Will Farage's Extreme Wealth Be His Downfall?

**Alastair Campbell** (0:00)
Just this week, Nigel Farage declared his biggest single payment yet as an MP. £270,000 for 12 hours of work from a gold bullion dealer. That works out at £22,500 an hour, which is double what the same company paid him just nine months earlier. And it comes not long after Nigel Farage was found and accepted £5 million as a gift from a crypto billionaire who lives in Thailand. This is the man who built his entire political career on being the voice of the ordinary left behind Britons, the man of the people fighting for the people. Now, one of the wealthiest politicians in British history. So how do we get here? How has a party supposedly for the ordinary working man and woman ended up attracting money from some of the richest people in the world? And what do they expect in return? We've been inundated with questions following our four-part mini-series on Who Funds Reform. So it's time that we answered some.

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**Alastair Campbell** (3:06)
Welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell, and joining me to answer your questions on our member series is Kat Neilan, who was the reporter on the series, and who's been following Westminster as a journalist for the past 10 years. So Kat, let's start with these questions on the five million pound gift. Heidi, are there any journalists still digging into the five million pound gift, or is there now little else to find out now that Farage has brushed it aside? Taz, has the five million pound donation story harmed Nigel Farage and Reform's brand? Sarah, how much of an impact do you think Farage's five million pound donation will have on Reform's popularity? The reason I just read out three of those, we had tons of questions and people, this five million gift, bung, whatever you want to call it, really has broken through. So is there much more to find out, Kat, and what do you think the damage, if any, has been to Reform?

**Kat Neilan** (3:56)
Yeah, hi Alastair, and thank you so much for having me on the show. So firstly, we got a letter from Christopher Harbourn's lawyers complaining about various things, but one of them was the fact that we had described it as a donation rather than a gift, even though actually Reform politicians have described it as a donation. So we have scrupulously since kept to the description of it as a gift, that is their words. Taking the questions one at a time, yes, there are definitely journalists still digging around it. Of course, we should all remember that it was only because of the hard work of journalists specifically and Isaac at The Guardian that we even know about this because it was not declared and clearly there was no plan to declare it. So it is a very, very difficult story to do because, of course, it requires knowledge of someone's personal finances and there's not that many sources around it. But since this story has broken, there has been even greater scrutiny on Nigel Farage specifically and Reform more generally, looking at where they're getting their money from. Of course, the question as far unanswered whether this is the only sum that he received in that period before he became an MP.