On Monday night—at the height of the row over the £72m Reform crypto donations—a TV anchor went rogue and launched into a rambling diatribe defending the dosh and attacking criticism of the donations as “like an old communist country.”
Only joking! The TV anchor was none other than Nigel Farage. And here he was—back on the GB News show which has paid him more than £600,000 since becoming an MP—talking about … Nigel Farage!
Well, frankly, who better to talk about Nigel Farage than Nigel Farage himself, especially when he’s on every front page making the news? The man of the moment discussing the man of the moment. What’s not to like?
The pedantic will complain that GB News is supposedly obliged to be impartial and that having Nigel talking about himself might not pass the Ofcom smell test. But, frankly, Ofcom, has suffered from Anosmia—the medical term for a complete loss of the sense of smell—for some time now. So, the sleepy regulator, if it stirred itself to watch the programme—“Nigel Farage BLASTS Labour’s plans to cap donations to parties” as it was headlined on YouTube—might well have yawned and gone back to sleep.
The rest of us might like to sit up and pay attention.
Now, the cunning olds cats running GB News had obviously advised their star presenter that he mustn’t turn the programme into an outright party political broadcast. That would be too obvious, even for Ofcom. So Farage introduced a couple of B-List guests called John and Jo to offer a modicum of challenge. But, in a reversal of normal journalistic practice, the subject of the headlines was holding the microphone. Big difference.
Who is joining the dots in this stampede to drown British politics in billionaire money?
Just over 20 weeks ago we were shocked to discover that a foreign-based crypto tycoon, Christopher Harborne, had secretly slipped the Reform leader £5m. It was doubly shocking: the sheer size of the donation and the fact that Farage didn’t feel obliged to declare it.
A week ago, that sum was dwarfed by the revelation that another crypto billionaire, convicted (and Trump-pardoned) criminal, Ben Delo, was going to shower more than seven times that sum on getting Reform elected.
Just as we were absorbing the implications of such a vast swamp of cash deluging our politics came the news that Harborne, was going to match Delo’s £36m. So—in the space of five months—an astonishing £77m has been tipped the way of Farage himself, or to Reform UK Party Limited, a company incorporated in February 2025, by just two men.
But there is a further effective subsidy in play here: the vast losses incurred by GB News—described by Andrew Neil as “Reform TV”. And he should know, since he started it.
Neil had the idea of creating a centre-right channel, regulated by Ofcom. The main funders were Paul Marshall, a hedge fund manager who also started UnHerd and subsequently bought the Spectator, and the Dubai-based Legatum Group. In Neil’s words the investors turned out to be “above all rabid Brexiteers…. They worshipped the ground that Nigel Farage walked on. Just as Fox basically became the channel of Donald Trump, it’s clear they have turned GB News into the Reform channel… I think they see themselves as in the vanguard of the Reform movement.”
Marshall and Legatum, headed by Christopher Chandler, a New Zealand-born investment manager, have absorbed £131.5m of losses since GB News was launched five years ago. So if you think of the channel as little more than the media wing of Farage’s political project, the total subsidy funnelled his way by just four men tops £200m.
Join the dots.
The main political parties have been remarkably complacent about the way the Delo/Harborne/Marshall/Chandler millions have been directed towards the Reform cause.
Compare and contrast the howls of outrage when it seemed as if the Telegraph might fall into the hands of a US private-equity firm backed by finance from the UAE (coincidentally, the base for Legatum). In no time at all Rishi Sunak’s government rushed through urgent legislation which effectively killed off the Red Bird bid.
The Starmer government commissioned the Rycroft Review into foreign financial influence in UK politics but Labour has done little since its publication in March. There is now a belated scramble to retrospectively prevent what was utterly foreseeable last spring.
Meanwhile Labour appointed a businessman called Ian Cheshire to succeed dozy Lord Grade as chair of Ofcom. He was described to me as “no Thomas Dewey.” Which is a shame, since Dewey was a punchy former New York governor with a successful record in taking on vested interests.
Talk about missed opportunities.
But there may yet be a twist of plot. Reform has apparently briefed that it plans to spend part of its £72m windfall on launching something called Reform TV. Not content with having one broadcaster pumping out pro-Reform messaging night and day, they want another one.
The second channel will reportedly broadcast content over YouTube, where it will jostle for attention with the other Reform TV Channel, which boasts 2.18m subscribers. According to Michael Crick, a biographer of Nigel Farage, a former head of digital at GB News, one Geoff Marsh, has been contracted to spent 100 days working out just how Farage TV would work. “He looks set to become one of the channel’s first permanent signings,” reports Crick. “The initial target, I hear, is 25 new staff, many poached from GB News.”
It is win-win for Farage, whose own company holds nearly half a million GB News shares, which could amount to a 2 per cent holding. With £72m in the Reform Ltd bank, he could afford to pay himself double the £3,000 GB News fee. And he could talk about himself every night without—ha, ha!—the fear that Ofcom might one day recover its sense of smell.
Andy Burnham has a lot on his plate, but is he paying attention to all this? Farage and his billionaire backers smell blood.
