a \u00a35m gift Harborne had given him<\/a> before he became an MP.<\/p>\nHarborne, who until now had kept a low profile, said he wanted to speak out to explain his motivation and his relationship with Farage.<\/p>\n
Farage said he had been given the \u00a35m gift to pay for personal protection “so that I would be safe and secure for the rest of my life”.<\/p>\n
But Labour and the Conservatives have accused Farage of breaking parliamentary rules by not declaring the \u00a35m gift in the register of interests for MPs – and the Tories have referred the Reform leader to Parliamentary Standards Commissioner.<\/p>\n
The Conservatives have also raised concerns with the Electoral Commission, which said it was considering the information.<\/p>\n
Farage’s team say there was no requirement to declare the money because it was a “personal unconditional gift that was given before he was elected”.<\/p>\n
Last year, Harborne donated \u00a39m to Reform UK – the biggest single donation to a UK political party by a living person.<\/p>\n
The cryptocurrency investor and aviation entrepreneur gave \u00a312m in total to Reform UK in 2025.<\/p>\n
Harborne has previously given large sums to the Conservatives under Boris Johnson’s leadership, as well as Reform’s predecessor the Brexit Party in 2019 and 2020.<\/p>\n
In March, the government announced changes to “protect UK democracy from scourge of foreign actors and financial influence”, including an annual \u00a3100,000 cap on donations from British citizens living abroad.<\/p>\n
At the time, Reform UK’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf accused Labour of “choking off legal funding for its main rival”.<\/p>\n
Harborne echoed that view in his interview with the Telegraph, telling the newspaper: “I think I’m the reason for that legislation.”<\/p>\n
He added: “I don’t believe the government has a right to stop me, and they won’t. There is always a way, we just don’t know what it’s going to be yet.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Housing Secretary Steve Reed denied the cap was designed to target Reform UK’s donors, after announcing the move…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":559021,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-559020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559020\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/559021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}