Tag: Christopher Harborne

Article by Max Colbert republished form DeSmog.

Nigel Farage’s donors include Mayfair club owners, fox hunt masters, and the landed gentry.

On 7 June, Nigel Farage announced that he was resigning as the MP for Clacton amid the political furore caused by his £5 million undeclared gift from crypto billionaire and major Reform UK donor Christopher Harborne. 

Farage said that he will stand for re-election in a contest he has described as “the people versus the establishment”.

However, judging by the makeup of Reform’s donors, the party is firmly embedded in the “establishment” that Farage has attempted to malign. 

Not only has Reform accepted millions from crypto barons and fossil fuel interests, it has also been bankrolled by aristocrats, peers, and owners of swanky private members’ clubs. 

“My family have known the Cottrell family and the broader Hesketh family for 50 years – a very successful aristocratic family,” said Reform deputy leader Richard Tice in an interview with Times Radio on 10 June. 

Tice was being questioned about a £1 million transfer from Fiona Cottrell to his company, Britain Means Business, half of which was donated to Reform. 

Fiona and her son George Cottrell have been in the news recently for their financial ties to Farage’s party – and they are far from Reform’s only old money backers. 

Fiona Cottrell is the daughter of Rupert Watson, 3rd Baron Manton. Under her maiden name, Fiona Watson, she was a former glamour model and one-time girlfriend of King Charles III when he was the Prince of Wales. On top of the £1 million she gave to Britain Means Business, Cottrell has donated £750,000 directly to Reform – although a large portion, £500,000, is currently being investigated by the Metropolitan Police.

George Cottrell – nicknamed “Posh George” – is part of Farage’s inner cadre, having been UKIP’s head of fundraising, and later Farage’s chief of staff. George, who was previously convicted of wire fraud after being arrested by undercover U.S. agents while attending the 2016 National Republican Convention with Farage, has also provided direct financial support to the Reform premier.

Cottrell helped to fund Farage’s anti-immigration campaign videos in 2023 and 2024, supplied him with security, and allowed the Reform leader to use an office in his five-storey London townhouse, which overlooks Buckingham Palace. Farage didn’t declare these gifts, and recently falsely claimed that he hadn’t received any additional support from George since being elected to Parliament.

As his nickname suggests, George is known for his opulent tastes, lives in a penthouse in Tivat, Montenegro, and regularly claims to have a trust fund of £250 million, according to the Sunday Times.

And his aristocratic lineage is extensive. George is the nephew of Thomas ‘Alexander’ Fermor-Hesketh, 3rd Baron Hesketh, a former Conservative donor who defected to UKIP. One of Alexander’s three sons, Frederick Hatton Fermor-Hesketh, donated £11,500 to Reform last year.

Another member of high society to have donated £100,000 to Reform is Isabel Marcelle Christina Goldsmith, daughter of Sir James Goldsmith and Bolivian heiress Maria Isabel Patiño – the former a financier who left a £1.5 billion fortune to his family on his death in 1997.

Isabel Goldsmith is an avid art collector and half-sister of Conservative politician Zac Goldsmith, who served in ministerial positions under Conservative leaders Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak. 

There is also a familial link between Zac Goldsmith’s mother, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, and another high-profile Reform donor – Robin Birley, who has donated £172,000 to the party.

Annabel is Robin’s mother, while his father, Mark Birley, was the founder of the famous ‘Annabel’s’ nightclub in Mayfair, London. 

Robin is himself a Mayfair club owner whose portfolio includes 5 Hertford Street, and Oswald’s (named after Robin’s grandfather) at 25 Albemarle Street, both of which are regular haunts of Reform politicians and their allies. 

Alexander Thévoz, who has documented the “secret life of London private members’ clubs”, writes that “to understand Robin Birley’s clubs is to understand Brexit”. In 2024, the high society magazine Tatler reported that Oswald’s had 2,000 members, “all at the apex of social power”.

Farage is a member of 5 Hertford Street, which earned the moniker of “the Brexit sex dungeon” around the time of the referendum due to the number of anti-EU figures who frequented the establishment. The club costs a rumoured £3,000 to join (including the £1,200 joining fee) and its members reportedly wander around “in smoking jackets, velvet slippers and signet rings”.

Farage appears to conduct a considerable amount of his political business from Birley’s clubs. It was reported in 2025 that the Reform leader held a fundraiser at Oswald’s – founded as a private wine club – to attract billionaire donors including former Tory patron Bassim Haidar, all while popping “jeroboams of white burgundy and double magnums of Tempo d’Angelus”. The event reportedly raised £1 million for the party. 

Birley isn’t Reform’s only private members’ club donor. Another backer, Steven McTiernan, behind three donations worth a combined £15,000, appears to be the director of another exclusive private members’ club, the Oriental Club (or Oriental Club 1824 Limited), located in Stratford House, near Oxford Street in central London. 

The club is described on its website as being “founded by returning officers and officials from India and the East for whom the Club was a valued haven in London”, and “a place where high ranking Members of the East India Company could meet and do business in pleasant, comfortable surroundings whilst home on leave”. The Duke of Wellington was, it says, “the Club’s first and only President in 1824”.

Reform’s donor base is also populated by several individuals with peerages.  

Lord Anthony Bamford, who stood down from the Upper Chamber in 2024, is one of Reform’s more recent donors, having previously given vast sums to the Conservative Party. 

With a combined wealth of £10.3 billion, the Bamford family gave Farage’s party £200,000 in November last year through its multinational construction conglomerate JCB, while Lord Bamford paid for a helicopter flight for Farage and one of his staff members to tour a JCB site in 2024, valued at £8,413.

Following JCB’s donation, Reform’s senior figures have publicly praised JCB’s Pothole Pro equipment, which is said to speed up the fixing of road damage – a key issue in local authorities, many of which Reform now controls. 

The machine was even promoted on Reform’s local campaign literature in the run-up to this year’s May elections.

Reform also has financial ties to the owner of the Daily Mail, Viscount Rothermere, the great-grandson of Harold Harmsworth, who founded the newspaper in the late 19th century and was handed hereditary titles in the 1910s.

Viscount Rothermere’s spouse, Viscountess Rothermere (Claudia Harmsworth), gave £50,000 to Reform in September 2025. The family is worth £2 billion, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, and owns the Daily Mail’s parent company through complex offshore structures. The pair also own Ferne House, a country manor set in 225 acres of parkland in Wiltshire, which they revamped in the early 2000s at a reported cost of £40 million. 

Not all of Reform’s donors are aristocrats, but even those lacking old money or a peerage have a habit of engaging in aristocratic hobbies. 

Reform donor Johan Christofferson, who gave the party £100,000 in June 2025, has a keen interest in fox hunting. A hedge fund manager and former Tory donor, Christofferson was the joint-master of a Scottish fox hunt that was prosecuted in 2017 for illegal hunting. Farage, for his part, is a vocal supporter of the blood sport, and has opposed the ban on the practice. 

As documented by DeSmog, senior Reform politician Zia Yusuf – also a party donor – made his money by providing luxury experiences to the super-rich.

Commenting on the importance of transparency around political donations, Cary Mitchell, executive director of strategy at Best for Britain, which campaigns to strengthen the UK’s democracy, said: “Nigel Farage likes to present himself as a man of the people, but with a parliamentary investigation by the standards watchdog into undeclared gifts, there are clearly questions for him to answer when it comes to transparency.

“Scrutiny of political donations is a critically important part of the electoral process, allowing voters to assess who is seeking to represent them, and evading it demonstrates a fundamental contempt for voters and the UK’s values as a parliamentary democracy.”

Article by Max Colbert republished form DeSmog.