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One of Reform UK’s largest financial backers at the last election has donated £125,000 to Nigel Farage’s party as it aims to try and unseat dozens of Conservative MPs.
Jeremy Hosking, a City of London financier who partly bankrolled the Brexit campaign, told the Financial Times he donated to the populist party last week.
His donation will help strengthen the party’s finances, which Farage has admitted are a key “weakness” as it fields candidates in almost every seat in England, Scotland and Wales.
Farage, who is standing in Clacton, said the party needs to raise “a lot of money very, very quickly”, after it was caught off guard by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s decision to call a snap election last month.
Hosking, a former Tory backer who has since donated more than £2.2mn to Reform, had said this month he would no longer support the Reform party financially as he wanted to focus instead on “culture war” issues.
But he changed his mind, telling the FT: “In despair I have given £125,000 to Reform in support of their embrace of the cultural crisis in Britain. I feel sure lots of Tory sympathisers are feeling the same way.”
Reform declined to comment, while a spokesperson for Hosking confirmed the £125,000 donation’s size.
The right-wing party has accepted hundreds of thousands of pounds from a raft of new donors since the beginning of the campaign, including former pop star Holly Valance and Zia Yusuf, founder of concierge service Velocity Black.
Before Hosking resumed donations to Reform, he had offered £5,000 to Tory candidates if they would sign up to a “four-point commitment to culture”.
These commitments include axing the hiring of diversity and inclusion officers in government departments, revoking plans to crack down on big technology companies, and ending the BBC’s licence fee model. Reform has signed up to some of these pledges.
Despite Tory efforts to prevent its candidates from accepting the donations, four Conservative MPs including Dame Andrea Jenkyns already have.
Tory campaign officials are concerned that Reform will attract right-wing voters and cost the Conservative party seats at next week’s election, even if Reform fails to win more than a smattering of MPs.
Farage’s party is averaging about 16 per cent, according to the FT poll tracker. It has surpassed the Conservatives by a single percentage point in at least two polls.
The Reform party raised roughly nearly £900,000 in large donations above £11,180 in the first two weeks of the campaign — a figure that does not included a donation from either Yusuf or Hosking — but does feature £500,000 from Britain Means Business, a company owned by party chair Richard Tice.
Reform reached 50,000 members — each paying a £25 annual subscription — following Farage’s decision to stand in Clacton.
