Reform UK leader Nigel Farage at the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Abu Dhabi, December 2025. Credit: Nigel Farage / X
The leader of Reform, a pro-oil party, received lavish hospitality from Abu Dhabi.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage received freebies worth £10,000 from the Abu Dhabi government, new records show.
Farage’s latest register of interests shows that he accepted flights and accommodation to attend the Abu Dhabi Formula 1 Grand Prix in December, paid for by the regime that runs the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This included a front-row “paddock” pass to the event worth £4,500.
The records show that Farage also attended “meetings” during his visit.
The Reform leader has previously mocked Prime Minister Keir Starmer for receiving gifts from donors.
Reform campaigns for the UK to dramatically expand its fossil fuel production, scrap its clean energy policies, and dismantle its climate targets.
The UAE is an autocratic monarchy and petrostate. Roughly 30 percent of the country’s GDP is directly based on its oil and gas output.
Reform received 92 percent of its donations between the 2019 and 2024 UK elections from polluting sources and climate science deniers, while its treasurer Nick Candy has claimed the party is actively raising money from oil executives.
Senior party figures have also praised U.S. President Donald Trump’s “drill baby drill” agenda, which has seen his administration recently capture Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and pledge that the U.S. oil industry will “go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure and start making money for the country”.
Farage denies basic climate science, claiming it’s “absolutely nuts” for carbon dioxide to be considered a pollutant. The party is being advised by the Heartland Institute, a U.S.-based pro-Trump climate denial group. Farage helped to launch Heartland’s UK-EU branch in December last year.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading climate science body, has said “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet.”
The IPCC has also stated that carbon dioxide pollution “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, which has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought” – all of which “put a disproportionate burden on low-income households and thus increase poverty levels.”
Key individuals in Reform have also heaped praise on the UAE in recent months.
Reform deputy leader Richard Tice has said he travels to the UAE “every six to eight weeks” to visit his partner, Telegraph columnist Isabel Oakeshott, who moved to Dubai in January 2025.
Tice has praised the UAE for its sense of national pride, work ethic, law and order, integration of migrants, and energy sector, while stating that the UK is “decadent” and “going bust”.
In an article last January for the website Arabian Gulf Business Insight, Candy praised the UAE’s crime prevention and “robust law enforcement”, adding: “Coupled with a high standard of living, excellent healthcare and top-tier schools, the UAE offers a lifestyle that few other locations can match.”
Candy also lauded “the wisdom and visionary nature of the UAE’s leadership”, writing that “the quality of government officials is mind-blowing”. By contrast, he said that Western countries are ruled by “second-tier individuals” who “allow political agendas to get in the way of what is best for the country”.
The UAE does not hold popular elections, and there are no political parties. Critics of the government are often jailed, while migrant workers face “widespread abuses” according to Human Rights Watch, including wage theft and passport confiscation.
The country also discriminates against women and its penal code allows the authorities to arrest people for campaigns promoting the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people.
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.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Keir Starmer refuses to be outcnuted by Nigel Farage’s chasing the racist bigot vote.
The Daily Telegraph front page. Credit: Steven May / Alamy
The newspaper has been scolding the BBC for its editorial failings, while issuing a string of climate corrections.
The Telegraph, which has accused the BBC of bias and a lack of editorial rigour, has been forced to amend a swathe of climate inaccuracies.
The BBC’s director-general and CEO resigned this weekend after a critical review of the broadcaster’s coverage was leaked to The Telegraph.
The Telegraph has used this opportunity to slam the BBC – saying that the “BBC has just signed its own death warrant” and that its future is “now in doubt”. The paper is also reporting that the BBC is now reviewing its climate and energy coverage over accusations of bias.
However, The Telegraph has repeatedly made basic errors in relation to its climate coverage in recent times.
According to its corrections and clarifications page, The Telegraph published four articles in December and January that included the false claim that Energy and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband plans to build 1 billion solar panels to meet his net zero emissions targets.
In reality, reaching net zero by 2050 will require a tenth of that figure – 100 million solar panels.
The Telegraph has repeatedly castigated the BBC in recent days for its apparent lack of fairness, yet the newspaper frequently attacks its opponents using hyperbolic, incendiary language – even when its facts are wrong.
One of the reports that used the false solar panels statistic was entitled, “Miliband’s eco lunacy will wreck Britain and enrich the Chinese dictatorship”.
In an article from Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice entitled, “Ed Miliband’s solar farm building spree will ruin our countryside for ever”, the newspaper also claimed that the solar panels set to be installed over the next decade will cover an area of farmland the size of Greater London – a falsehood that had to be corrected.
Tice is a notorious climate science denier who has suggested that CO2 is “plant food”.
Other Telegraph falsehoods have included the amount of undersea cables and overland power lines needed to reach net zero, the amount that would be saved by manufacturers if “net zero costs” were scrapped from bills, and that Britain has been “paying the highest electricity prices in the world for second year running”.
The BBC has made 33 corrections to its coverage overall this year, compared with 114 corrections from The Telegraph.
“The paper’s attacks on the BBC are not remotely done in good faith and are the result of the publisher’s ideological and commercial interests. There is no world in which The Telegraph’s output would survive the level of scrutiny applied to the BBC’s journalism.”
The leaked review of BBC editorial decisions was produced by Michael Prescott, a former external adviser to the broadcaster’s editorial standards committee. He claimed that a speech by Donald Trump during the 6 January 2021 riots on Capitol Hill in Washington DC had been selectively edited by Panorama to suggest that Trump was encouraging the riot.
Trump is now threatening to sue the BBC for $1 billion (£760,000).
While Trump’s speech was edited to distort his words, he did tell his supporters to “walk down to the Capitol”, after which rioters smashed through barricades, ransacked the U.S. Capitol, and injured 174 police officers. When he re-entered office in January 2025, Trump retrospectively pardoned all 1,600 individuals who were charged or convicted in relation to the attempted coup.
“It’s easy to see why Trump wants to destroy the world’s number one news source,” said Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey. “We can’t let him.
“The BBC belongs to all of us here in the UK. The prime minister and leaders from across the political spectrum should be united in telling Trump to keep his hands off it.”
The Telegraph was approached for comment.
The Telegraph’s Climate Deniers
As DeSmog has shown, The Telegraph has ramped up its aggressive, inaccurate, anti-climate attacks over recent years.
DeSmog’s analysis of opinion and editorial articles about the environment published on The Telegraph’s website in the first 100 days of the current Labour government found that 94 percent were anti-green – attacking or undermining climate science, policy and technological solutions, or environmental activists.
The Telegraph focused on Ed Miliband, with its columnists regularly deploying ad hominem attacks, labelling him “red Ed” and “mad Ed”. In one article, columnist Allison Pearson called Miliband “thoroughly mental Mili”.
In an article last week about the BBC, Pearson said: “We have become accustomed to BBC journalists lying by omission and the prioritisation of pet subjects – I swear there isn’t a spark caused by two sticks rubbed together in southern Europe that hasn’t been seized on by climate editor Justin Rowlatt as evidence of man-made global warming.”
Pearson has formal ties to climate science denial groups – a common feature of The Telegraph’s climate commentators.
She is a director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), which has claimed that carbon dioxide has been “mercilessly demonised” when in fact it is a “benefit to the planet” and should be “two or three times” higher than current levels.
Telegraph journalist and GWPF director Allison Pearson. Credit: Keith Morris / Hay Ffotos / Alamy
Fellow Telegraph columnist Lord David Frost is a director of Net Zero Watch, the GWPF’s campaign arm. Frost – who has no scientific training – has claimed that “rising temperatures are likely to be beneficial” to Britain. He was recently appointed director-general of the Institute of Economic Affairs, an anti-climate lobby group that received funding from oil major BP for decades.
Individuals associated with the GWPF wrote at least 48 articles in The Telegraph during Labour’s first 100 days, yet their ties to the climate denial group were not mentioned once by the newspaper.
“When disinformation is allowed to run rampant, this can have devastating consequences for democracy – as is already being seen in the United States,” said Richard Wilson, director of the campaign group Stop Funding Heat. “Clearly we all therefore have an interest in ensuring that every UK media outlet – including the BBC – maintains the highest possible standards of accuracy.
“Equally, anyone familiar with The Telegraph’s long track record of misleading climate coverage may have questions about their new-found enthusiasm for rigorous and accurate reporting.”
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading climate science body, has said “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet.”
The IPCC has also stated that carbon dioxide pollution “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, which has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought” – all of which “put a disproportionate burden on low-income households and thus increase poverty levels.”
A previous DeSmog analysis found that, during the six-month period to 16 October 2023, 85 percent of The Telegraph’s editorials and opinion pieces on environmental issues were anti-green.
Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, previously said the editors of The Telegraph had “lost their minds when it comes to climate change”.
“Both newspapers [The Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph] are campaigning against climate policies,” Ward told DeSmog. “They are bombarding their poor readers with laughable propaganda, particularly in their comment columns.”
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received millions and millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.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.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage speaking in Aberdeen. Credit: Reform UK / YouTube
Nigel Farage’s party was told by Offshore Energies UK to rethink its plan to thwart clean energy.
LIVERPOOL – The UK’s largest oil and gas trade body has criticised Reform UK’s plans to “turn off the tap” on renewable energy.
Nigel Farage’s party has tried to present itself as the oil and gas industry’s closest ally, vowing to “drill, baby, drill” in the North Sea and scrap the windfall tax on excess profits, while meeting with oil executives, and courting donations from the sector.
However, on a panel at the Labour Party’s annual conference in Liverpool on Monday (29 September), a spokesperson for Offshore Energies UK (OEUK) criticised Reform’s plans to end state support for clean energy.
Natalie Coupar, communications and marketing director at OEUK – members of which include fossil fuel giants BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, and Equinor – said the group is “apolitical” but gives “hard truths to all parties”.
She said: “One of the things we’ve been saying to Reform very much is, you know, if you’re going to turn on the taps for oil and gas, there’s almost really no point if you’re just going to turn off the taps to renewables.
“That doesn’t help. We need to keep both those streams open.”
According to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the UK’s net zero economy grew by 10 percent in 2024, employing almost a million people in full-time jobs.
Coupar also said it was essential to “hold the consensus on tackling climate change and growing our energy future”.
A panel at 2025 Labour Party conference sponsored by Offshore Energies UK (OEUK). Credit: DeSmog
Reform’s Oil Campaign
Reform has vowed to stop all government subsidies for renewable energy, and has pledged to block solar and onshore wind farms in the local authorities it controls.
In May, the party’s deputy leader Richard Ticesaid: “Whether it’s planning blockages, whether it’s judicial reviews, whether it’s lawsuits, whether it’s health and safety notices, we will use every available legal measure to an extreme way in order to frustrate these people.”
Tice – who has said “there’s no evidence that man-made CO2 is going to change the climate” – met with senior oil executives in May and promised to approve new drilling licences “on day one” of a Reform government.
Last month, he pledged to overturn the UK’s ban on fracking for shale gas, which he calls “treasure beneath our feet”, and told the industry to “get ready”.
In April, Reform party treasurer and a billionaire property developer Nick Candy said he was trying to secure donations from oil and gas executives, claiming to have raised £100,000 from one, though this has yet to appear on Reform’s donations register.
As DeSmog has reported, 92 percent of Reform’s funding between the 2019 and 2024 general elections came from climate science deniers or those with highly polluting interests – a total of £2.3 million.
Since his election as an MP last year, Farage has spoken at a string of events in the U.S. organised by radical groups backing U.S. President Donald Trump’s pro-fossil fuel agenda. Last December, Farage launched the UK-EU branch of the Heartland Institute, a U.S. climate denial think tank.
Speaking at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London in February, Farage claimed it was “absolutely nuts” for CO2 to be considered to a pollutant. However, he added: “I’m not a scientist. I can’t tell you whether CO2 is leading to warming or not, but there are so many other massive factors.”
Climate scientists at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading climate science body, have stressed that “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet”.
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.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Nigel Farage reminds you that he’s the man that brought you Brexit and asks what could possibly go wrong.
U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright handpicked the five contrarian scientists who authored a controversial new climate report.Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Researchers say DOE report cherry-picks data to downplay threat of greenhouse gases
The last assessment of the state of climate science from the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in its final form 2 years ago, was a monumental effort, with 721 volunteer scientists synthesizing all available published research. Yesterday, the Department of Energy (DOE) released its own climate assessment, as part of a campaign by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to overturn its landmark endangerment finding from 2009, which found that burning fossil fuels endangers public health and established carbon dioxide as a pollutant EPA could regulate. But the DOE report—called A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate—had fewer authors than IPCC’s: just five.
Handpicked by DOE Secretary Chris Wright, a fossil fuel entrepreneur, the authors are well known to climate scientists. Although the members of this Climate Working Group all hold scientific doctorates, they hold contrarian views on climate science that are out of step with the mainstream. The report, assembled in months, argues that some of the warming attributed to fossil fuel burning is instead driven by natural cycles or variability in the Sun, and that sea level rise has not been accelerating. Climate researchers say the authors cherry-picked evidence and highlighted uncertainties to achieve the net effect of downplaying the impacts of climate change. “This shows how far we have sunk,” says Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University. “Climate denial is now the official policy of the U.S. government.”
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.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, and deputy leader Richard Tice. Photo: Sipa US / Alamy
The anti-net zero party has been bankrolled by oil and gas investors, aviation entrepreneurs, and those who reject climate science.
Reform UK has received more than £2.3 million from oil and gas interests, highly polluting industries, and climate science deniers since December 2019, amounting to 92 percent of the party’s donations.
This week, Nigel Farage confirmed he would be returning as leader of Reform and standing in the general election, threatening to split the already fragile Conservative vote. His populist party, which campaigns to “scrap all of net zero”, claims to represent ordinary people against out of touch elites.
Yet Reform’s official register of donations reveals the party is bankrolled by rich businessmen who reject climate science or make money from polluting industries.
In the past 12 months, Reform has received £200,000 from First Corporate Consultants. The firm is owned by Terence Mordaunt, a director and former chair of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s leading climate science denial group.
The GWPF has in the past expressed the view that carbon dioxide has been mis-characterised as pollution, when in fact it is a “benefit to the planet”. Mordaunt himself told openDemocracy in 2019 that “no one has proved yet that CO2 is the culprit” of climate change.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s top climate science body, has stated that it is “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land”. It has also stated that carbon dioxide “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, which has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought”.
Reform has also received more than £500,000 since the last election from Jeremy Hosking, whose investment firm Hosking Partners had more than $134 million (around £108 million) invested in the energy sector at the close of 2021, two thirds of which was in the oil industry, along with millions in coal and gas.
Hosking previously told DeSmog: “I do not have millions in fossil fuels; it is the clients of Hosking Partners who are the beneficiaries of these investments.”
Since December 2019, Reform has also received £465,000 from Christopher Harborne, owner of AML Global, an aviation fuel supplier with a distribution network that includes “main and regional oil companies”, according to its website. Harborne is also the CEO of Sheriff Global Group, which trades in private jets.
Aviation emissions accounted for eight percent of the UK’s annual greenhouse gas emissions before the pandemic, according to the government’s Climate Change Committee.
In response to DeSmog’s request for comment, Harborne posted a lengthy statement on the AML Global website. He said: “I am not a climate science denier and … I do not seek to influence any government through donations or lobbying regarding their policies on climate change or in favour of corporate interests.”
Harborne added that “there is overwhelming scientific evidence that human activity and in particular the use of hydrocarbons as an energy source is accelerating climate warming due to the greenhouse effect.”
Reform has also received more than £1.1 million in donations from Richard Tice, a property millionaire and the party’s leader until this week. Tice has now become the party’s chairman.
In addition (and not included in the overall figures for this analysis), Reform has received more than50 loans collectively worth around £1.4 million from a company called Tisun Investments, which is owned by Tice, since the start of 2020.
Tice is one of the UK’s most prominent climate deniers, his presenting role on the right-wing broadcaster GB News to attack net zero policies and the science behind them. Tice has claimed that “there is no climate crisis” and expressed the view that “CO2 isn’t a poison. It’s plant food”.
DeSmog has also revealed that the governing Conservative Party has received £8.4 million since December 2019 from oil and gas interests, highly polluting industries, and individuals who have expressed or supported climate science denial.
“No political party should be taking any money from fossil fuel interests whatsoever,” Caroline Lucas, until recently the Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion, told DeSmog.
Reform’s Climate Science Denial
Reform’s platform on climate change conforms to the views and business interests of its major donors.
The party’s manifesto falsely claims that “scientists disagree as to how much” humans have had an impact on global warming.
A number of climate consensus studies conducted between 2004 and 2015 found that between 90 percent and 100 percent of experts agree that humans are responsible for climate change. A study published in 2021, which reviewed over 3,000 scientific papers, found that over 99 percent of climate science literature says that global warming is caused by human activity.
Reform wants to develop new oil and gas fields in the North Sea, open onshore fracking sites across the country, end the windfall tax on oil and gas companies, and “restart opencast coal mines using the latest cleanest techniques”.
The party has campaigned for a referendum on the UK’s 2050 net zero emissions target, and supports scrapping the policy entirely.
Farage himself also has a long history of opposing green reforms and criticising established climate science.
Speaking on GB News in August 2021, Farage said that he was “very much an environmentalist” and that he couldn’t “abide things like plastics in our seas, pollution in our rivers.” However, on the issue of climate change, he added: “What annoys me though, is this complete obsession with carbon dioxide almost to the exclusion of everything else, the alarmism that comes with it, based on dodgy predictions and science.”
Reform’s only MP, Lee Anderson, who defected from the Conservative Party in March, has repeatedly attacked the government’s net zero policies, arguing in February 2024 that a net zero UK “wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to the Earth’s atmosphere”.
Anderson is also a vocal backer of new oil, gas, and coal extraction in the UK. In 2022 he supported the government’s decision to approve a new coal mine in Cumbria – the UK’s first new coal mine for 30 years.
A Reform UK spokesman said: “Climate change is real, Reform UK believes we must adapt, rather than foolishly think you can stop it. We are proud to be the only party to understand that economic growth depends on cheap domestic energy and we are proud that we are the only party that are climate science realists, realising you can not stop the power of the sun, volcanoes or sea level oscillation.
“The deniers are those who continually gaslight the public into thinking you can stop these powerful natural forces. We must use the energy under our feet, rather than send our money and jobs abroad.”
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. 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.Nigel Farage explains the politics of Reform UK: Racism, Fake anti-establishmentism, Deregulation, Corporatism, Climate Change Denial, Mysogyny and Transphobia.
