Reform UK has received a record £36m donation in a major boost to Nigel Farage’s hopes of winning the next general election.
Ben Delo, a cryptocurrency billionaire, said he had given the money to ensure “a fair fight” at the polls. It also signals his vote of confidence in Mr Farage after a difficult summer for the Reform leader.
The game-changing gift from Mr Delo, who was already the party’s second-largest donor, means Reform has raised five times as much as the Conservatives this year and more than six times as much as Labour.
Both parties have raised considerably more than Reform in the eight years since it was founded.
Writing for The Telegraph, Mr Delo says that only a massive injection of cash can enable Reform to compete with the “entrenched advantages” enjoyed by its rivals.
Equal terms
Mr Delo writes: “Unlike the people who express mock concern for the health of ‘our democracy’ while doing everything they can to keep it as a cartel, I want a fair fight and a level playing field.
“My conclusion from Reform’s recent troubles is that they should spend less time trying to raise funds to compete on equal terms and more time preparing for government.”
Mr Farage, who is facing an ongoing police investigation into party financing, said he was “honoured and humbled” by the gift.
The amount dwarfs the previous record for a single donation of £10m, which was left to the Conservatives as a bequest, as well as the biggest single donation from a living donor, £9m given to Reform by Christopher Harborne, another cryptobillionaire.
It has the potential to transform Reform’s fortunes in the next election, enabling Mr Farage to hire campaign managers in every target constituency as well as ramping up his staff at party headquarters.
In the first two quarters of 2026, Reform raised £14.9m, the Conservatives £10.2m and Labour £7.7m. The Conservatives also receive £5.5m in so-called Short money, which is allocated by Parliament to opposition parties based on how many MPs they have.
With just eight MPs, Reform receives just over £400,000 in Short money, meaning it is almost entirely dependent on donations.
Labour receives between £5m and £10m each year from the trade unions.
Since January 2021, Reform has raised £38m, not including Mr Delo’s latest gift, while the Tories have raised £150m and Labour £128m.
Both Labour and the Conservatives have existed for well over a century, enabling them to utilise long-term infrastructure that Reform lacks.
Cap on donations
Mr Delo says he is giving £1m per month to Reform between now and the latest date Labour can call an election – in 2029 – but has given the party all of the money up front to defy any attempt by the Government to block it.
Earlier this year, Labour imposed a cap of £100,000 on donations to political parties from expatriate donors in what was widely seen as an attempt to choke Reform’s funding.
Further reform of party funding is contained in Labour’s Representation of the People Bill, which Mr Delo describes as “an attempt at election rigging” as he points out that Labour’s millions from the unions will be unaffected.
He also says that Mr Harborne, whose £5m personal gift to Mr Farage to pay for his security is the subject of a parliamentary investigation, has been treated differently to donors such as Lord Sainsbury of Turville, who has given £11m to Labour in total.
Political opponents have accused Reform of leaving itself open to influence by a handful of billionaire donors on whom it relies, but Mr Delo insists he is not supporting Reform for personal gain, having retired from the financial industry.
Mr Farage told The Telegraph: “I am honoured and humbled that Ben Delo has shown such confidence in Reform. Ben knows that we are the only party that can turn the country around and reverse Britain’s rapid decline.”
Reform sources said the money would enable the party to recruit “the best brains” to its policy team and to have campaign managers in every constituency at the next general election, which Mr Farage was convinced would be next year.
“This is about preparing for government,” said a senior party source.
“No party seems to have gone into government with a plan, but we are building the biggest research and policy team ever, so we can be ready for government and do this properly.
“Ben has done this as a vote of confidence in Nigel and a sign of his support in Nigel’s leadership and his belief in him as the next prime minister. The people of Clacton have shown their support for Nigel by backing him in the by-election, and Ben’s message is ‘now go and win the election’.”
Mr Delo, 42, is the co-founder of BitMEX, a cryptocurrency trading platform, and was reported to have made his first billion within four years of setting it up in 2014.
In 2022, he pleaded guilty in the US to failing to implement an anti-money laundering programme, but was pardoned by Donald Trump, the US president, last year.
He had already given £8m to Reform. He announced he was moving back to the UK from his home in Hong Kong earlier this year after Labour announced its cap on party donations from expats.
Questions about party funding overshadowed Reform’s annual conference in Birmingham last week.
The party is facing police investigations into the source of £1.5m in donations and allegations that it broke laws on foreign funding, which came after an undercover Channel 4 investigation.
Reform insists no laws have been broken.
Parliament is also investigating whether Mr Farage should have declared the £5m gift from Mr Harborne, which the Reform leader has always insisted he did not need to do as it was a personal gift to pay for his security and was made when he was not a politician.
I’m giving Reform millions to make the next election a fair fight
By Ben Delo
Labour and the Conservatives have occupied the commanding heights of British politics for a combined total of more than 300 years. Reform UK has been around for less than eight.
One of the reasons why the old parties have lasted so long is that they have made it very expensive to challenge them.
Both of them have annual budgets that run into the tens of millions. Last year, when there was no general election, Labour spent some £3.9m per month and the Tories about £2.3m per month. Reform only managed around £1.8m per month.
Unlike the people who express mock concern for the health of “our democracy” while doing everything they can to keep it as a cartel, I want a fair fight and a level playing field. My conclusion from Reform’s recent troubles is that the party should spend less time trying to raise funds to compete on equal terms and more time preparing for government.
That’s why today I’m announcing that I’m giving £1m per month to Reform UK until the expected 2029 general election, to help them get ready for government. What’s more, to remove the temptation from Labour to use control of Parliament to try to cut that financial lifeline to a competitor, I have front-loaded these donations into a single payment of £36m.
Restricting opposition party funding is literally as anti-democratic as you can get, but that’s the aim of the Government’s Representation of the People Bill.
Unless Labour decides to use the bill to restrict the millions it receives each year in union funding, then functionally it is an attempt at election-rigging. It is so appalling that even the Conservatives, who might benefit if Reform is starved of funds, have called it out. For that, I give Kemi Badenoch great credit.
As a Tory frontbencher recently said: “A government should not direct the power of the state to undercut the lawful flow of funds to their political opponents. Party finance law is not ordinary lawmaking; it is the law by which the competitors in our democracy agree on the rules of the contest. The Government of the day are the trustee of those rules, not the proprietor.”
When I wrote in The Telegraph in April to announce my first gift to the party (made in January), I made the point that “even Reform’s strongest supporters would concede that they are not yet the finished article”.
This remains true. Indeed, Reform will probably come into office not being polished – but unpolished is not the same as unready.
Reform is making serious plans for government, which is more than Labour did before it won in 2024. It takes time to develop thought-through policies and draft legislation, and it takes real money.
Reform is a startup, founded in 2018 (and I know about startups). Outfits such as Ocado or Octopus Energy suffered teething pains and public blunders on their way to becoming British success stories.
As a challenger brand that threatens the status quo and established interests, Reform must expect to be subjected to more scrutiny than the 120-year-old Labour Party, or the 192-year-old Tory Party, will ever receive. So be it.
Being a retired veteran of the FinTech industry, I’m accustomed to intense scrutiny and hard knocks. During a period when crypto was in its infancy, I co-founded a trading platform.
Despite the fact that we ran an honest shop and never lost a penny of customer funds to a hack or a misallocation (a claim few crypto exchanges can make), a US prosecutor went after us for not keeping sufficient records on our customers. We got through it, and I kept calm and carried on with my philanthropy.
If I had confined myself to supporting autistic schoolchildren and supporting maths education and research, where I spend most of my money, I doubt Labour would have bothered with me, when frankly it’s not hard for any normal, patriotic person to understand what animates me – love of country.
It takes a thick skin to back Reform financially
Nevertheless, Labour can’t seem to make up its mind about my motives for funding the party it fears most. Sometimes, Labour claims it’s a plot to advance my own commercial interests, other times it’s an extreme ideological crusade. It’s neither. Could it be that the party of Lord Mandelson can’t help judging everybody else by its own standards?
Labour seems to think that the only reason to support a political party is if you can get it to do your bidding. This says more about them than it does about me. Regardless, at the same time I’ve moved home, I’ve also exited the crypto industry; future changes to UK laws regarding crypto really can’t help or hurt me. So you’ll either believe me or you won’t when I say I’m not supporting Reform for personal gain.
Right now it takes a thick skin to back Reform financially. Look at the way Christopher Harborne has been treated, as compared to, say, Lord Sainsbury, who has given well over £16m to Labour over the years, and millions more to the Liberal Democrats and the Remain campaign, or Lord Alli, brought back by Andy Burnham this month to raise money for Labour having paid for the last prime minister’s suits.
Is it any wonder successful business people with a stake in mainstream society and a care for their own reputation are shy about writing cheques to Reform?
I believe it is the duty of people with broad shoulders and deep pockets to step up and help Reform to win and govern, rather than allow the British people to be trapped in the political monoculture that is driving this country off a cliff.
Labour and the Conservatives have built vast infrastructures using hundreds of millions of pounds. They have entrenched advantages that Reform cannot hope to match. If a few people like me are willing to contribute to creating a more level playing field, that is not undermining democracy – it is supporting it, on behalf of millions of Britons that the establishment has let down.
And if somebody fancies making a record-breaking donation to the Green Party, you’ll get no objection from me.