Nigel Farage claims the Guardian’s revelation of the donation from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne was the result off a Russian ‘hack-and-leak’ operation. Photograph: Jack Taylor/Reuters
Ciaran Martin says Reform UK leader’s allegation over Guardian report on £5m gift ‘entirely unsubstantiated’
Nigel Farage’s claim that a Russian hack was behind a Guardian report on the £5m gift he received from a crypto billionaire has been described as “without any merit” by a former head of the National Cyber Security Centre.
Ciaran Martin, founding chief executive of the agency, which is part of GCHQ, said Farage’s allegation, if true, would have major implications for UK policy towards Russia but that the Reform UK leader had yet to provide “a shred of evidence”.
It is understood that Farage is yet to ask the NCSC to investigate his apparent belief that the Guardian’s revelation of the multimillion-pound donation by crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne was the result of a Russian “hack-and-leak” operation.
Martin said such an operation by the Kremlin would amount to an “unprecedentedly aggressive intervention” into Britain’s democracy and that Farage should both contact the NCSC to investigate and make public the technical evidence he has for his claim.
Martin said: “An aspiring prime minister has essentially claimed that Russia has launched an unprecedentedly aggressive intervention – a malicious intervention – in British politics, and he’s not produced a shred of evidence to support that claim.
“He’s made a serious foreign policy and national security allegation which if true would have massive implications for British policy towards Russia.
…
A spokesperson for the Guardian described Farage’s claim as “an attempt to deflect attention from legitimate scrutiny of his financial affairs”. They added: “Nigel Farage is once again hiding behind a baseless attack on the media rather than facing up to scrutiny from journalists and politicians.”
Nigel Farage reminds you that he’s the man that brought you Brexit and asks what could possibly go wrong.Led by Donkeys poster quotes Nigel Farage “Brexit has failed”
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Funeral ceremonies held at Al-Shifa Hospital for two Palestinians killed in an Israeli airstrike on the Jabalia Refugee Camp despite the ceasefire in Gaza City, Gaza, Palestine on May 24, 2026. [Saeed M. M. T. Jaras – Anadolu Agency]
Five Palestinians, including three members of the same family, were killed and five others injured in fresh Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip on Sunday amid daily violations of an ongoing ceasefire, medical sources said.
One of the Palestinians was killed by Israeli gunfire in the center of Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza and his body was transferred to Al-Shifa Hospital in western Gaza City, the sources told Anadolu.
A couple and their child were also killed, and three others were wounded in an Israeli airstrike that targeted their home in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, the sources added.
In a separate incident, the sources said a child died from injuries sustained in an Israeli strike that targeted a police headquarters in northwestern Gaza on Saturday.
In northern Gaza, a Palestinian fisherman was moderately injured after Israeli naval forces fired shells and machine-gun fire at fishing boats off the coast of Gaza City, according to the sources.
Another Palestinian was injured by shrapnel from a shell fired by Israeli forces on the beach in the Al-Sudaniya area, northwest of the enclave.
In a related development, the Israeli army carried out demolition operations targeting buildings and facilities in northern Gaza. Local sources reported hearing a large explosion resulting from the demolitions.
In Khan Younis in southern Gaza, Israeli forces also carried out similar demolition operations east of the city, accompanied by gunfire and artillery shelling near Bani Suheila roundabout, according to the local sources.
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, over 880 people have been killed and more than 2,645 others injured in Israeli attacks since the ceasefire was announced on Oct. 10, 2025.
The agreement was meant to halt Israel’s two-year war that killed more than 72,000 people, most of them women and children, injured over 172,000 since October 2023, and caused massive destruction affecting 90% of civilian infrastructure.
Nigel Farage objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Strait of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don’t need people to join wars after they’ve already won. He’s challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.
The UN just released its 2025 Global Climate Report, and, predictably, the outlook for our earth is incredibly dire. The past 11 years were the 11 warmest on record, and Earth’s energy imbalance—the amount of solar energy absorbed versus the amount Earth radiates back into space—is also the highest on record. Greenhouse gas emissions continued to increase through 2025, despite the world crossing the 1.5°C threshold marked in the Paris Agreement above which the worst effects of global heating will take place.
There is no shortage of urgent climate news right now. The scientific consensus that we need to phase out fossil fuels fast has not changed, despite President Donald Trump’s anti-climate policies rolling back environmental protections and clean energy growth. But data shows coverage about climate change in US news outlets has plunged.
Downward trend
FAIR’s research has found that online news coverage of climate change has been trending down. A search of the term “climate change” in Media Cloud’s US–National dataset, which indexes 248 online outlets, found that there was almost 32% less climate coverage in 2025 than 2024.
This trend is similar in TV news. A recent Media Matters (3/4/26) study found that climate coverage on major US commercial broadcast TV networks was down 35% in 2025.
Zooming out to the past five years to date, results show a steep downward trend. In 2021, 2.4% of US online news pieces in MediaCloud contained the phrase “climate change.” In 2025, that percentage was 1.3%, which is a nearly 46% decrease.
This trend continues in 2026. Between January 1 and March 31 2026, climate stories made up 1.1% of total US news coverage. That’s a 42% decrease compared to the same period in 2021, when climate stories made up 1.9% of coverage.
Coverage of climate change in MediaCloud’s US news database peaked at 3.4% of content in October 2021. This was in the runup to the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow (10/31/21–11/13/21), and was at the time the world’s fourth-warmest October on record, although now it’s only the seventh-warmest. Coverage reached its nadir in January 2026, at just under 1%, and as of March 31, 2026, sat at 1.1%.
The unlabeled ‘crisis’
The term “climate crisis,” which carries with it a more urgent connotation than the more familiar “climate change,” has nearly disappeared from media lexicon. The term, which averaged 0.4% of coverage in 2021, reaching its peak in November 2021 at 0.7%, has averaged 0.1% of content in the first quarter of 2026.
Though it has never approached the usage of “climate change,” there was a time when the terms “crisis” or “emergency” to describe the heating planet were popularized in media and political lexicon (Public Citizen, 6/22/19). In 2019, activist Greta Thunberg (Twitter/X, 6/4/19) declared:
It’s 2019. Can we all now please stop saying “climate change” and instead call it what it is: climate breakdown, climate crisis, climate emergency, ecological breakdown, ecological crisis and ecological emergency?
Months later, the Guardian (10/16/19) changed its style guide to “introduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world.” The editors explained:
Climate change is no longer considered to accurately reflect the seriousness of the overall situation; use climate emergency or climate crisis instead to describe the broader impact of climate change.
In 2026, this terminology is arguably more applicable now than it has ever been. The years 2015–25 were the hottest on record. Yet while the Guardian continues its policy, it appears increasingly isolated.
Trump and climate silence
Under a president who called climate change a “con job” at the UN, and whose EPA edited its “Climate Change Science” page to blame global heating on debunked “natural causes” theories like changes in Earth’s orbit and volcanic activity, news media should be redoubling their efforts to tell climate change stories with accuracy.
Instead, one cannot help but notice a correlation between Trump’s second presidency and dwindling media attention to the climate. From January 2021 through November 2024, climate pieces were an average of 2.2% of total news content per month. From December 2024, after Trump was elected, through March 2026, climate pieces averaged more than 46% lower, at 1.2%.
The lack of recent coverage is not for lack of newsworthy climate stories. In addition to the release of the 2025 UN report, in March alone:
The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research filed a lawsuit charging that the Trump administration shut down the Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research to get back at Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, whom Trump has clashed with (NCAR/UCAR, 3/16/26).
Scientists found that March’s record-shattering heatwave in the Western US would have been “virtually impossible” without the climate crisis. The heatwave included the hottest March days on record in the US, with two 112°F days in Arizona (NBC New York, 3/30/26).
The Trump administration paid a French energy giant $1 billion to cancel its offshore wind projects and invest in fossil fuels instead (Grist, 3/25/26).
More than 160 environmental and public health groups called for the firing of EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, who has rolled back national environmental regulations, including air quality standards, pollution limits for oil and gas drilling, and regulations on power plant and vehicle emissions (Earth.org, 3/26/26).
An oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began in late March, killing wildlife and damaging reefs (Al Jazeera, 3/27/26).
Iran War and climate
The US and Israel’s unprovoked war on Iran is causing global oil and gas price shocks—and is being reported as the worst energy crisis in history, topping the crises of the 1970s and the Ukraine invasion of 2022 (Fortune, 3/23/26). With the war dominating headlines—the terms “Iran” and “war” made up 10.5% of US news coverage in March, per MediaCloud’s data—there were plenty of opportunities to discuss the war’s impact on climate.
While 5,012 stories in MediaCloud’s US news database mentioned Iran and oil or gas prices during March 2026, only 219 (4.4%) mentioned those topics in relation to renewable energy or climate change.
Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, spoke at the 2026 Green Growth Summit in Brussels, explaining that a just transition from fossil fuels is not only an environmental imperative, but also an economic and national security one:
Sunlight doesn’t depend on narrow and vulnerable shipping straits, wind blows without massive taxpayer-funded naval escorts [and] renewable energy allows countries to insulate themselves from global turmoil and to side-step might-is-right politics.
Renewables like solar and wind are less beholden to geopolitics than fossil fuels, which are vulnerable to volatile shipping lanes and international relations in the specific regions of the world they are produced. Once solar panels and wind turbines are installed, they allow for energy to be produced locally and predictably. As a result, their prices remain stable over time (Global Witness, 4/2/26).
Solar and wind have also been cheaper than fossil fuels for quite some time. A 2025 Lazard report found that utility-scale solar and wind have been the lowest-cost generation sources for 10 years, even without tax subsidies.
This is not the first time in recent years the corporate press failed to make the connection between war-inflated gas prices and the need for renewable energy. In June 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, UN sanctions on Russian oil led to a global shortage, causing the national gas price average to top $5 a gallon. Out of 93 nightly news episodes in June 2022 that discussed gas prices, only 18 made even a passing climate connection, and only one made a pro-climate argument (FAIR.org, 7/29/22).
Impacts of climate
The Nation (3/5/26): “The climate implications of this new war are not the center of attention at the moment, but they are essential context for understanding what’s at stake.”
What’s more, as Mark Hertsgaard and Giles Trendle wrote for The Nation (3/5/26), “Modern warfare is inextricably linked with climate change.” Whether or not a war is fought over oil, the authors note, it cannot be fought without it. If the world’s militaries were a country, they would have the fourth-largest national carbon footprint.
Modern warfare emits astronomical amounts of carbon, which cause extreme heat and other dangerous weather events that impact livelihoods and destabilize economies—conditions that lead to more war.
And warfare also has immediate environmental and public health impacts, some directly linked to fossil fuels. After Israel attacked Iran’s oil facilities, black rain fell in Tehran. The heavy metals and toxic chemicals unleashed have the potential for major public health ramifications, leaching into food supplies and waterways in addition to air. Health risks from this pollution include lung problems, heart problems and cancer.
Climate change does not occur in a vacuum. It is relevant to virtually everything that happens on Earth, from natural disasters to your weekly expenses. Studies show that 80–89% of people worldwide want to see stronger action on climate change from their governments.
It is news media’s responsibility to reflect reality and to address the concerns of the communities they serve, regardless of the priorities of the administration in power. Failing to mention climate change where it is relevant will not stop it from occurring, but inattention will surely make it worse.
This story is part of the 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
FAIR’s work is sustained by our generous contributors, who allow us to remain independent. Donate today to be a part of this important mission.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
The sun rising over London, seen from Richmond Park, on Sunday. Photograph: Brook Mitchell/AFP/Getty
Highest temperatures of 2026 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland as Kew Gardens in London reaches 32.3C
England, Wales and Northern Ireland recorded their highest temperatures of 2026 on Sunday, which was also the UK’s hottest May day for at least 79 years.
Kew Gardens in west London recorded 32.3C (90.1F), Cardiff 27.4C and Armagh 23.4C.
Scotland reached 23.5C in Edinburgh, just 0.1C below the record of 23.6C set in Aboyne on 1 May.
The first area of the UK to hit the heatwave threshold was Santon Downham in Suffolk, which reached the criteria of recording temperatures of more than 27C for three consecutive days at 11.30am on Sunday.
The other areas officially in heatwave conditions are Heathrow, Kew Gardens and Northolt in London, Benson in Oxfordshire, Brooms Barn in Suffolk, and High Beach and Writtle in Essex.
Temperatures could rise again on Monday, with possible highs of between 33C and 34C.
The climate crisis is increasing the likelihood of extreme heat. Large parts of western Europe are experiencing similar peaks, and the French national weather agency, Météo-France, said periods of exceptional heat are to be expected “more and more often and more and more prematurely, and to be more and more intense”.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Questions about a £5 million gift to the leader of Reform UK Nigel Farage from a crypto billionaire simply won’t go away. As someone who spends their life thinking, writing and talking about money in politics, I’ve been left with at least five questions that remain unanswered. These centre not just on the donation and Reform’s financial arrangements, but also on what it says about the system of political finance in the UK.
1. Should he have declared it?
It appears so. It was reported in late April that Farage had received the cash from Christopher Harborne. This was shortly before deciding to stand in the seat of Clacton in the 2024 general election, which he subsequently won.
Farage claims that because it was a personal gift it did not need to be registered. However, the House of Commons code of conduct states that the possible motive of the gifter and what the donation is to be used for should be considered. If there is doubt, the code is clear that it should be registered.
Harborne has said he expected nothing in return, but only wanted to ensure Farage’s security. But given the timing of the gift, in 2024, questions might be asked about his motive. At this time, according to the Electoral Commission, Harborne had given about £1.5 million to the Conservatives (and £1 million to Boris Johnson’s private office). He had also given millions to Reform ahead of its 2019 general election campaign.
As such, Harborne was not some unknown benefactor. This information, at the very least, creates doubt about whether the donation ought to be declared. And there have also been questions over a house Farage bought weeks after receiving the £5 million.
But the question of whether the money should have been declared is now one for the parliamentary standards commissioner, which is investigating whether Farage broke the rules.
2. What does it tell us about how Reform is funded?
One thing that we know about Reform is that its funding base is remarkably shallow. In fact, investigative journalist Peter Geoghegan has found that 75% of all the reportable donations Reform has received came from just three men. They are Christopher Harborne, millionaire businessman Jeremy Hosking and Reform’s own deputy leader, Richard Tice.
Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice is one of the three main donors bankrolling the party. EPA/NEIL HALL
I have shown in my research that the UK is very much a donor-led democracy where the few get more of a say than the many. So concerns about the wealthy having a larger influence on the way politics is run are certainly not a Reform-shaped novelty.
3. Should the public be worried?
Yes. It has been argued that for elections to have integrity, four things need to be on show: participation, contestation, deliberation and adjudication. Importantly, perception is as important as reality here.
Public opinion fluctuates, but one of the more robust polling findings is that the public has always been and remains concerned that donors have an outsized influence on British politics. So whether they do or not (and it’s notoriously hard to prove), the damage is done.
4. Should Reform be worried?
When he was questioned about Farage’s £5 million, Tice maintained that voters knew about it and “they said, we want more Nigel”. It is true that if you ask the UK public to rank issues that matter to them, then (unless you happen to knock on my door) party funding wouldn’t come close to the top ten.
And yet standards never seem to matter to politicians – until they really do. Just ask Boris Johnson, Keir Starmer or Peter Mandelson, all of whom have faced questions of their own. There are many populists who build personas as mavericks who refuse to play by the rules. While voters might not always agree with their methods, they get results. (And some voters might even think: gosh, you can’t help but love them a little bit for it.)
Nigel Farage might not think the public cares about this. But it appears that they do. And maybe Farage knows this too. If not, he’d probably have been happy to mention the £5 million in the first place.
5. Why don’t Labour care?
It remains astonishing that Labour seems to be so uninterested in addressing a financial pattern of behaviour that could risk undermining democracy – which the party is professing to protect.
It seems even more astonishing that the party seems so casual about addressing the issue of mega-donors while a bill is going through parliament that is quite literally designed to restore faith in politics.
But it may be that the government doesn’t want to cap donations (as many other countries do) because it thinks it would mean introducing more state funding. But the problem has now become too stark to ignore, and a compromise position is imperative.
This could be a “democracy backstop” donation cap of £1 million. This is far higher than any other cap I know of around the world. But it would reflect the voluntarist tradition of the UK – and could start a conversation. Get a backstop in place, and then conduct research on how much it can be lowered without a) risking the financial ruin of parties or b) the need for further state support.
After the May elections, Labour said it was listening to voters and that as a government it needed to be bold. It’s time for the party to put its money where its mouth is. That is, before a mega-donor does it for them.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Nigel Farage explains the politics of Reform UK: Racism, Fake anti-establishmentism, Deregulation, Corporatism, Climate Change Denial, Mysogyny and Transphobia.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
