British police investigate financing of Farage's party. New suspicions added to February 2025 investigation

The Metropolitan Police announced on Wednesday that it is opening a criminal investigation into the financing of Nigel Farage's Reform UK party. The trigger was an undercover Channel 4 News report in which, according to the broadcaster, two then-senior party officials discussed ways to circumvent the ban on foreign donations with a journalist posing as a donor. The police are not investigating the new suspicions separately; they are adding them to the investigation into donations to the same party that they have been running since February 2025. On Thursday the case dominated the British front pages, which reported that police are preparing to question Farage himself.

What the police announced

The Metropolitan Police's statement is short and to the point. "Following a broadcast by Channel 4 News on Thursday 3 September, the Met received a number of reports relating to donations and polling involving a political party," it states. According to it, detectives assessed the information and determined that "there are potential offences requiring investigation". The Guardian ↗

Next comes the sentence that defines the scope of the case. The possible offences are, according to police, "similar in nature to matters already under investigation by the Met’s special enquiry team relating to donations made to the same political party", and will therefore become part of the ongoing investigation. All the suspicions being examined relate to possible offences under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. BBC News ↗

In connection with the new suspicions from the report, no one has been arrested so far and no one has been interviewed under caution. That is no longer true of the older branch of the investigation, where police interviewed two people under caution last summer. Detectives are now trying to obtain the recording from the report and are cooperating with the Electoral Commission and the Crown Prosecution Service. The Independent ↗ On Thursday morning, the British front pages added that police are preparing to question Nigel Farage himself. This is reported by the i Paper, while the Mirror writes of "a police grilling over possible donation wrongdoing". So far this is information from the newspapers, not confirmation from the Metropolitan Police — which has only repeated that it received several tip-offs about donations and polling related to the political party after the report aired. The Guardian also reports that the Electoral Commission, in parallel with the police investigation, is "considering all relevant information and regulatory options". (BBC News ↗)

How the mechanism was supposed to work

British rules on party donations are specific. Donations may be made by a person registered on the British electoral roll or by a company that is registered in the United Kingdom and also does business there. What matters is who actually provides the money, so simply residing in Britain is not enough to qualify, and the money must not merely be passed through an intermediary. Electoral Commission ↗

According to Channel 4, a reporter from the investigative group Verbatim and a hired actor posed as a son living in Britain and his wealthy American father. On the recording, Farage's chief of staff Dan Jukes, according to the broadcaster, suggests that the donation could be made in the son's name, even though the money would be the father's. James Orr, the head of policy development, suggests a second route in which the father would not give the money directly but would instead pay for opinion polls supporting the party's campaign. Channel 4 News ↗

Both sums are known. According to the report, an offer of half a million pounds via the son was made at a lunch in Clacton; that money never arrived. Polling worth over thirty thousand pounds, however, was paid for and benefited the party when national newspapers picked it up. If classified as a non-monetary donation from abroad, it would be impermissible and undeclared. The Guardian ↗

Both Jukes and Orr resigned within a week, and both deny doing anything unlawful. Farage told the BBC that the conversation about the donation "frankly wasn’t listening", and described his colleagues' words as "loose pub talk including a couple of boasts that simply were not true". The party said that "denies any wrongdoing and will fully cooperate with the investigation". BBC News ↗

What the police were already investigating before the report

The investigation to which police are adding the new suspicions began in February 2025 following a referral from the Electoral Commission. It concerns donations that reached Reform UK in the weeks before the 2024 election from Fiona Cottrell, the mother of Farage's unpaid adviser George Cottrell. The Guardian ↗

Cottrell received an eight-month sentence in the United States in 2017, though the original indictment had more than twenty counts, including conspiracy to launder money. Under a plea deal he pleaded guilty to a single count, wire fraud, and the prosecution dropped the remaining counts. He now lives in Montenegro. Evening Standard ↗

According to an analysis of the party's accounts, the same money is also linked to the think tank Britain Means Business Ltd, led by the party's current deputy leader Richard Tice. Cottrell sent it £1,075,000 in June 2024, and the company subsequently donated half a million to Reform UK. Byline Times ↗

A parallel proceeding by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards is under way. It concerns five million pounds that cryptocurrency businessman billionaire Christopher Harborne gave Farage before the 2024 election, which the MP failed to declare. Farage repeatedly describes it as a personal gift for his security. While the parliamentary inquiry was ongoing, he resigned his Clacton seat on 7 July 2026, triggering a by-election. Al Jazeera ↗ He retained the seat in it on 13 August. UK Parliament ↗

Added to this was a Sunday Times finding that Farage also failed to declare further benefits from Cottrell, namely security, drivers, staff and accommodation. On taking his seat in parliament in 2024, he declared only a single benefit from him, worth about £9,200, for a trip to a conference in Belgium. Al Jazeera ↗

What the polls say and what cannot be read from them

Reform UK was still leading the polls at the start of the year. In the latest Opinium poll, Labour has 28 percent support and Reform 24. The same pollster gives Prime Minister Andy Burnham a net rating of plus fourteen points — the difference between the shares of positive and negative responses — and Farage minus twenty-six, with minus thirty-three on the question of trustworthiness. Opinium ↗

These figures do not document the impact of the case. Opinium collected responses from 2 to 4 September, so most of them were gathered before the report aired on Thursday evening, with only a smaller share collected after it. The Ipsos poll, according to which the public would prefer a Burnham government to a Farage one by fifty to twenty-nine, dates from late August and is therefore even older. How support changes will only be shown by polls collected after 9 September, though even those will not, on their own, prove the cause of any shift. Ipsos ↗

The story was also picked up by media outside Britain, including Norwegian public broadcaster NRK. NRK ↗ Slovak news outlets carried a short wire report on it. SME ↗

Limits of this account

An investigation is not a charge. Police speak of possible offences, have not arrested anyone in the new branch, and the party and both former officials deny any wrongdoing. The presumption of innocence applies.

The basis is an edited recording filmed undercover by journalists, which police have only just requested be handed over. A hidden camera is a legitimate method, but this is material selected by the broadcaster. Channel 4 itself states that the half-million-pound donation never materialised, so part of the case rests on what people said, not on what they did. There are three distinct steps here, and they must not be conflated: police investigate, the prosecution service decides whether to bring charges, and a court decides guilt.

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