Christopher Harborne has donated a further £3m to Reform UK, on top of his record £9m last summer.
Nigel Farage’s party, which has been leading the polls for over a year, raised a whopping £5.5m in the final quarter of 2025. It also included a £200,000 donation from JC Bamford Excavators – traditionally a Conservative donor – who also gave the same sum to the Conservatives that quarter.
Harborne’s donations will bolster Reform UK’s war chest ahead of May’s election, in which Farage hopes to make gains in Wales and across England, where council seats are contested.
Harborne, a Thailand-based aviation and cryptocurrency investor, previously donated £10 million to the Brexit party to fund its 2019 election campaign and £1 million to Boris Johnson’s office after his resignation.
By contrast, the Conservatives raised £4m in donations, the Lib Dems over £2m and Labor almost £2m.
The Green Party, which won the by-elections in Gorton and Denton in February, received just £290,000 in donations, showing they have overcome their financial situation, while Your Party, with Jeremy Corbyn as parliamentary leader, got £670,000.
The huge scale of Harborne’s donations, as well as the £20m donated by Frank Hester to the Conservatives ahead of the 2024 election, have led to fresh calls from MPs and campaigners for political donations to be capped. There is also pressure from several Labor select committee chairs to ban cryptocurrency donations.
Releasing the figures, Jackie Killeen, head of regulation at the Electoral Commission, said: “Political parties accepted almost £65 million in donations during 2025. The UK’s political funding system has high levels of transparency and we know voters are interested in knowing where parties get their money from. This publication is an important part of delivering this information to voters.
“However, we know there are parts of the system that need strengthening, and we have been calling for changes to the law for some time. The UK Government’s proposed reforms to the political finance regime in the Representation of the People Bill could strengthen donation controls and help ensure voters can have confidence in the political finance system. We will continue to work with the government so that any changes are evidence-based and workable in practice.”
