In the last days of Tony Blair’s Premiership, the DUP was waiting for Gordon Brown because it expected a friendlier hearing from a Scots Presbyterian. I thought of that when, saying what Nigel Farage had said three years earlier to the month, Donald Trump, once a strong supporter of the SNP and now presumably one of the many who had given up on the party while still believing in the cause, expressed the only view of the Irish Question that could ever be held by any President of the United States, or by anyone formed in the American tradition who had not undergone a conversion to the very, very, very old school of Toryism in the manner of T.S. Eliot or Chips Channon.
Like all Presidents, Trump is surrounded by people who articulated his own and every President’s instinct that Perfidious Albion had unjustly partitioned both of the twin republics that rightfully covered the whole of Ireland and the whole of North America. The prominence of the Orange Order in the history of Canada is not unnoted in certain highly influential American circles, even if it is the 26 Counties rather than the Six that will soon approximate to Canada on assisted suicide and on gender self-identification; the former, at least, has now been actively thrown out by Westminster, Holyrood and the Senedd, and would never have stood any chance procedurally at Stormont.
Like Farage, in wishing to transfer two million people into the European Union, Trump was also saying what was thought by the overwhelming majority of that fairly small minority of people in Great Britain who had any view on the matter. There is at least one Catholic church in every town, almost always built by the Irish. But there is almost never an Orange Hall. Even among people with no skin the game, the feeling would be that the inability of the Irish to get on with each other was a matter for the Irish. Saint Patrick’s Day is huge, while scarcely a soul would know what the Twelfth was. Ulster Unionists have the heaviest Irish accents that anyone has ever heard.
Where in Great Britain does anyone march behind a Union Flag while wearing a bowler hat? But as every year for the last 30 years to my knowledge, and no doubt longer than that, the Last Night of the Proms was a sea of EU flags. Those have always been the people who could afford the tickets. Three years ago, that same flag flanked the King when he addressed the French Parliament. That could not have happened without both his permission and that of the then British Government. Both of the new unitary authorities in Surrey will be controlled by the Liberal Democrats, the same party that, topically, controls Portsmouth City Council. Those who wave the Confederate flag as an expression of Southern pride do at least refer to “the Lost Cause”. But those who wave the EU flag as an expression of Southern pride regard their Cause as anything but Lost, and they are anything but powerless economically or culturally. George Osborne has just called for reaccession to the Customs Union. Think on.
Meanwhile, United States Marine Security Guards have staged a dawn raid on the private London flat of an American diplomat accused of sexual offences against children, and smuggled him out on a cargo plane before our own Police could investigate. Embassies are closed for less. And that is before mentioning that Trump had said that Britain would not be prepared to travel the distance necessary to reclaim the Falkland Islands again, but that he himself would be willing and able to settle the dispute between a Prime Minister whom he despised and a President who was a stalwart of his fan club.
The most visible member of that club in Britain at the moment is Daniel Thomas, who in 2016 was one of three men who tried to kidnap a rival drug dealer, got the wrong man, and then apologised to him on Facebook. Having gone to town on their stupidity, the judge gave Thomas a much lower sentence than the other two, for the same crime. How very informative. Thomas’s Balaclava Blackshirts are policed in nothing like the manner of those who merely held up placards in support of Palestine Action, with a day’s closure of the Port of Dover deemed unworthy of arrest, unlike the tiresome antics of Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil. Two-tier policing, indeed.
Now ask Thomas about both Northern Ireland and the Falklands. Now ask Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, especially in view of his Irish citizenship and his heavy financial dependence on ferociously pro-Argentine Israel. Now ask Rupert Lowe. Now ask Blair, the only British member of Trump’s so-called Board of Peace. Now ask Andy Burnham, who continues to extend Labour Party membership to Blair. And now ask Farage, of whom Paul Knaggs writes:
Every political party in Britain, combined, reported £15.2 million in donations during the entire five-week campaign that decided the 2024 general election, the strictly regulated “pre-poll” period when parties must declare weekly. This week, two men gave one party almost five times that in two days. Across the whole of 2024, the year the country actually voted, every party in Britain raised just shy of £100 million between them. Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne needed 48 hours to hand Nigel Farage’s Reform UK nearly three quarters of that sum, on their own, with no election even called.
On Friday, the cryptocurrency trader Ben Delo gave Reform thirty-six million pounds, the largest single donation any UK party has ever received, saying he wanted “a fair fight and a level playing field.” On Saturday, Harborne, until then Reform’s biggest backer, matched it pound for pound. Asked why, he skipped Delo’s language about democracy altogether. His “competitive spirit,” he said, had inspired him to match it. Farage thanked them both, saying the party could now “fight that election on a level playing field.” Nobody involved used the phrase seventy-two million pounds without also reaching for the word fair.
Reform currently holds eight of the House of Commons’ 650 seats. Its deputy leader, Richard Tice, gave a clearer account of what the money actually buys than either donor did, telling LBC it would let the party “employ campaign managers… in almost every constituency across the country.” That is not levelling a playing field. That is buying one, outright, before a single vote has been cast in the next election.
Remember who is doing the buying. Delo made his fortune co-founding BitMEX, a cryptocurrency exchange that let traders move enormous sums with barely a check on who they were or where the money had come from. In 2022 he pleaded guilty in the United States to failing to implement anti-money laundering controls at the platform, and was pardoned last year by Donald Trump. A man once convicted over an exchange with too few defences against dirty money is now, alongside Harborne, the single largest financial backer of a British political party, at the exact moment that party is under criminal investigation for how it handles its own.
Days before Delo’s donation, the Metropolitan Police confirmed a criminal investigation into Reform UK over allegations it broke the law barring foreign donations, after an undercover documentary by Channel 4 News and the investigative outlet Verbatim filmed two of Farage’s most senior aides discussing how a reporter posing as the British son of a wealthy American backer might funnel money into the party’s accounts, or pay for private polling instead. Farage was in the room for part of that conversation. Both aides resigned within days. Farage has called the sting entrapment and denies Reform has ever taken illegal foreign money. A separate parliamentary standards inquiry is examining an undisclosed personal gift worth around five million pounds that Farage received from Harborne, who had already put some fifteen million pounds into the party before this week and has now gone past fifty million pounds of his own giving. None of this has been proven in court.
Parliament had a chance to stop exactly this, and shelved it days before the money arrived. After Nathan Gill, Reform’s former member of the European Parliament for Wales, was jailed for more than ten years for taking bribes to make pro-Russian statements, an independent review led by Philip Rycroft recommended a £100,000 annual cap on donations from British citizens abroad and a ban on cryptocurrency donations, both in force since March. Those rules only bite on donors based overseas. Neither Delo nor Harborne needed to worry: both are now UK residents. The Labour MP Stella Creasy tabled an amendment that would have closed that gap entirely: a hard cap of £100,000 on donations from any individual or company, resident or not. Polling for the Good Law Project found 92 per cent of voters back a limit like it. Last week, Creasy withdrew the amendment after ministers promised to tackle mega-donations through a new taskforce. Days later, two men gave seventy-two million pounds to one party in under 48 hours. Duncan Hames of Transparency International UK had already warned what would happen: without a cap on size, “the door remains open to anyone wealthy enough to walk through it.”
None of this makes Reform’s underlying complaint baseless. Incumbency carries advantages no spending cap touches: broadcast access, press relationships, decades of accumulated name recognition, all of it scaled to seats already held rather than votes cast or standing in the polls. A party stuck on eight seats despite regularly leading national surveys has a real grievance there.
But that is not the grievance seventy-two million pounds in two days is correcting. A party whose senior aides were filmed discussing how to route a foreign backer’s money through an invented son, whose leader faces a standards inquiry over an undisclosed personal gift, and whose deputy leader has already had donations flagged to the National Crime Agency, is not an underfunded outsider levelling an unfair contest. It is a party drowning in cash from the same two men who supplied more than sixty per cent of its funding last year. That is not a broader base of support. It is the same narrow one, with more zeros.
None of this should let Labour off the hook, and we have never pretended otherwise. In September 2024, in the one-week gap between Rishi Sunak calling the general election and the start of the reporting period that would have forced immediate disclosure, Starmer’s Labour accepted four million pounds from Quadrature Capital, a hedge fund structured through the Cayman Islands with holdings in Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and other arms and fossil fuel firms. As we reported at the time, it was the largest single donation Labour had ever taken, timed to slip past the one week of scrutiny that might have embarrassed the party before polling day.
His successor has since done a version of the same thing, closer to home. Before entering Downing Street, Andy Burnham built part of his reputation on opposing exactly this kind of politics, arguing publicly, as recently as June this year, for a cap on large donations to curb the influence of wealthy backers. He made the same complaint back in 2010, when he said his own party’s leadership contest had been distorted by big money. Weeks after his June intervention, Burnham’s first register of financial interests as Prime Minister showed close to three hundred and fifty thousand pounds in gifts and donations behind his own leadership campaign, including thirty-five thousand pounds from his former Manchester night-time economy adviser Sacha Lord, twenty-five thousand from the former Autoglass chief executive Gary Lubner, fifty thousand from a production company owned by a television executive and Labour donor, more than twenty-two thousand from Labour Together, since renamed ThinkLabour, and a sixteen-thousand-pound staff secondment from the accountancy firm Ernst and Young. None of it was illegal, and all of it was eventually declared through the proper register, the same way any MP’s outside support must be. But “eventually” is doing a lot of work in that sentence: the money arrived, and did its job, months before the public had any way of knowing where it came from. It surfaced only once Burnham had already won. He has separately been accused of failing to declare a £6,600 VIP hospitality trip to Japan within the required time, an allegation he has yet to resolve with the parliamentary standards commissioner.
Set the three stories side by side and the pattern is unmistakable. Starmer took millions from an offshore hedge fund and the public found out about it only once the moment it might have cost him votes had passed. Burnham took hundreds of thousands from wealthy individuals and a corporate secondment and the public found out about it only once the moment it might have cost him the leadership had passed. Delo and Harborne handed Reform seventy-two million pounds in a system with no cap at all, and told everyone immediately, because unlike the other two, they had nothing to hide and no reason to wait. Three parties, three different mechanisms, one identical outcome: the public learns who paid for power only after the question of who holds it has already been settled.
This is the trajectory worth worrying about, because Britain is not the first country to travel this road. In the United States, where individual and corporate money has flowed into elections with almost no ceiling since the Citizens United ruling in 2010, the pattern is no longer disputed. Independent analysis by the watchdog OpenSecrets has repeatedly found that the better-funded candidate wins the overwhelming majority of Congressional races, sometimes above 90 per cent of House contests in a single cycle, and that sitting incumbents, who attract the most donor money by far, are re-elected at rates in the nineties election after election. Money does not guarantee a win every time. But across enough elections, in enough seats, it stops looking like an input to democracy and starts looking like its precondition.
There is an old saying that covers this without needing a single statistic: he who pays the piper calls the tune. Nobody writing a cheque this size, whether it is Ben Delo, Christopher Harborne, Lord Sainsbury, or a hedge fund based in George Town, is doing it for the pleasure of watching democracy flourish. They are buying proximity to power, and the tune that gets called afterwards tends to be theirs, not the electorate’s. That is the real cost sitting underneath every one of these donations. It is not simply that rich men can buy elections. It is that the politicians elected this way owe their position to people who are not the voters who put them there, which means the people meant to be represented, the ones paying for all of this in the end through their taxes, their rent and their falling wages, increasingly are not. Britain does not need to become America to see where that road leads. It only needs to keep walking down it at the current pace.
Harborne says seventy-two million pounds between two men was inspired by nothing more than competitive spirit. Nine in ten voters say they want a cap on exactly that kind of spending. Parliament chose the billionaires’ instinct over the country’s, and two prime ministers in a row have shown they can live with a similar arrangement for themselves. Until that changes, elections in Britain will keep being decided by whoever pays first, and governed, afterwards, by whoever they were really paying for.
It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the lumpy stormtroopers deployed on our streets (including the street outside our offices) last week by the new national figure ‘Tommo’. It would also be hard not to cackle at Kent Police’s description of their carefully-planned appearance on Dover streets last weekend as ‘spontaneous’. Tommo is a retired kidnapper, who failed at that ancient trade, and also (so we are told) a born-again Christian. I am tickled by the idea of ‘Tommo’, real name Daniel Thomas, trilling ‘Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam’ in whatever Church, chapel or tent he worships at. I await the moving publicity video with sanctified soundtrack.
Did you notice his black-clad followers wear shorts rather than grown-up trousers? This is very odd. Having had a private education, can Mr Thomas be unaware of a previous (but fictional) organisation called the Black Shorts, a fascistic 1930s militia headed by the ludicrous Roderick Spode? This was the invention of the comic genius PG Wodehouse, also known for creating Jeeves and Wooster. Wodehouse wrote of Spode that he looked ‘as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla and had changed its mind at the last moment’, but Spode’s ferocious, glowering image was undermined by his secret life as a purveyor of frilly ladies’ underwear. Should we also not laugh at people who no doubt growl that we should ‘ban the burqa’ – while themselves wearing a garment which is rather like a burqa, the balaclava helmet?
But dare we laugh? The accelerating collapse of the conventional parties, especially over immigration, makes it almost certain that people of this sort will grow closer to actual power in the years to come. In France, the dubious National Rally edges towards office. In Germany the AfD, which has some creepy connections, does the same. In the USA, the increasingly erratic Mr Trump continues to stomp wildly across the country and the planet like a giant with a sore head. The problem is that, just like the conventional parties, these movements will fail. Mass immigration has already happened. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, who posed as the scourge of migrants and so won office, has almost entirely failed to do anything to solve the problem.
These movements are like miracle cures which we buy in the hope they will work, then discard and replace with new, allegedly more powerful remedies. Until eventually we realise there is no cure, or that the cure will be much worse than the disease. Meanwhile our political system rots and loses confidence. Poverty, disorder and a strong intolerant state grow daily more likely. The governments of the last 30 years have much to answer for.
