Channel 4 News and investigative outfit Verbatim released undercover footage on Thursday showing senior Reform UK officials arranging secret foreign funding for party-commissioned political polls. Within hours, the Liberal Democrats had taken the complaint to both the Metropolitan Police and the Electoral Commission, and Labour said it would separately go to police.
Reporters posing as a wealthy American backer and his son, a UK resident, spent months meeting with Reform’s Head of Policy, James Orr, and Nigel Farage’s close aide, Dan Jukes. Earlier this year, the two men lined up a US company to secretly bankroll three polls Reform itself had ordered up, at a combined cost of £32,500.
JL Partners, a name familiar to newsrooms across the UK, did the actual polling. All three results made headlines, but the boost to Reform’s standing ahead of May’s local elections came from just two of them. Neither the public nor the outlets that covered the polling knew who had actually paid for it.
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Jukes proposed a riskier plan for future money. He suggested the reporter, who counted as a UK resident, formally make donations himself, regardless of whose money it actually was. UK law bars foreign nationals from donating to political parties. Orr told the reporters Farage “knows you are a significant donor.”
The Liberal Democrats’ Cabinet Office spokeswoman called it a “potential serious breach of electoral law” in her referral letter. Separately, a lawyer who once led the Electoral Commission told Channel 4 he sees grounds for prosecutors to open a criminal case.
Reform UK denied wrongdoing, calling the investigation “a hoax perpetuated by foreign-funded, climate change activists posing as would-be party donors” and pointing to its donor vetting process. The timing could hardly be worse for the party — the footage surfaced as Reform opened its annual conference in Birmingham, where Farage is fighting to regain his grip on the party after Labour pulled ahead in the polls this summer.
This isn’t Farage’s only open donations problem. He’s also fighting a parliamentary standards investigation over an undeclared £5 million gift from crypto entrepreneur Christopher Harborne. Farage’s defense is that the money was a private gift toward his security detail, not a political donation requiring disclosure. Reform has two donation controversies running at once, right as it tries to present itself as ready for government.
