When it was revealed last month that Nigel Farage had received a £5m gift from Christopher Harborne without declaring it, the Reform UK leader insisted he did not have to because it was for his personal security.
The seven-figure sum from the Thailand-based crypto billionaire was “purely private” and “wasn’t political in any sense at all”, Farage added, while Harborne said he wanted “to support Nigel’s security not just now, but for the rest of his life”.
Yet on Thursday – the day the parliamentary standards commissioner, Daniel Greenberg, confirmed the previous day’s reports that he had opened an investigation into whether Farage had breached the Commons code of conduct – the story shifted.
In a sit-down interview with the Sun, Farage said: “This was given to me on an unconditional basis, completely unconditional basis. But, frankly, it was given as a reward for campaigning for Brexit for 27 years.”
Farage said the donation had no impact on his decision to return to public life. Asked whether “he who pays the piper picks the tune”, the Reform leader said: “I can’t be bought by anybody.”
This interview – in which he claimed he had rejected money from Elon Musk in exchange for saying “certain things” – prompted the world’s richest man to tweet: “Farage is lying.”
A Reform party spokesman told The Observer that “both can be true at the same time”.
“[It was a] reward after the years of danger he’s put himself in, and is still in now because of his campaigning for Brexit, [and] now he can be safe for the rest of his life.”
This is not the first time Farage’s claims about his financial dealings have evolved as the story wears on.
In November 2024, under pressure to demonstrate a commitment to his Clacton constituency, he told journalists he had “just exchanged contracts on a house that I’ll be living in… I’ve bought a house in Clacton. What more do you want me to do?”
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Six months later, that story changed too, with the Reform leader admitting the property was in fact solely owned by his long-term partner, Laure Ferrari. “Whether I say ‘I’ or ‘we’ is pretty irrelevant. Laure bought the house; it is her asset,” Farage claimed. “The main reason my name does not appear is for security reasons.”
Fast-forward four months, amid growing questions about whether he might have dodged an additional £44,000 of stamp duty, he introduced another version of events. During Reform’s conference, the party’s leader told Sky News: “I shouldn’t have said ‘we’. I should have said ‘we’,” he said, contradicting himself in the space of a few words. “It’s her money. It’s her asset. I own none of it. But I just happen to spend some time there.”
Photograph by Toby Melville via getty Images