Shameless Trump obsessives pose a grave threat to our country – and this proves it

The list of things Nigel Farage will do for money is long, unedifying and, in the week that we learned of £72m being donated to his party by a couple of cryptocurrency billionaires, surely worth revisiting. For a fee, he recorded himself gurning the infamous IRA slogan “Up the Ra” while raising a drink to the camera. He later said he didn’t understand the slogan. For £155, also via the personalised video platform Cameo, he offered support to a man convicted of violent disorder at a far-right riot in 2024, throwing in a cheery “keep acting in the right way” for no extra charge. A Reform UK spokesman said he had filmed the messages “without knowledge of the individuals involved beyond what is written for him”. Yet, sometimes, it is the timing rather than the content that causes concern. After becoming an MP, he uploaded six videos during the second reading of the Renters’ Rights Bill and one “Happy Birthday” message during a parliamentary vote that he missed. This year he received a £270,000 payment for promoting gold bullion, standard behaviour for anti-Establishment heroes everywhere, and continues to present lucrative programmes on GB News, co-owned by a hedge fund manager called Paul Marshall. An investigation into Marshall’s Twitter (now X) activity in 2024 by the anti-extremism advocacy group Hope Not Hate found that the self-professed “Christian” had liked a number of tweets from the far-right and other conspiracy accounts calling for “mass expulsions” of immigrants, questioning climate science and predicting civil war “once the Muslims get to 15–20 per cent”. A representative for Marshall told Hope Not Hate that it had focused on “a small and unrepresentative sample” of posts which “does not represent his views”. Following the revelations, the former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger called Marshall, who subsequently bought the Spectator magazine, “unfit to be a media mogul”. Nigel Farage, presumably, just calls him “boss”. The two cryptocurrency billionaires who this week donated £36m each to Reform UK, Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo, insist that they neither seek nor expect anything in return for their largesse. They are acts of altruism, motivated by a sincere belief that Farage, who is yet to hold a face-to-face constituency surgery in his Clacton constituency (he cites security grounds) despite having time to undertake all of the activities detailed above, cares much more about the interests of ordinary voters than, say, the interests of cryptocurrency billionaires, gold bullion providers or TV station-owning hedge fund managers with a history of hideous activity on social media. You may recognise Harborne’s name. Based in Thailand, where he is known as Chakrit Sakunkrit, he is the chap who secretly gave £5m to Farage in early 2024, again in return for absolutely nothing whatsoever, on top of the £22m he had already given to the party over seven years before this week’s jackpot. And apropos of nothing in particular, the cryptocurrency bill published on Reform’s website, that was deleted shortly after details of Harborne’s secret donation emerged, can still be accessed via the Internet Archive. We can only speculate as to why the party has put such emphasis on that particular policy area. The name of the other mega-donor, Ben Delo, may not be known to you. It is, however, very familiar to the United States Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York. In 2022, they described BitMex, the cryptocurrency platform he co-founded, as having been designed by Delo and his co-founder “as a Platform to flout US anti-money laundering rules”. That February, he pleaded guilty to violation of the Bank Secrecy Act by “willfully failing to establish, implement, and maintain an anti-money laundering program”, was sentenced to 30 months’ probation and paid a $10m penalty to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Last year, Delo was pardoned by Donald Trump. Presidential pardons are in the news this week on the other side of the Atlantic after CBS News filmed lobbyists promising to help secure them in return for payment. There is no suggestion that Delo, who has has written that he backs Nigel Farage because he cannot cope with lying politicians, has ever engaged in any questionable conduct. Except the conduct that got him convicted in the first place. And he has been pardoned for that, so let’s all move along. Also in the States this week, it was reported that Donald Trump Jr’s latest wedding celebrations were partly bankrolled by Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin. In 2008, Trump Jr told a New York real estate conference that a lot of the family’s assets came from Russia. “In terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” he said. “Say, in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo, and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Meanwhile, Jared Kushner, a property developer with zero diplomatic experience until his father-in-law became president, was charged by Donald Trump with bringing peace to Ukraine and the Middle East, and explained last week that peace could be achieved in the former if only Volodymyr Zelensky would concede to Vladimir Putin’s territorial demands. It may seem a long way from resting Cameo star Nigel Farage, whose former ally and protégé Nathan Gill is currently in jail for accepting bribes from a Kremlin stooge – though Farage said he had no knowledge of Gill’s “shameful activities” – to a post-nuptial knees-up in the Bahamas for a senior member of the president’s family being paid for by a Kremlin ally. Or it may not. And it may well be that the foreign-based businessmen funnelling money into Reform’s coffers on a scale never previously seen in British politics are doing so, as they insist, for entirely altruistic reasons. Or it may not. But Trump, through both his family and his administration, has taught the UK what can happen if an electorate is persuaded not to care enough about the provenance of money in politics or the motivations of donors. We would do well to heed the lesson.