna Isaac’s brilliant Guardian scoop about his five-million-quid donation to Farage, the questions came thick and fast. Who is Christopher Harborne? Why had he given Farage £5m? And what does he want?
This is what we’ve been trying to answer over the last three months, in a series of stories that have tried to pick apart Harborne’s complex web of interests and interactions with UK politics.
We began with a timeline: every donation Harborne has ever made to the Conservatives, the Brexit party, Farage, Boris Johnson, the Conservatives and now Reform UK. And from that we began to pattern-match, to understand the flow of money in relation to the interests of a cryptobillionaire with significant investments in defence technology.
So far, we’ve revealed:
Part 2: Allegations of a “deal” between Farage, Johnson and Harborne to “fix” the 2019 general election.
Today, we’re publishing a new master version of our investigation timeline (below). Because the devil is in the detail and the 1,000-foot view. And because, taking our cue from OSINT – open source intelligence – we’re sharing our research.
How it’s going
There is much more to be done. But we wanted to take a moment to reflect on what we’ve learned so far. Because Harborne is still a ghost. There are few photos of him (in fact, we identified in June that Harborne was present, unsuspected, in the background of a photo widely published when Farage stood down Brexit party candidates in the 2019 election). He’s a man who has deliberately kept under the radar. But we do now know much more than we did. And if you read some of these stories, you do too.
Brexit party leader Nigel Farage on the campaign trail in Hartlepool on the day (11 November 2019) that he announced he was standing down 317 Brexit candidates in Tory-held seats. Christopher Harborne (pink trousers) is in the background. Photograph: Ian Forsyth/Getty
My reflection from writing and co-authoring a significant chunk of these articles alongside our terrific Nerve team – Charlie Young, Lucia Osborne-Crowley and Ian Tucker – is that the UK body politic is still struggling to metabolise the extent and complexity of Farage’s financial affairs. The Sunday Times is running full pelt at the Cottrell story but it hasn’t covered his Russian connections – as we did last week – or his involvement in Brexit. And Harborne’s long involvement with Johnson and the Conservatives is an essential piece of this tale. It’s an important piece of pattern-matching but almost none of it has been reported elsewhere.
And even where some other outlets have covered the crypto connection, it’s not in the forensic detail we’ve been able to go into here.
Nigel Farage – rightly – is the central figure in all this. But what our reporting reveals is that it’s not just Farage. The new political money behind him is not dependent on him; it’s the other way around. If Farage vanished in a puff of intergalactic smoke, it wouldn’t matter. Harborne has repeatedly switched parties and politicians before. He could easily do so again.
And that’s why it’s critical to know who these funders are and what they want. That includes Cottrell and others, but Harborne is the biggest whale of them all.
UK politics has changed. The amount of new money coming in is still tiny compared with US politics, but it’s not only growing fast, it’s also following the exact same playbook that saw Donald Trump, against the odds, return to power. The crypto industry donated more than $238m to pro-Trump Super PACs: more than any other individual or sector. And Harborne has donated more than £20m to Farage and his parties.
We’re keeping the receipts because Farage vs a bin isn’t a pantomime. It’s what casino capitalism enabled by new crypto tools looks like when played out against the lives of real people.
This timeline will be updated to reflect developments in the story as they happen
2001-08
24 May 2001
Christopher Harborne donates £10,000 to the Conservative party. (All donation records from Electoral Commission)
13 March 2003
Harborne donates £19,994 to the Conservative party.
8 June 2004
Harborne donates £19,994 to the Conservative party.
28 February 2005
Harborne donates £50,000 to the Conservative party.
30 November 2005
Harborne donates £400 to the Conservative party.
19 April 2006
Harborne donates £50,000 to the Conservative party.
31 August 2006
Harborne donates £8,000 to the Conservative party.
16 September 2008
Harborne donates £8,000 to the Conservative party.
2018
26 January
Harborne donates £20,000 to the Conservative party.
Harborne donates £10,000 to the Conservative party.
Harborne donates £20,000 to the Conservative party.
26 June
Harborne donates £12,500 to the Conservative party.
2019
4 April
Harborne donates £200,000 to the Brexit party.
21 June
Harborne donates £20,000 to the Conservative party.
1 July
Harborne donates £30,000 to the Conservative party.
9 July
Harborne donates £1m to the Brexit party.
23 July
Boris Johnson is elected prime minister.
23 August
Harborne donates £1m to the Brexit party.
28 August
Harborne donates £1m to the Brexit party.
4 October
Harborne donates £1m to the Brexit party.
29 October
Parliament votes 438-20 to call a general election on 12 December. Polling throughout October had the Brexit party on 11-12%; once the election is called it dropped into the single digits.
31 October
During an interview on Nigel Farage’s LBC show, Donald Trump urges Farage and Johnson to team up as an “unstoppable force” in the December election.
1 November
Farage launches the Brexit party election campaign. He says he will field 600 candidates unless Johnson drops his Brexit deal, which he says is “not Brexit”.
3 November
Farage announces he will not contest a seat himself.
Early November (exact date unclear)
According to Rupert Lowe of Restore Britain, senior Brexit party figures, including Lowe at the time, and senior Conservatives meet in Blackfriars to discuss a possible election pact. The Brexit team says the Tories must stand down candidates in Labour seats if they are to stand down candidates in Tory seats. The Tories refuse. After the meeting, the Brexit team relay the outcome to Farage. He declares they will stand in every seat. Those present at the meeting include Harborne.
6 November
Parliament is dissolved.
Screenshot of a Guardian article from 11 November 2019, featuring a picture of Nigel Farage in Hartlepool. Christopher Harborne, fourth from left in the pink trousers, was not identified at the time – or, indeed, even known to be a Brexit party donor. (Photograph: Ian Forsyth/Getty)
13-14 November
Farage claims that he and eight senior Brexit party figures were offered peerages to withdraw.
14 November
Harborne donates £2m to the Brexit party.
Election nomination deadline (4pm). The Brexit party files nominations for 277 seats.
16 November
Lord Falconer writes to the Metropolitan police and the director of public prosecutions arguing that the alleged offers of peerages and jobs constitute criminal offences. The police later decide to take no further action.
5 December
Harborne donates £25,000 to the Brexit party.
9 December
Harborne donates £1.425m to the Brexit party. Over the course of the final six months of 2019, he ends up donating £9.525m to the party.
10 December
Harborne donates £25,000 to the Brexit party.
11 December
Harborne donates £25,000 to the Brexit party.
12 December
The general election is held. The Conservatives win with a majority of 80. The Brexit party fails to win a seat and takes 2% of the vote.
Harborne donates £25,000 to the Brexit party.
2020
16 January
Harborne donates £250,000 to the Brexit party.
31 January
The UK officially exits the EU.
10 February
Harborne donates £25,000 to the Brexit party.
11 February
Harborne donates £50,000 to the Brexit party.
12 February
Harborne donates £40,000 to the Brexit party.
13 February
Harborne donates £75,000 to the Brexit party.
14 February
Harborne donates £25,000 to the Brexit party.
George Cottrell, Christopher Harborne and Nigel Farage at Scott's restaurant in Mayfair, London, 6th July 2020. Photo: MJ Pictures
September (exact date unknown)
According to former Reform UK deputy leader Ben Habib and Rupert Lowe, the two had dinner with Farage at the Chelsea Arts Club. The purpose of the dinner, they claim, was to bring Farage back into frontline politics. According to Habib, “Nigel said: ‘I've done this for so long, I need to make money.’”
The Digital Currencies Governance Group (DCGG), a crypto lobbying outfit representing the stablecoin company Tether, in which Harborne has a major stake, is registered in Brussels. Harborne is officially registered as a DCGG lobbyist.
Screengrab from a Facebook video of Farage promoting his new-found enthusiasm for crypto, December 2020. The video was an ad for Farage’s subscribers’ newsletter Fortune and Freedom.
27 November
Farage puts out his first pro-crypto/bitcoin content on his newsletter Fortune and Freedom.
2021
4 January
The Brexit party changes its name to Reform UK.
15 October
The DCGG provides written evidence to the Bank of England aiming to dissuade it from the roll-out of a government Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) or “Britcoin”. This stance is later adopted by Farage.
2022
11 February
Harborne donates £500,000 to the Conservative party.
24 February
Russia invades Ukraine.
4 April
Boris Johnson's government publishes a landmark pro-crypto plan: "The government has today announced moves that will see stablecoins recognised as a valid form of payment." Harborne’s Tether is now the largest stablecoin issuer in the world.
9 April
Johnson arrives in Kyiv for Russia-Ukraine peace talks. Before arriving, he reportedly instructs Zelenskyy not to negotiate with Putin and urges Zelenskyy to fight. In his speech on that visit, Johnson says: “We – the UK and others – supply the equipment, the technology, the know-how, the intelligence.”
6 May
Harborne donates £500,000 to the Conservative party (officially accepted by the party on 11 May).
Harborne purchases his first shares in QinetiQ, one of the UK’s top defence companies. He owns 3.2%. Market experts suggest that for a purchase of this size Harborne would have paid a premium against the screen prices. (QinetiQ shareholding records from Investegate and Nerve research)
7 May
Harborne visits Johnson at Chequers. He spends the afternoon with Johnson and two of his close associates – Ross Kempsell and Ben Elliot.
8 May
Johnson has a call with Zelenskyy to prepare for the G7 summit the following month.
9 May
Harborne purchases more QinetiQ shares. He now owns 4.25%.
12 May
Harborne purchases more QinetiQ shares. He now owns 5.14%.
23 May
Harborne purchases more QinetiQ shares. He now owns 6.22%.
25 May
Harborne purchases more QinetiQ shares. He now owns 7.08%, worth approximately £150m. Harborne is now the third largest shareholder in QinetiQ, through his company AML Global Ltd, which is based in Hong Kong.
31 May
Harborne acquires 6,348,672 QinetiQ shares. His holding is now 8.18%.
6 June
Harborne donates £15,000 to the Conservative party.
22 June
Tether announces the launch of a UK stablecoin, “GBPT”, tied to the pound, following a government announcement recognising stablecoins as a valid form of payment. This allows Tether to diversify away from sole reliance on the US market and project an image of stability at a time of volatility in crypto markets.
23 June
Harborne acquires 6,629,470 QinetiQ shares, taking his holding to 9.33%.
7 July
Johnson announces he is resigning as prime minister, but will stay on until a Conservative leadership election is held.
11 July
Harborne acquires 3,926,347 QinetiQ shares, taking the holding to 10.01%. He is now QinetiQ's largest shareholder.
27 July
Harborne’s entire QinetiQ holding is transferred from AML Global Ltd to Klear Kite LLC, in Delaware. Delaware is a more opaque jurisdiction than Hong Kong, potentially shielding the shares from even UK government public scrutiny.
21 August
Harborne visits Johnson at Chequers again. A large group attends for a barbecue thrown by the prime minister. Towards the end, Johnson holds a call on Ukraine strategy with “the Quad” – the leaders of the US, Germany, France and UK. Harborne is the only guest to stay behind after the barbecue ends.
23 August
The DCGG crypto lobby group meets Nadhim Zahawi, Johnson’s chancellor.
6 September
Johnson steps down as prime minister.
3 October
Harborne donates £500,000 to the Conservative party.
13 October
At the Bitcoin Amsterdam conference, Farage tells a panel that crypto provides “the ultimate freedom, the ultimate liberty”, and argues against central banks getting at all involved in crypto, saying regulators “lack … understanding” and that central bank digital currencies are a mistake.
26 October
Parliament votes to recognise crypto and stablecoins as a legal form of payment. The bill was introduced under Johnson.
16 November
Johnson and Harborne meet in Singapore around the Bloomberg New Economy Forum. They dine together.
1 December
Johnson and Harborne have dinner at Teppan Ya in Singapore. The next day Johnson appears as the keynote speaker at a blockchain event.
December 2022 (exact date unknown)
Harborne holds a birthday gathering in Thailand at Kamalaya, Koh Samui, a wellness retreat he owns. At the shoreside table are Farage, Harborne, Farage’s pollster Chris Bruni-Lowe, George Cottrell and Cottrell’s sometime girlfriend, TV personality Georgia Toffolo. The grainy photographs from Kamalaya are the first publicly available images of Farage and Harborne together. Reform's representatives call it "just a birthday party" and threaten legal action over any characterisation of it as evidence of coordination.
2023
30 January
Johnson and Harborne have a call about Ukraine while Johnson is staying in New York. The call with Harborne, described as a “Ukraine readout”, is the only event listed in Johnson’s itinerary between arriving in the US and going to Washington DC to meet senior US figures about Ukraine.
1 February
Following the crypto/stablecoin bill passing, the Treasury publishes a detailed consultation and call for evidence on stablecoin and crypto-asset financial regulation. The document positions stablecoins as vital financial infrastructure.
12 June
Johnson ceases to be an MP.
7 September
Johnson and Harborne go to Ukraine for the Yalta European Strategy summit, flying on Harborne’s Dassault Falcon jet. Harborne is the only person to accompany Boris at the high-level opening ceremony. The ceremony is immediately followed by a meeting with Zelenskyy.
17 November
Harborne acquires 8,538,844 QinetiQ shares, taking his holding to 11.48%.
2024
5 April
Harborne gives £5m to Nigel Farage, which he does not declare. It comes to light in April 2026, reported by the Guardian.
23 May
Farage announces he won't stand in the 2024 general election.
3 June
Farage U-turns, and is announced as Reform leader and the parliamentary candidate for Clacton.
5 June
Farage mentions crypto on the campaign trail for the first time. He says “freeing up the UK for crypto is important for me” and announces that crypto is an “important part” of his financial services plan.
4 July
The 2024 general election is held. Farage is elected as MP for Clacton.
17 July
Harborne pays £33,000 for Farage's trip to the Republican National Convention to support Trump.
13 September
In a cryptocurrency scam dispute, the English and Welsh high court rules that Tether’s US stablecoin, USDT, is a legal form of property – a major boost to the token’s legal status.
2025
17 January
Harborne donates £27,616.76 to Farage to help fund a trip to attend Trump’s second inauguration. Harborne and Farage go together. Farage hosts a “Stars and Stripes” party.
21 January
Harborne acquires 4,200,000 QinetiQ shares, taking his holding to 12.63%.
March 2025
Harborne’s lawyers tell a Delaware court that he has had a “medical episode” which means that he is “temporarily unable to participate” in a lawsuit he is pursuing against the the Wall Street Journal over an article about Tether and Bitfinex published in 2023. The court pauses the Dow Jones proceedings against the paper’s owners, Dow Jones, until January 2026.
29 May
Reform’s first crypto policy announcement. Farage announces a crypto assets and digital finance bill at the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas during a fireside chat with Frank Corva, former White House correspondent for Bitcoin Magazine.
The bill promises the creation of a "bitcoin digital reserve" in the Bank of England, a reduction in capital gains tax on crypto from 24% to 10%, and making it illegal for any bank to close customer accounts simply because they send or receive funds from crypto exchanges or trade legal cryptocurrencies.
Nigel Farage holds up a copy of his proposed crypto assets and digital finance bill at The Bitcoin Conference, Las Vegas, 29 May 2025. Photo: Ian Maule/Getty
23 June
Reform UK announces the Britannia Card, its plan to give non-doms the chance to avoid some UK taxes by paying a £250,000 fee.
18 July
Trump signs the Genius Act into law – the first federal regulatory framework for US stablecoins. Tether pushed for the law with the help of four lobbying firms.
July (exact date unknown)
Representatives of US crypto companies Coinbase, Kraken and Ripple meet Reform head of policy Zia Yusuf in order to “woo” Farage.
20 September
Farage and Yusuf write a column calling on the Bank of England to abolish its proposed £20,000 cap on individual sterling stablecoin holdings.
24 September
Farage plugs Tether on Nick Ferrari's LBC show, calling the Bank of England "dinosaurs" for not adopting Tether's stablecoins: "Tether is about to be valued as a $500bn company.” He urges the UK to “embrace” it and become a “global trading centre” in stablecoin.
25 September
At a private meeting, Farage lobbies the governor of the Bank of England to abandon plans for a Central Bank Digital Currency and to create a “crypto strategic reserve”.
13 October
Weeks after the £9m donation from Harborne, Farage speaks at the UK Digital Asset Summit, announcing a raft of pro-crypto policies.
12 November
Harborne donates £3m to Reform UK.
On the same day, in an op-ed in City AM, Farage pledges there will be no cap on stablecoin ownership under a Reform government. "Crypto is no longer a fringe experiment. It is reshaping payments, finance and global commerce. At the heart of this revolution are stablecoins, digital tokens pegged one-to-one to real-world currencies like the pound or the dollar."
2026
21 February
Harborne pays £25,000 in a bid to fly Farage to the UK-US military base in the Chagos Islands. Farage’s trip ends in the Maldives because the UK government refuses him permission to visit the base.
March (exact date unknown)
Farage invests £275,650 in Stack BTC, former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s cryptocurrency venture.
25 March
The UK government introduces measures to ban crypto donations and impose a £100,000 cap on donations from overseas donors.
29 April
Harborne tells the Telegraph he will fight the overseas political donation cap proposed by Labour in court.
The Guardian reveals Harborne’s £5m gift to Farage, made in early 2024.
13 May
The parliamentary standards commissioner launches an inquiry into the £5m gift and whether Farage broke rules by not declaring it.
15 May
Harborne acquires 3,542,783 QinetiQ shares, taking his stake to 15.08% – the peak holding in the record, 78,531,288 shares.
30 May
Reform’s crypto assets and digital finance bill vanishes from the party’s website. They later tell the BBC it is still party policy.
22 June
The Bank of England abolishes plans for a £20,000 stablecoin cap.
28 June
It emerges that Harborne is registered to vote at Hampshire farmhouse. In December records described him as an overseas voter.
8 July
The Guardian reports that the undisclosed gift was reported to the National Crime Agency and that at least four Suspicious Activity Reports were filed by banks relating to transactions involving senior Reform figures and donors.
5 August
The FT reveals that on 10 June 2024, during the general election campaign, three things happened: George Cottrell’s mother, Fiona, gave £1,075,000 to a Richard Tice company, Britain Means Business; Britain Means Business then donated £500,000 to Reform UK; and Reform repaid £200,000 of the money to another Tice company, Tisun. The Guardian had previously reported that Cottrell gave his mother $1.4m shortly before she made the transfer. It is illegal to disguise the source of a political donation – this is likely to be what the police are investigating. Also, what happened to the other £575,000 is unclear – if it was used to settle an outstanding £1.08m debt that Reform owed Tice, that should also have been declared.
The Nerve is a fearless, independent media title launched by five former Guardian / Observer journalists: investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr, editors Sarah Donaldson, Jane Ferguson and Imogen Carter and creative director Lynsey Irvine. We cover culture, politics and tech, brought to you in twice weekly newsletters on Tuesdays and Fridays (sign up here). We rely on funding from our community, so please also consider joining us as a paying member. You can read more about our mission here.
