Questions raised about ‘security risk’ to Farage in row over £5m gift from crypto tycoon

The justification Nigel Farage offered last week for taking a gift of £5m from Reform UK’s billionaire benefactor Christopher Harborne was that it was to provide personal security for life. The scale of the gift suggested an unprecedentedly grave threat, but The Observer has learned the police judged one crucial incident to be less serious than Farage himself reported.

There have been well-publicised attacks on the Reform leader – he has been hit with eggs and milkshakes on the campaign trail – but, before Harborne handed over his millions, nothing that seemed to put him in a different category from other high-profile politicians.

Farage pointed instead to an incident after he had taken the money; a ‘lit incendiary device’ had been pushed through his letterbox in the early part of last year, he said. Newspaper headlines spoke of his home being “firebombed”. But an account from the police calls into question whether an attack that can properly be described as arson ever took place.

The Metropolitan police have told The Observer they are “investigating an attempted burglary that happened between 5pm on Thursday 17 April [2025] and 6pm on Sunday 20 April at an address in Bromley. Damage was caused to a door but nothing was stolen. No arrests have been made at this stage and inquiries continue.” Farage has a house in the south-east London borough.

The police description makes no reference to attempted arson, and Home Office guidelines make clear that, if it was suspected, the incident should be recorded as such. The principal crime rule tells police that if “an incident contains more than one type of crime, then count the most serious crime”. There is a league table of crimes that specifies arson is more serious than burglary.

Reform has stood by the description of an incendiary device but acknowledged that police are treating the incident as burglary. Any suggestion that Farage “fabricated, exaggerated or falsely described the incident” would be wrong, the party said. 

Reform’s dependence on Harborne’s money is well documented. In the second half of 2025, he gave £12m to the party, meaning he was responsible for two-thirds of its entire donations last year. Harborne, who has lived in Thailand for at least 25 years and made his fortune from cryptocurrencies, last week acknowledged that his wealth runs into “many multiples” of a billion pounds.

But until last week’s revelation in the Guardian, the depth of Farage’s personal entwinement with Harborne was not known. The £5m tax-free gift he took in the summer of 2024 is without precedent in British politics, and it is clear that he had no intention of declaring it.

Farage has said he did not need to because he was not an MP at the time he received it, and the gift was a private matter, but the code of conduct for MPs requires them to report financial benefits they receive in the 12 months before being elected within one month of their election.

The Tories have reported Farage to the parliamentary standards commissioner. In theory, he could face sanctions as severe as suspension from the Commons and a byelection. Farage’s critics point to an apparently glaring conflict of interest between taking money – unacknowledged – from a crypto billionaire and the lighter regulation on crypto that Reform advocated as its policy afterwards.

In the scramble to explain why he thought it was appropriate to take £5m of unreported income, Farage has relied entirely on threats to his safety. There is good reason for concern. Ten years ago, the Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered in her constituency, and in 2021, Conservative MP David Amess was stabbed to death at his constituency surgery. The psychological impact of these incidents, and the knowledge of other near-misses, looms large in the collective psyche in parliament.

MPs generally rely on security support from the parliamentary authorities. Farage claims that he was initially given a “reasonable level of protection”, but that it was withdrawn. Reform’s home affairs spokesman, Zia Yusuf, said last year that “the authorities slashed Nigel’s security by 75%... thankfully, donors stepped in to ensure he is protected”.

Parliamentary authorities do not comment on individual members’ security arrangements. However, a spokesman said they are “subject to a rigorous risk-based assessment, conducted by security professionals and with input from the police and a range of professional authorities”.

They are kept under “continuous review”, added the spokesman.

Farage has an extensive security detail, with up to six private security guards at any given time. It is not possible to say who pays for them.

When Farage was hit with a milkshake in Newcastle in 2019, Harborne was with him, and now says that, having seen first-hand how exposed the politician was, he decided – five years later – “to support Nigel’s security not just now, but for the rest of his life”.

Harborne’s gift came at a pivotal moment. On 22 May 2024, Rishi Sunak had called a surprise general election and Farage announced he would not be standing. Publicly, his reasoning was that he wanted to help Donald Trump get re-elected as US president that November, but it was also noted that, some years earlier, Farage had said: “There’s no money in politics, particularly doing it the way I’ve done it – 20 years of spending more than you earn.”

On 3 June 2024, Farage changed his mind and declared himself a candidate. No exact date has been given for when Harborne’s money arrived in Farage’s account, but Reform accepts that it was around this period.

Before he gave £5m to Farage, Harborne had donated £1m to Boris Johnson to fund a private office after he resigned as prime minister in July 2022. A source who worked with Johnson shortly beforehand believes that the donation to Farage did not relate to security concerns. “Clearly, it was to stand,” the source said. “[The donation for] Boris was at the end – for his office. This clearly was to say [to Farage]: ‘Run, and if doesn’t work out, you are sorted’… I imagine it was: ‘Stand, I will fund and you can be a voice for…’.”

Harborne has denied any such link. “I never thought he would go back into politics,” he said of his gift to Farage. But both men’s protestations of innocence are coming under pressure even before official investigations begin.

Photograph by Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images