Nigel Farage’s insurgent Reform U.K. party has attracted more than a dozen donors from Britain’s once-dominant Conservative Party, new data reveals, underlining the threat the Tories face from a right-wing populist party that models itself on President Trump’s MAGA movement.
In total, Reform U.K. raised 4.75 million pounds ($6.1 million) last year, a third of which came from former donors to the Conservatives. The amount is a sharp increase from the less than $200,000 it raised in 2023 and a striking figure for a party that eight months ago was on the fringe of national politics.
The Conservative exodus began after Mr. Farage, an ideological ally of Mr. Trump, took over last year as Reform’s leader just before Britain’s general election. A longtime political disrupter and former commodities trader who campaigned for Brexit, Mr. Farage has pledged to remake British conservatism, pushing the movement rightward on a nationalist platform that he frames as anti-establishment and anti-immigration.
The New York Times analyzed the donations that Reform U.K. reported to Britain’s campaign finance watchdog in 2024, including figures for the final quarter of the year that were released on Thursday, to get the first major snapshot of who is funding the party.
While it is unsurprising that many political donors are wealthy, a remarkable number of Reform’s millionaire donors used to be Conservatives, the establishment Mr. Farage and his party have long rallied against. While Labour does have wealthy individual donors too, the majority of its funding comes from union donations.
“The populist right all over Europe and the U.S. pitch themselves as parties of the people, as against a privileged moneyed elite,” said Sam Power, a political finance expert at Bristol University. “But at the same time, what we know about the financial support of these parties is that it’s the uber wealthy who support these parties.”
A Conservative Party spokesman said that Reform was “not serious” as a party and claimed that, “despite his constant boasting, Farage is clearly failing to bring in the funds.” He added that Kemi Badenoch, who took over as Conservative leader in November, was “rebuilding the party finances.”
A Reform spokesman said: “We are a grass roots political party funded by the mass membership and not reliant on any single large donor.”
The biggest single donation to Reform in the last quarter of 2024 came from Roger Nagioff, a former Conservative donor, former Lehman Brothers banker and Monaco-based investor, who donated £100,000 in December. In a LinkedIn post two weeks ago, Mr. Nagioff lamented that the “biggest screw up of the UK” was the country losing its wealthy residents and squandering its advantages “in a sea of government spending, insane welfare, and mass immigration of the poorest and least adjusted culturally it can find.”
Other major donations in 2024 included one million pounds from a company owned by Reform’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, and £500,000 from Fiona Cottrell, the mother of George Cottrell, a convicted fraudster with no defined role in the party but who is a close aide to Mr. Farage.
Other individuals gave smaller amounts. Gary Mond donated £17,500 to Reform last year. He flipped from the Conservatives after decades as a party member. In February, he won an appeal against the UK’s charity watchdog, which had barred him from acting as a charity trustee because of “anti-Muslim” social media posts, including one that claimed “all civilization” is “at war with Islam.” The tribunal ruled that while the posts of Mr. Mond (who has denied being Islamophobic) could be “perceived as anti-Islam,” it stated that he “has the right to freedom of expression.”
Reform, which won five parliamentary seats at last year’s election, has surged in national opinion polls in recent months, overtaking the Conservative Party, and winning its first municipal seats. Although the governing Labour Party does not have to hold a general election until 2029, Reform’s fund-raising success underlines Mr. Farage’s momentum and could help his still-young party professionalize its operation as it challenges the two main parties at local elections in May.
Reform has a long way to go to the next general election, or to come close to the money flowing into the Labour Party, which last year raised more than 60 million pounds from donors. But it certainly has ambition.
“Money in U.K. politics is nothing compared to money in the US,” said Mr. Power, the political finance expert. But “for a new challenger party to raise £4.7 million pounds in a year” was extraordinary, he said.
Reform’s treasurer, the real estate billionaire and former Conservative donor Nick Candy, has pledged to “secure more money for the party than any other in British political history.” It was Mr. Candy who brokered a meeting in December at Mar-a-Lago between the tech mogul Elon Musk and Mr. Farage. Mr. Farage has since said that Mr. Musk shared advice on campaign strategies and discussed potentially donating money to Reform through his U.K. registered companies, although so far he hasn’t.
The first fund-raiser that Mr. Candy hosted, a big-ticket American-style event in London’s Mayfair neighborhood in late January, raised more than $1.25 million. The guests ranged from former Conservative lawmakers to Trump allies, British socialites and a reverend.
In a phone interview on Thursday, Mr. Candy told The Times that the figures published today “do not yet reflect the surge in fund-raising Reform has seen in 2025.” He also pointed to the 220,000 members the party claims to have now, up from 100,000 when he joined in December.
Mr. Candy said he had secured pledges from a number of “large donors” to give the party £1 million each. His goal is to get pledges from 20 donors. “I won’t do it overnight, but I think I can get it there in 18 months,” he said.
And he plans to raise money from British citizens overseas.
“We are going to have fund-raisers all over the world, in every part of the world where there are British nationals,” he said. “We will have fund-raisers in the U.S., in Monaco, and we will have huge fund-raisers in the U.A.E. where we have an expat community there who are unhappy with the amount of regulation and tax in the U.K.”
Reform has also recruited supporters from more modest backgrounds and donors include several small family-run British businesses. Johnny Gallagher, an entrepreneur who donated £100,000 to the party in June, could be considered the model of the kind of supporter the party wants to attract.
In an interview, Mr. Gallagher said that he was raised by his single mother in Essex, a county on the outskirts of London that holds both great poverty and wealth, and left school at 18 to join a drainage company. He later founded five businesses, and made his first million pounds at the age of 23, he said, adding that Reform was the first political party he had ever given money to and that he was attracted by their “business understanding” and because he was worried about crime and safety.
Most of those bankrolling Reform in 2024 were multimillionaires, individuals and companies based in low-tax offshore countries, climate change skeptics, or those with investments in fossil fuels or other climate-polluting industries.
In its 2024 manifesto, Reform framed itself as an alternative to the “out of touch political class who have turned their backs on our country.”
One of its flagship proposals is to make tax cuts that would cost about £90 billion a year, which the party said it would pay for through cuts to spending, like public services and benefit payments. Mr. Farage has claimed that the plan would free millions of low-paid workers from paying tax altogether. But those cuts would disproportionately benefit those with higher incomes, experts say.
Reform has also pledged to abandon key climate targets and swing the energy sector back toward oil and gas. In February, Mr. Tice said the party would tax solar farms and claimed that renewable energy was “a massive con.” He also called evidence for man-made climate change “garbage.”
One of Reform’s donors in 2024 was First Corporate Consultants, founded by Terence Mordaunt, which gave £130,000. Mr. Mordaunt is the chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a pro-fossil fuel think tank, established to expose what its founder once termed “the intellectual bankruptcy of the climate change establishment.”
Reform, which Mr. Farage originally created in 2019 as the Brexit Party, won 14.3 percent of the vote in last year’s general election. But in recent weeks, it has reached around 25 percent in several polls, at times overtaking the Conservatives and Labour. While the Conservatives still managed to raise two million pounds in the last quarter of 2024, twice as much as Labour and far more than Reform, that was before Reform’s most recent surge in the polls and Mr. Candy’s funding push.
“The challenge the Tories have is not just an electoral challenge but a financial challenge from Reform,” said Mr. Power. “The donors really do show that Reform is here to stay, and it has very rich backers, so will be able to professionalize and monetize and be a very serious prospect in British politics.”
Methodology
The New York Times analyzed every donation that Reform U.K. reported to the Electoral Commission between 1 January to 31 December 2024. This is the latest available data. We managed to identify all but four donors out of 38 total donors. We categorized “millionaire” as any individual with a net worth of more than one million pounds, or any company with more than one million pounds in net assets. Most donors are multimillionaires. We categorized offshore-connected donors as any individual or entity based in an offshore jurisdiction, or with offshore investments. Our climate categorization includes those who have openly questioned climate change, or have investments in fossil fuel or other climate polluting industries. There is no suggestion that individuals or companies with investments in such polluting industries are climate change deniers.
The post A Threat on the Right to Britain’s Conservatives, as Donors Fund a Populist Rival appeared first on New York Times.
