Reform UK mega-donors Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo have handed the party £72 million in 24 hours, a sum that exceeds the total donations received by every UK political party combined in 2025, which according to Electoral Commission data cited by AP News came to £64.8 million.
Harborne matched Delo’s earlier £36 million pledge, writing in the Daily Telegraph that his ‘competitive spirit’ prompted him to do so after Delo informed him of the record gift. The two donations are jointly the largest ever made to a UK political party since parties were required to declare donations in 2001, according to BBC News.
To put the scale in context: the previous record was held by businessman John Sainsbury, who gave £10 million to the Conservative Party in 2023, according to Courthouse News Service. Harborne and Delo have each donated three and a half times that figure in a single transaction.
Nigel Farage said he was ‘honoured and humbled’ by the contributions, adding that Delo and Harborne ‘know that we are the only party that can turn the country around and win the next general election’. Reform said the money would fund ‘the brightest and best minds to work on policy and the most comprehensive plan for government ever’, BBC News reported.
Who Are the Men Writing the Cheques?
Harborne disclosed that he had been donating around £1 million a month to Reform before the lump sum, and that Delo’s move triggered his decision to match it. Delo had similarly been contributing £1 million a month, but chose to front-load the entire sum in case the government moved to restrict mega-donations before the next election.
Delo’s background warrants attention. He co-founded the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX and pleaded guilty in the United States to failing to prevent money laundering on the platform, with prosecutors noting that lax controls allowed customers under US sanctions, including people in Iran, to trade there. He was sentenced to 30 months of probation and fined $10 million. US President Donald Trump pardoned him in March 2025, according to Courthouse News Service.
Both donors are registered to vote in the UK. Harborne holds British and Thai citizenship; Delo recently returned from Hong Kong. Their eligibility to donate is therefore not straightforwardly in question, though parliament is actively debating exactly where the boundaries should sit.
Reform UK Mega-Donors Intensify the Pressure for a Cap
The donations have accelerated a debate that Westminster has been conducting with conspicuous diffidence. Labour MP Stella Creasy tabled amendments to the Representation of the People Bill, one of which, designated NC71 by the Electoral Commission in its parliamentary briefing, would establish an annual cap of £100,000 on donations to registered parties. A separate Creasy amendment proposed an immediate £500,000 limit reducing to £100,000 in the second calendar year. More than 60 MPs signed the amendments. Not one was put to a vote.
Green Party MP Ellie Chowns said she would prefer an even tighter limit of £50,000 a year, according to BBC News. Rachel Millward, deputy leader of the Green Party in England and Wales, accused Prime Minister Andy Burnham of ‘flip flopping’ on the question of a cap, noting his earlier apparent support before trade union lobbying gave him pause.
The trade union angle is what makes this genuinely complicated for Labour. In 2024, an election year, Labour received £12 million from trade unions; in 2025 that figure was £5 million, according to Electoral Commission data cited by Courthouse News. Any cap stringent enough to constrain Harborne and Delo would, depending on how it is structured, apply pressure to union funding as well.
Labour peer Margaret Hodge said she was ‘gobsmacked’ by Harborne’s donation and warned of a ‘real danger’ that British politics could be ‘captured by rich individuals’. Her proposed solution: allow union members to opt in to making individual contributions to the Labour party, which would then be classified as personal donations rather than union transfers. Whether opposition parties would accept that workaround is another matter entirely.
My read is that the paralysis here is deliberate. Both the major parties have a donor class they cannot afford to antagonise, and the polite outrage from both sides of the Commons will dissipate the moment the cameras turn elsewhere. What may change the arithmetic is the cumulative scale: from July 2024 to June 2026, Reform received a total of £33.7 million in registered donations before this weekend’s announcements, with Harborne and Delo accounting for £23 million of that, according to NewsCord’s analysis of Electoral Commission donation register data. Adding Saturday’s pledges takes Reform’s total to approximately £105.7 million, with Harborne and Delo responsible for around 90% of it. At some point, a party funded almost entirely by two individuals stops looking like a political movement and starts looking like something else.
The Representation of the People Bill has its second reading in the Lords on Monday. If that passes without a donation cap attached, the next set of mega-donations may well dwarf even these.
