Reform UK bagged £7 million from a pair of crypto billionaires in the first three months of this year, official donation figures show.
The biggest single sum – £3m, which was accepted by the party on January 23 – came from Christopher Harborne, one of the wealthiest people in the UK.
Harborne was thrust into the spotlight earlier this year for a £5m gift he handed to Nigel Farage in January 2024, a few months before Farage returned to politics as leader of Reform UK.
That money is now at the centre of a parliamentary standards investigation over whether the Clacton MP should have declared it.
Harborne’s latest donation is included in the Electoral Commission’s rundown of all donations worth more than £11,180 to British political parties in the first quarter of 2026.
It also shows Ben Delo, another cryptocurrency billionaire, gave £4m to Farage’s party in two portions of £2 million in January and March.
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The £7m donated by the two men exceeds the total amount given to the Conservatives (£6m) and Labour (£4.1m) in the first three months of the year.
It also made up more than a third of the £9,936,393 received by Reform over that period.
Who are Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo?
Christopher Harborne snatched the record for the biggest individual donation from a living person to a British political party in history last year, when he handed £9m to Reform.
According to the Sunday Times Rich List published last month, he’s got plenty of cash to go around. He was named the sixth-richest person in the UK with £18.2 billion.
However, his real wealth may go beyond that, as some is held overseas or could not be identified by the newspaper’s researchers.
While living and working in Thailand for more than 20 years, Harborne has invested in financial companies including Tether, the crypto platform with an estimated valuation of roughly $200 billion.
Ben Delo, similarly, owes his billions to working in the cryptocurrency business.
The 42-year-old, who was based in Hong Kong before returning to the UK this year, co-founded the trillion-dollar crypto trading platform BitMEX in 2014.
But in 2022, he pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act by ‘willfully failing to establish, implement, and maintain’ an anti-money laundering programme at the exchange.
Delo was sentenced to 30 months’ probation, but Donald Trump pardoned him last year.
Overall, UK-registered political parties accepted donations worth £24,716,802 in the first quarter of 2026, an increase of 214% from the same period last year.
Olly Buston, the chief executive of campaign group Clean Up Westminster, said: ‘When a tiny number of wealthy donors can spend millions promoting the politicians and causes they favour, it’s no surprise people feel politics is rigged against them.
‘The rich and powerful shouldn’t be able to buy themselves a louder voice in our democracy.’
The top donor to the Conservative Party was a woman named Mary V Doran, whose £1.1m donation was accepted in February.
Perennial political donors Lord David Sainsbury and Gary Lubner jointly provided the top individual donations to Labour, both worth £550,000 and accepted on March 6.
Earlier this year, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced he would be banning cryptocurrency donations to political parties following a review of foreign financial interference.
The move was one of 17 recommendations made by ex-top civil servant Philip Rycroft in his report.
At that point, Reform UK was the only British political party to have accepted donations in cryptocurrency.
Farage is a shareholder in the British Bitcoin company Stack, which is chaired by Liz Truss’s former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, and the Reform leader appeared in a video promoting a £2m crypto purchase by the firm.
Since his return to Parliament in 2024, he has emerged as one of the leading advocates for cryptocurrency among British politicians.
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