British police investigate funding of Farage's party. New allegations added to the investigation from February 2025

The Metropolitan Police announced on Wednesday that it is opening a criminal investigation into the circumstances surrounding the funding 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 with a journalist posing as a donor ways to circumvent the ban on foreign donations. The police are not investigating the new allegations separately; they are adding them to the investigation into donations to the same party that they have been running since February 2025.

What the police announced

The Metropolitan Police's statement is brief and factual. "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 the statement, detectives assessed the information and determined that "there are potential offences requiring investigation". The Guardian ↗

The following sentence defines the scope of the case. According to police, the possible criminal offences are "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 allegations being examined relate to possible offences under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. BBC News ↗

In connection with the new allegations from the report, no one has yet been arrested or interviewed under caution. That is no longer the case in the older branch of the investigation, where police interviewed two people under caution last summer. Detectives are now seeking to obtain the recording from the report and are working with the Electoral Commission and the Crown Prosecution Service. The Independent ↗

How the mechanism was supposed to work

British rules on party donations are specific. Donations may be made by a person registered on the UK electoral roll or by a company registered in the United Kingdom that also does business there. What matters is who is actually providing the money, so mere residence in Britain is not sufficient for eligibility, and the money must not simply be funnelled through an intermediary. Electoral Commission ↗

A reporter from the investigative group Verbatim and a hired actor posed, according to Channel 4, 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. Head of programming James Orr, meanwhile, proposes 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. During a lunch in Clacton, an offer of half a million pounds via the son was reportedly made, but this money never arrived. The polls, however, costing over thirty thousand pounds, were paid for and benefited the party once national newspapers picked them up. If assessed as a non-monetary donation from abroad, they would be impermissible and undeclared. The Guardian ↗

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

What the police were investigating before the report

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

Cottrell received an eight-month sentence in the United States in 2017, although 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, which was led by the party's current deputy leader Richard Tice. Cottrell's mother sent it £1,075,000 in June 2024, and the company subsequently donated half a million to Reform UK. Byline Times ↗

In parallel, proceedings by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards are underway. The subject is five million pounds that cryptocurrency businessman and billionaire Christopher Harborne gave Farage before the 2024 election, which the MP did not declare. Farage repeatedly describes it as a personal donation for his security. While the parliamentary review was ongoing, he gave up his Clacton seat on July 7, 2026, triggering a by-election. Al Jazeera ↗ He retained the seat in the by-election on August 13. UK Parliament ↗

Added to this was a finding by the Sunday Times that Farage also failed to declare further benefits from Cottrell, namely security, drivers, staff and accommodation. Upon entering Parliament in 2024, he declared only a single benefit from him, worth approximately £9,200, for a trip to a conference in Belgium. Al Jazeera ↗

What the polls show and what cannot be inferred from them

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

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

The story was also picked up by media outside Britain, for example Norway's public broadcaster NRK. NRK ↗ Slovak news outlets carried a brief wire report on it. SME ↗

Limits of this account

An investigation is not a charge. Police speak of possible criminal offences, no one has been arrested in the new branch, and both the party and the two former officials deny wrongdoing. The presumption of innocence applies.

The basis is a compilation filmed by undercover journalists, which the police are still requesting be handed over. Hidden cameras are a legitimate method, but this is material selected by an editorial team. Channel 4 itself states that the half-million-pound donation never took place, so part of the matter rests on what people said, not on what they did. There are three separate steps that must not be conflated: the police investigate, the prosecution service decides whether to bring charges, and the court decides on guilt.

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