It seems certain now, after last week’s local election results, that we are destined to follow America down the same destructive path as Trump’s MAGA movement. A significant portion of the UK electorate are clearly impervious to reason, logic, truth or facts. Reform UK Ltd, led by Nigel Farage, has become a cult made up of the terminally stupid. Following revelations that he secretly took £5 million from the British-born, Thai-based, cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne, in 2024, just before he changed his mind about standing as an MP, people across the country went out and voted for his party in droves.
Not only that, his party chairman, Zia Yusuf, announced as official policy that any constituency voting for the Green Party would risk getting an immigration detention centre if and when Reform UK becomes the governing party. Vote Reform, and he guaranteed you won’t. This is a threat, and not even a veiled one.
In Sunderland, where the first result in the 2016 referendum presaged the Brexit victory, voters have rewarded Farage for their ten years of increasing austerity and social hardship by giving his party 58 seats out of the 75 on the local council. You can’t begin to fathom the logic in that one, when Reform’s major policy plank is to cut taxes! What do they think will happen?
Despite all of that, plus the widely reported incompetence and chaos that reign across the ten local councils won by Reform in May 2025, Farage came out the clear winner, although he didn’t do as well in vote share as he did a year ago. And that shouldn’t be a surprise.
The BBC’s projected national vote share, calculated from the local results, indicates that Reform UK are down 4 points on 2025, Labour is down 3 points, the LibDems down one point, while the Tories are up 2 and the Greens up by 7. Here are the numbers:
Labour 17% (-3)
Conservative 17% (+2)
LibDems 16% (-1)
Greens 18% (+7)
Reform 26% (-4)
Assuming you think Labour, LibDems and Greens are broadly left, they total 51% while Reform and the Tories only manage 43%. I suspect in 2028-9 we will see five parties in England with roughly equal vote shares, and the outcome completely unpredictable. The PM will be determined by a lot of horse-trading, more or less the same as a PR system.
After Harborne’s £5 million bung became public, Farage immediately went silent to avoid the story dominating the local election, and it was notable that much of the right-wing media didn’t bother reporting the huge sum paid in 2024 to a man who may well be prime minister in 2029. The Sun and The Daily Mail didn't mention it at all. Only after the votes were counted did Farage give interviews, including this one to Beth Rigby of Sky News:
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has said there was "no obligation" to declare a £5m gift he received from a billionaire backer before he became an MP. Sky’s Beth Rigby points out the rules— Peter Stefanovic (@peterstefanovic.bsky.social) 9 May 2026 at 09:45
Just to be clear, the rules which he and Rigby talked about are HERE. The way I read paragraph 2, the 'gift' is undoubtedly declarable.
I note in his register of interests, he recently accepted three tickets to a boxing match worth £1749 from a British-South African entrepreneur, Avi Lasarow. This is one entry in a very long list by the way. It’s clearly a personal gift, but registered under the rules in case it influences his behaviour or voting in some way.
But £5 million from a crypto billionaire resident in Thailand, is not, apparently. Harborne is far and away the biggest donor to Reform UK, having contributed around £22 million, about two-thirds of the party’s running costs. Farage was previously critical of Starmer accepting a tiny fraction of that money from Labour donor Lord Alli for suits and glasses, which were all properly declared (although £5000 for his wife’s clothes weren’t). He described that as a “mess.”
Farage says the £5 million was unconditional and was to provide for his safety and security, which implies it did have a purpose - that Harborne wants to ensure Farage’s future. The secretive billionaire obviously realises Reform UK Ltd is a one-man band.
Bear in mind that Reform now has a detailed and quite liberal policy on cryptocurrency published in May 2025. As far as I can make out, they are the only UK party to have such a policy. The other parties seem more concerned about regulating untraceable cryptocurrency donations to British political parties. I don’t know if Harborne was consulted about Reform's policy, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was, would you? If implemented Harborne's company Tether will be far more valuable.
What it shows is that Farage is amenable to receiving large, undisclosed, sums of money. The principle doesn’t trouble him. Therefore, he needs to be asked how many other significant gifts he has taken secretly? We simply don’t know.
It's also very strange that his partner's family apparently had to provide the £885,000 for his house in Clacton when he had £5 million in the bank. I wonder how they greeted the news?
The electorate seems to want rid of Kier Starmer, but the reasons are unknown. The consensus seems to be that ‘he hasn’t done anything’ as if he was expected to transform the nation in twelve months. Another prime minister, from any party, will face the same problem, which is, of course, a lack of money and that in large part is down to Farage, aka Mr Brexit. You can't make this stuff up.
Starmer isn’t a leader, that’s true. He’s a detail man, a manager, even perhaps a micro-manager. The problem with Farage is that he’s neither a leader or a manager. He can’t work with a team, his parties are characterised by frequent departures of his closest and most senior colleagues amid rows. Witness Rupert Lowe (now leader of Restore Britain and sinking into oblivion) and Ben Habib. And he’s certainly not a detail man. I’m not sure he even wants to be PM with the civil service and protection offers around him 24/7 watching his every move. He is only in it for the money.
He dreams up policies and ditches them at the drop of a hat. There seems to be no careful process in Reform UK Ltd for adopting or changing policies, no committees, no focus groups, no detailed papers circulated for comment. He spits out policies like a machine gun, and most don't survive the slightest scrutiny.
As he gets closer to Downing Street, the tougher the questioning will become. In power, Reform will be hobbled as every party would be by a serious lack of money, a problem which will only be made worse if we distance ourselves from Europe even more than we have so far.
It's also bizarre that virtually all parties now have quite extreme policies. SNP and Plaid want to split from UK. Sinn Fein want Irish unification. The Greens want to quit NATO. Reform is committed to mass deportation of all illegal immigrants (up to 600,000 people) "over one parliament" and leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), repealing the UK’s Human Rights Act, and “disapplying” for five years the Refugee Convention and other international agreements that could prevent deportations to regimes which engage in torture. Labour is trying to ape Reform on immigration, but slightly less extreme.
The Tories also want to leave the ECHR and repeal the HR Act. Only the LibDems seem semi-normal.
Finally, can I point you to some comments made by Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski about the prospects of Britain applying to rejoin the EU at some point in the future. Sikorski is an Anglophile, studied PPE at Oxford after being granted political asylum in Britain in 1982. He was a journalist for The Observer and The Spectator between 1986 and 1989.
Sikorski said that during the 2016 referendum he travelled to Britain often and he found that: “Not a single member of the British cabinet understood the difference between a free trade area and a single market, because you you didn’t bother to learn how the EU actually worked. And without that homework, we wouldn’t want you as a member because you would, you would be unhappy and we would be unhappy."
And also a Times article by Ben Judah, former special adviser to David Lammy in 2024-26 when he was foreign secretary and deputy PM. Judah says this:
“There is no middle way with the EU. What I saw of our negotiations with Brussels is this. Europe will never offer truly game-changing access to the single market unless we join the single market. Pursuit of a Swiss-style patchwork, which is this government’s stated goal of deals, is a fool’s errand. It’s not on offer, Brussels hates it and it took decades to build up.”
It’s a mark of how little our leaders understand the EU that this needs to be said ten years after the campaign to leave began. The UK still harbours a mad belief that we can somehow gain advantageous access to the EU single market without being a member of it.
