There are plenty of lists of Nigel Farage's scandals. Most of them share two problems. They stop at the allegation, so you never find out what happened next. They also carry no dates, so you cannot tell a live police investigation from a complaint that was thrown out in 2019.
This is the other kind of list. Every entry has a date, a named source and an outcome. Where an investigation cleared someone, that is here too, in the same size type as the accusation. Where Farage denies something, his denial is printed. The point is not to make the case look worse than it is. The point is that the documented version is quite strong enough on its own.
It is updated as things move, and things are moving weekly.
What you will find in here
- A £5 million personal gift from a crypto investor, and the standards inquiry into it that stopped the day he left the Commons.
- Seventeen breaches of the MPs' code of conduct, upheld, and the honest comparison with Starmer, Lammy and Johnson that most write-ups leave out.
- A live Metropolitan Police investigation into £500,000 of donations, with two people interviewed under caution and no arrests made.
- Ten years and six months in prison for Reform's leader in Wales, who took Russian money. Farage is not accused of wrongdoing in that case.
- 166 candidates dropped in a single year, three of them too late to come off the ballot paper.
- Half an MEP salary docked to recover €40,000, and one fisheries committee meeting attended out of 42.
- Twenty former pupils from Dulwich College, an open letter, and his categorical denial printed in full.
- The Coutts affair, the one where he was right, which cost two chief executives their jobs.
- An open inquiry into Richard Tice, opened on 28 July 2026, alongside the near-identical case against a Labour MP.
Every entry carries a date, a named source and a status. Nothing here is unsourced.
How to read this: what open, upheld, denied and no action actually mean
Each entry ends with a status.
Open means a live investigation with no finding yet. Upheld means a body with the power to decide has decided against. No action means an investigation ended without a finding. Denied means an allegation has been reported but not tested by anyone with the power to test it. Concluded means it is finished and the outcome is on the record.
An allegation is not a finding. A police investigation is not a charge. A charge is not a conviction. This register keeps those apart, which is more than most of the internet manages.
The money: a £5 million gift from a crypto billionaire, a police investigation and a standards inquiry he walked away from
The £5 million gift. The Guardian reported that Farage received £5 million from Christopher Harborne, a British crypto and aviation investor based in Thailand. Farage said he was under no obligation to declare it because it arrived before he was an MP. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Daniel Greenberg, opened a formal inquiry on 13 May 2026. Farage later told journalists he should perhaps have "filled in a piece of paper" about it. Status: open, and paused. The inquiry stopped when he left the Commons and resumes only if he wins Clacton back. A report is not expected before September 2026.
What he told colleagues first. The Guardian reported that in March 2024, before Harborne's gift, Farage told colleagues he would need £1 million a year to justify running for Parliament, and £5 million to cover the 2024 to 2029 period. Reform says the report is incorrect. Status: denied.
The £9 million to the party. Electoral Commission figures published in December 2025 showed Harborne had given Reform UK £9 million, the largest single political donation ever made by a living person in Britain. It beat the previous record held by Lord Sainsbury. Reform says none of Harborne's donations were made in cryptocurrency. Labour and the Liberal Democrats wrote to the Electoral Commission and the Financial Conduct Authority asking for the crypto links to be examined. Status: lawful donation, complaints filed.
Tether and the Governor. The Guardian reported that in a meeting with Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey, Farage urged him to drop plans for a state run stablecoin while championing the rival stablecoin Tether. Harborne is heavily invested in Tether. Status: reported, no investigation announced.
George Cottrell. Reform says Cottrell never held an official role in the party. The Guardian reported that Tony Mack, who was selected as Reform's Clacton candidate in 2024 before being replaced by Farage, said Cottrell had been introduced to him as Farage's chief of staff, and that Cottrell's business card carried Farage's email address. Other insiders told the paper he covered the cost of a 2024 fundraising lunch for potential donors and arranged transport to Westminster for Reform's newly elected MPs. The Times reported on 11 July 2026 that Cottrell had failed to declare gifts to the Reform office. LBC reported the following day that he had access to Farage's emails. Cottrell was convicted of fraud in the United States in 2017. Status: open, part of the standards inquiry.
The benefits that were not registered. Farage received in kind benefits from Cottrell including security, housing and staffing for his social media operation, in the year before he became an MP. That year falls inside the declarable period. Farage said they were "totally undeclarable" because he was an influencer rather than a frontline politician. In May 2024 he described himself as Reform's honorary president. A separate £9,253.60 from Cottrell, for travel, security and accommodation to attend a conference in Belgium in the same period, was registered. Status: open.
The seventeen late declarations. Following a complaint from a member of the public, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards opened a formal inquiry on 30 October 2025 into Farage's compliance with Rule 5 of the Code of Conduct. He reported on 20 January 2026 that there had been seventeen breaches, covering more than £380,000 of outside earnings registered beyond the 28 day deadline. The full itemised picture of what he actually earns sits alongside this. They included a £51,438 lump sum from GB News received on 29 August and declared on 3 October, six late GB News payments in total, £91,200 from the gold dealer Direct Bullion, £17,173.76 from Cameo, payments from Google, and speaking fees from the US consulting firm Imperial Independent Media declared three or four months late.
Farage apologised in a letter on 12 November, called it an administrative error by him and his team, said there was no malicious intent to deceive, and pointed to a complicated set of interests built long before he was elected. He also told the commissioner he does not do computers, which is why he relies on someone else, and that his political life had exploded in ways nobody could have comprehended. He blamed a senior member of staff. Status: upheld, resolved by rectification.
The last part matters and most write-ups skip it. Greenberg dealt with this under the rectification procedure and chose not to refer it to the Committee on Standards, which is the lower of the two routes. Late registration is also not rare at the top of British politics. Keir Starmer was found to have breached the same rule eight times, David Lammy sixteen times and Boris Johnson nine times. Seventeen is the highest of those and the sum is much larger, which is the fair way to put it.
The £500,000 from a mother. Fiona Cottrell, George Cottrell's mother, made two donations of £250,000 each to Reform UK in May 2024. The Electoral Commission referred them to the Metropolitan Police, who opened an investigation in February 2025 into whether they concealed a donation from someone not permitted to give. It was later reported that Cottrell transferred more than two million dollars to his mother days before she gave. Cottrell's lawyers say he is a permissible donor and that his mother's donations were her own decision. Richard Tice called the reports a "politically motivated smear". Status: open. On 9 July 2026 the Met confirmed two people had been interviewed under caution and prosecutors had given early investigative advice. No arrests have been made.
Britain Means Business. The company, owned by Reform MP Richard Tice, gave £500,000 to Reform UK after receiving £1 million from Fiona Cottrell. It is reported to form part of the same police investigation. Status: open.
Richard Tice and the Israel trip. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Daniel Greenberg, opened an inquiry into Reform's deputy leader on 28 July 2026, published on 3 August, under Rule 6 of the MPs' Code of Conduct, the duty to be open and frank in declaring any relevant interest in a proceeding of the House. It concerns a Commons debate on UK democracy and Israeli influence on 22 June 2026, and a trip to Israel in September 2025. Tice had registered the trip in the Register of Members' Financial Interests. The allegation is not that he hid it, but that he did not declare it aloud at the start of the debate, which the guidance requires separately, on the basis that listeners should not have to go and look up a register. Tice called the inquiry garbage, said he was being investigated for standing against antisemitism, and attributed the complaint to an antisemitic anti-Israel lobby group. Reform said it was baffled. Status: open. The same commissioner is separately investigating the Labour MP Cat Eccles over a £2,600 Labour Friends of Israel trip registered seventeen days after the deadline, which her spokesperson called an administrative error with no attempt to conceal. Neither case has reached a finding.
The resignation: he gave up the seat rather than wait for the verdict, then asked Clacton for it back
The resignation. On 7 July 2026, at Millbank Tower, Farage announced he was leaving the Commons and would contest the resulting by-election. He said the people of Clacton, rather than the press or parliamentary authorities, should judge him. Many observers read it as a move to get ahead of the standards commissioner. Farage denies that. The next day Rachel Reeves formally accepted the resignation by appointing him Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead, the procedural fiction by which MPs leave, and remarked that if he wanted to spend the summer arguing with a bin she would not stop him. Status: concluded.
The by-election itself. Polling day is 13 August 2026. Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and Restore Britain are all standing aside, which leaves the novelty candidate Count Binface as the best known name on the ballot against him. Thirty four candidates are standing in total, a record for a UK parliamentary election, beating the previous high set in 2008. Farage won Clacton in 2024 with 46.2% and a majority of 8,405. Status: live.
What happens if he wins. The standards inquiry restarts. If it finds against him and imposes a suspension of more than ten sitting days, that can trigger a recall petition and a second by-election. Status: pending.
Twenty-one years as an MEP, half a salary docked, and one of 42 fisheries meetings attended
The office near Bognor Regis, 2014. The Times reported that a former UKIP official had complained to the EU's anti-fraud office about Farage's use of the general expenditure allowance. He received £15,500 a year to run a small constituency office that the paper said had been provided rent free by UKIP supporters. A former office manager put the running costs at around £3,000 a year, then said he had been misquoted. The Times stood by the story. Farage called it a politically motivated attack, said the office cost about £1,000 a month to run and offered to have his accounts independently audited. Electoral Commission records showed the converted grain store had not been declared as a benefit in kind since 2004. The Commission wrote to UKIP for clarification and said it did not consider the matter an investigation. Status: no finding recorded.
The £60,000 and the Cayman Islands, 2014. The same Times investigation reported that almost £60,000 of EU office money had gone into Farage's personal bank account. David Samuel-Camps, his political assistant from 2002 to 2010, described being sent a personal cheque each month which he paid into the office account in Arundel and drew on for invoices. Because transparency declarations only began in 2009, the Times calculated he could have spent up to £200,000 of EU money on office running costs since 1999. Farage said on the Today programme that he had been accused on the front page of The Times of siphoning off money to the Cayman Islands, called it another politically motivated attack from an establishment newspaper and said he was taking legal advice. He denied claims from former staff that he moved European funds into accounts in the Cayman Islands and the Isle of Man. His defence was that MEPs do not claim expenses at all but receive a flat allowance to spend as they see fit. Status: no formal disciplinary sanction followed.
The salary docking, 2018. This one produced an actual penalty. European Parliament auditors suspended the contract of Christopher Adams, hired as Farage's assistant in Brussels and Strasbourg and also UKIP's national nominating officer, having concluded he was not working on European Parliament business. From 1 January 2018 the Parliament withheld half of Farage's monthly salary to recoup €40,000, about £35,500. He would have repaid it by that October. Farage denied wrongdoing, told the Telegraph he was the victim of arbitrary law and said it was guilty until proven innocent. His parliamentary group called it a vindictive campaign of selective persecution of Eurosceptic MEPs. Status: upheld. Money recovered. BBC, January 2018, first reported by the Guardian.
The ADDE audit, 2016. A leaked European Parliament audit found that the Alliance for Direct Democracy in Europe, the UKIP-dominated group, had misspent more than €500,615, much of it in the UK ahead of parliamentary elections in UKIP target seats including Thanet South, where Farage himself stood. ADDE accused the Parliament of harassment and said its spending was fully eligible. UKIP's Roger Helmer told the BBC: "Call it revenge for Brexit if you like." Status: upheld against the group.
The attendance. Farage sat as an MEP from 1999 to 2020 and had one of the worst attendance records in the Parliament. He sat on the fisheries committee, the one directly relevant to the industry he campaigned hardest about, and attended one of its 42 meetings. Status: on the record.
The Reform leader in Wales who took Russian money and got ten and a half years
Nathan Gill. This is the most serious criminal outcome anywhere near Reform UK. It is worth setting out properly. Gill was a UKIP MEP for Wales from 2014, elected when Farage led the party, and later leader of Reform UK in Wales. He pleaded guilty in September 2025 to eight counts of bribery committed between 6 December 2018 and 18 July 2019. On 21 November 2025 the Old Bailey sentenced him to ten years and six months.
He took around £40,000, much of it in cash, from Oleg Voloshyn, a former Ukrainian MP linked to the sanctioned Putin ally Viktor Medvedchuk, and once described by the United States government as a pawn of Russian intelligence. In exchange he tabled motions, made speeches and arranged media access. He used codewords including "postcards" and "promised X-mas gifts". It came apart when he was stopped at Manchester Airport on 13 September 2021 on his way to Russia and his phone was seized.
Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb told him he had allowed money to corrupt his moral compass and had fundamentally compromised the integrity of a supranational legislative body. The Crown Prosecution Service said the case struck at the heart of democratic integrity. Status: concluded, convicted.
Farage has not been accused of any wrongdoing in the Gill case. He ruled out holding an investigation into his own party after the sentencing.
The candidates: 166 withdrawn in a single year, and the vetting firm he blamed for it
One hundred and sixty six. By the end of June 2024, according to Hope Not Hate, Reform UK had withdrawn support from at least 166 candidates since the start of that year, many over racist or offensive remarks. Status: concluded.
The vetting company. On 18 June 2024, after ITV News found apparently racist social media posts by two Reform candidates and identified four more who belonged to a Facebook group carrying Islamophobic content, Farage blamed the firm the party had hired to vet them. In September he told the BBC: "I had no idea how bad it was. I had no idea that half of these people simply haven't been vetted." He promised proper vetting for the 2025 local elections. Status: concluded.
The ones who went. Ian Gribbin, standing in Bexhill and Battle, apologised for a post saying Britain would have been better off taking Hitler up on his offer of neutrality. Grant StClair-Armstrong resigned after comments emerged urging people to vote BNP. Hope Not Hate found tweets by Jonathan Kay of South Ribble saying Muslims should be deported and that Africans had among the lowest IQs in the world, and by Mick Greenhough of Orpington saying the only solution was to remove Muslims from British territory, and calling Ashkenazi Jews a problem who had caused the world massive misery. Both were removed. Benjamin Dade, Ginny Ball, Nick Davies, David Carpin and Roger Hoe were also dropped over social media posts. Status: concluded.
The three who stayed on the ballot. In the last week of the 2024 campaign Reform withdrew support from Edward Oakenfull, accused of posting about the IQ of sub-Saharan Africans, Robert Lomas, accused of offensive comments about black people, and Leslie Lilley. It was too late to remove them from the ballot paper, so they remained on it as Reform candidates. The party said they would sit as independents if elected, and told voters to vote for them anyway. Status: concluded.
The Channel 4 footage. A Reform canvasser, Andrew Parker, was filmed using a racist slur about Keir Starmer, and another campaigner in the same broadcast suggested LGBTQ people are paedophiles. Farage called it a complete and total set-up and suggested, without producing evidence, that the man may have been paid to act. He complained to the elections watchdog. Channel 4 denied the footage was fabricated. Status: denied by Farage, denied by Channel 4, unresolved.
After the promise. Max Bethell, standing for Reform in Bakewell in the May 2025 Derbyshire county elections, was linked to a 2019 Instagram post containing a racial slur. The posts were deleted and Reform declined to comment. Elliott Allman, standing in Coalville North, had posted a racist remark about black drivers in 2013. Reform kept him, saying it was confident his views had matured. In the 2026 Scottish campaign the party suspended Senga Beresford over financial allegations, having previously defended her support for a Tommy Robinson rally and her call for Muslims to be deported. Status: concluded, and ongoing.
Rupert Lowe: suspended, reported to the police, cleared by the CPS, still suing
Rupert Lowe. On 5 March 2025 Lowe, then Reform MP for Great Yarmouth, told the Daily Mail that Reform was a protest party led by "the Messiah". The next day the party reported him to the Metropolitan Police over alleged threats of physical violence against chairman Zia Yusuf, relating to an incident the previous December. On 7 March he was suspended and the whip was withdrawn. The party said two female employees had made allegations of serious bullying and derogatory remarks about women in his offices, and appointed a King's Counsel to investigate.
Lowe called the allegations untrue and false, said there was zero credible evidence and said he had found a knife in his back the day after criticising Farage. Reform denied any connection between the two things. Private WhatsApp messages later seen by the BBC showed Farage calling Lowe's behaviour disgusting and contemptible and accusing him of damaging the party just before elections.
On 14 May 2025 the Crown Prosecution Service announced there would be no charges. Malcolm McHaffie, head of its special crime division, said there was insufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction. Lowe said the party had made a sinister attempt to weaponise the criminal justice system against him and instructed solicitors to begin defamation proceedings. Status: no action on the criminal allegation. The party's own KC report reached a different conclusion on the workplace complaints, and Lowe denies those too. That finding needs a mainstream source before it goes in this register.
Leave.EU, Arron Banks and the £450,000 that paid for a Chelsea house and a Land Rover
This is where it started, and what the whole thing cost Britain is its own list. Farage fronted Leave.EU. Arron Banks funded it. They are different people and the findings against them are different findings, which most lists of this kind smear together.
The £450,000 that paid for his life. A Channel 4 News investigation in May 2019 found that Arron Banks had spent around £450,000 on Farage in the year after the referendum. A Banks company, Rock Services Ltd, leased him a £4.4 million three bedroom house in Chelsea at an estimated £13,000 a month and furnished it down to the shower curtain. He was given a Land Rover Discovery valued at £32,300. Banks paid £20,000 for a close protection driver and sought £130,000 more from unnamed supporters for security, funded a private office at 40 Great Smith Street in Westminster and paid a personal assistant's salary. Farage was drawing an MEP's salary of about €100,000 plus expenses at the time. The support was not declared to EU authorities. Status: reported, no sanction.
The Electoral Commission fine. In May 2018 the Commission fined Leave.EU £70,000 for breaches of electoral law including overspending. Status: upheld.
The referral to the National Crime Agency. In November 2018 the Commission referred Banks to the NCA, saying it had reasonable grounds to suspect he was not the true source of £8 million in donations. On 24 September 2019 the NCA found no evidence of criminal offences and took no further action against Banks, Leave.EU or its chief executive Liz Bilney. Banks tweeted "Victory is sweet." Earlier that month the Metropolitan Police had dropped its own investigation for insufficient evidence. Status: no action.
The data fines. The Information Commissioner's Office issued notices of intent in November 2018 proposing £135,000 in fines against Leave.EU and Banks's Eldon Insurance, over roughly 330,000 emails sent to insurance customers carrying a Leave.EU newsletter and more than a million emails to Leave.EU subscribers carrying GoSkippy marketing. The final penalties, confirmed in February 2019, came to £120,000, split evenly, with a compulsory audit attached. Banks said the ICO had found the company may have accidentally sent a newsletter to customers and no evidence of a grand data conspiracy. Status: upheld.
The wider ICO investigation, which Elizabeth Denham described as the most complex her office had ever conducted, covered 71 witnesses and more than 700 terabytes of data. It found what the report called a disturbing disregard for voters' personal privacy, and served warning notices on eleven UK political parties. Cambridge Analytica would have been fined substantially had it not already collapsed.
Dulwich College: twenty former pupils, one open letter and a categorical denial
This section carries the heaviest denial in the register, so it needs the most careful handling.
The Guardian published its first report in late 2025, days after Nathan Gill was jailed. It spoke to twenty people who said they were either victims of, or witnesses to, racial abuse by Farage over a six year period at Dulwich College in the mid 1970s and early 1980s. The allegations include antisemitic remarks directed at a fellow pupil, teaching younger members of the Combined Cadet Force a terrace song called "Gas Em All", Nazi salutes, racial slurs, telling pupils of overseas heritage to go home, and putting a pupil in detention while a prefect because of the colour of his skin.
The best known accuser is Peter Ettedgui, a film director whose Jewish grandparents escaped Nazi Germany. He says Farage repeatedly said "Hitler was right" and "gas them" with a hiss. Two further former pupils corroborated his account to the BBC. Twenty five former pupils and one former teacher later signed an open letter calling on Farage to apologise, and rejected the suggestion that they were politically motivated. A group of Holocaust survivors made the same call. Baroness Kishwer Falkner, the former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said she was confused and disturbed by his response.
Reform UK called the allegations entirely without foundation and said the Guardian had produced no contemporaneous record or corroborating evidence for disputed recollections from nearly fifty years ago. Richard Tice called them made-up twaddle. Farage said he had never directly racially abused anybody, and when pressed on what "directly" meant, said it meant taking it out on an individual on the basis of who or what they are. He also said he might have said things fifty years ago that could be read as playground banter. He sent legal letters to the Guardian and his spokesperson said he could take legal action.
Farage's own answer is worth printing in full weight: he says he has done more in his career to defeat extremism and far right politics than anybody else in the UK, from fighting the BNP onwards. There is no evidence that Farage has ever been a member of a far right organisation. There is no suggestion that he holds today the views attributed to him as a boy. Status: denied, untested.
Keir Starmer raised it at Prime Minister's Questions and later called Farage spineless over his handling of it.
Russia in his own words: from admiring Putin as an operator to promising to shoot down Russian jets
The Gill conviction is a matter of law. This is a matter of record, which is different. It is worth keeping the two apart.
The GQ interview, March 2014. Asked which world leader he most admired, Farage said: "As an operator, but not as a human being, I would say Putin. The way he played the whole Syria thing. Brilliant. Not that I approve of him politically. How many journalists in jail now?" Nick Clegg called the remark utterly grotesque during their EU debates. Farage then went further, telling reporters he admired what Putin had done over Syria and that Britain would have gone to war there if Putin had not intervened. He added that the poison gas was more than likely used by the rebels rather than by Assad, which most of the international community rejects. Status: on the record.
"We provoked this war." In an interview broadcast by the BBC on 21 June 2024, two weeks before the general election, Farage said the eastward expansion of NATO and the EU had provoked Russia's invasion of Ukraine. He said "we've provoked this war" while adding that of course it was Putin's fault, and stood by a social media post he made shortly after the February 2022 invasion calling it a consequence of EU and NATO expansion. Rishi Sunak said the claim was completely wrong and only played into Putin's hands. James Cleverly accused him of echoing Putin's justification. John Healey called it disgraceful. Farage said in the same interview that he disliked Putin as a person but admired him as a political operator. Status: on the record.
The banner. Two days later, at a rally at the Columbine Centre in Walton on the Naze, nine miles from Clacton, the campaign group Led By Donkeys dropped a banner of a grinning Putin behind him giving a thumbs up. Farage asked who had put it there and said someone at the venue needed to get the sack. Status: happened.
The hardening. Speaking to Bloomberg in the days after Nathan Gill admitted taking Russian bribes, Farage said Britain should shoot down Russian jets that enter NATO airspace, that he would send British troops to Ukraine as part of a UN peacekeeping force, and that he supported using frozen Russian assets to help Ukraine. He called Putin "a very bad dude" and "not a rational man", and said the idea that he was soft on this was nonsense. Labour's Anna Turley said he was panicking and desperately trying to backtrack. Status: on the record.
Lockdown: two police visits, one pint, no fines and a complaint against Kent Police
Dover and Pett Level, May 2020. Farage drove 63 miles from his home in Westerham to the Port of Dover to film a video about what he called the illegal migrant scandal, having the week before travelled around 100 miles to Pett Level in East Sussex to do the same. Two Kent Police officers came to his door to advise him on essential travel. He called it lockdown lunacy and a total waste of time and money, lodged a complaint against the force and said he was a key worker because of his LBC broadcasting. Kent Police said it would be inappropriate to comment on someone who had not been charged, and that officers receiving reports of breaches have an obligation to assess whether travel is essential. Status: no charge, no fine.
The pint, July 2020. Farage posted a photograph of himself in a Kent pub on the day pubs reopened, having returned from Donald Trump's Tulsa rally less than two weeks earlier, when returning travellers were required to isolate for 14 days. Ed Davey wrote to Kent's chief constable saying Farage appeared to be in violation of the quarantine and was showing flagrant disregard for the safety of his community. Farage said he had tested negative. Status: reported, outcome not established in the sources seen.
LBC, June 2020. Farage left his LBC show after tweeting that a new form of the Taliban had been born in the UK, about Black Lives Matter protesters, and then calling the movement a far left Marxist organisation that wants to abolish the police and dismantle capitalism. Status: concluded.
Coutts: the one where he was right, and it cost two chief executives their jobs
A register that only collects things against him is a worse register. This one goes the other way. It cost two chief executives their jobs.
In June 2023 Coutts, the private bank owned by NatWest, told Farage it was closing his accounts. The BBC reported he had fallen below the bank's financial threshold. Farage filed a subject access request, obtained the bank's internal dossier and published it. It showed the Coutts wealth reputational risk committee had concluded his values did not align with the bank's own, and described him in terms including a disingenuous grifter who was at best seen as xenophobic.
The BBC apologised on 24 July 2023, its business editor Simon Jack describing his story as incomplete and inaccurate. The following day NatWest chief executive Dame Alison Rose admitted she had been the source. NatWest said she retained the board's full confidence. She resigned by mutual consent at 1.25am the next morning, wiping around £850 million off the bank's value, more than £320 million of it from the taxpayer's 39% stake. The head of Coutts, Peter Flavel, resigned the day after that. Farage called for the rest of the board to follow.
NatWest commissioned the law firm Travers Smith to review what had happened. Its first phase found the decision to exit Farage was lawful, was predominantly commercial and breached no applicable law, and that Rose played no part in it. It also found that Coutts failed to comply with the FCA's complaints rules because no complaint was logged for months, that the May 2022 decision to keep classifying Farage as a politically exposed person was incorrect, and that confidential customer information about him was conveyed from Rose to the BBC on 3 or 4 July 2023. The Financial Conduct Authority raised concerns with NatWest and Coutts and said it would decide on further action once the review and any regulatory steps were complete. Status: upheld in part, in his favour.
Rose received a final payment of £2.4 million. Farage called it a sick joke.
The councillors: better than one in ten gone within a year of being elected
Reform's local government record since May 2025 has been tracked mostly outside the national press. The two most complete trackers are both run by opponents. The Liberal Democrat peer Mark Pack maintains one and an anti-Reform account maintains the other, which is worth saying plainly rather than presenting their totals as neutral. The individual cases below are separately reported by the BBC.
The scale. Of the 677 councillors elected under the Reform banner in May 2025, Pack's tracker recorded 74 who had resigned, defected, been expelled or been suspended by late April 2026. That is more than one in ten. It had roughly doubled in six months. He attributes it to vetting. Status: contested totals, consistent direction.
Days after the count. Stuart Prior, elected to both Essex County Council and Rochford District Council, resigned on 11 May 2026, days after winning, having been found before the elections to have shared posts describing white people as the master race. Jay Cooper of Sefton was declared not welcome by Farage after reports he had called the Holocaust a hoax, and resigned. Glenn Gibbins of Sunderland was suspended within a week of election for saying the city's Nigerian population should be melted down to fill in potholes. Status: concluded.
Doncaster. Reform swept to a majority in May 2025 and had lost three of its councillors within months. Mark Broadhurst was stripped of the whip over social media posts that a panel of his fellow councillors later found to be racist, Islamophobic, antisemitic and highly offensive. David Knight was removed by the leadership. Christopher Marriott left voluntarily. Samuel Booth resigned two months after being elected, for personal reasons. Status: concluded.
Kent. In October 2025 a leaked video showed Reform councillors complaining they were being ignored by council leader Linden Kemkaran, who told them to suck it up. Kent was the council Reform had most wanted to hold up as proof it could govern. Status: reported.
Why they say they left. The reasons are not all political. Charlotte Kelly of Staffordshire joined the Conservatives in June 2026 citing her experience of bullying and sexism within Reform. Andrew Kilburn of Durham resigned a week after being elected for failing to declare that he worked for the council. Daniel Taylor, elected in Kent, was suspended during a police investigation and later jailed for coercive behaviour. A steady stream have gone to Restore Britain. Status: concluded.
Before all this: the man who founded UKIP, tried to expel him and lost
Alan Sked's allegation. UKIP's founder says that in the run up to the 1997 general election Farage wanted former National Front candidates to stand, and that when Sked hesitated Farage used a racial slur to argue that black voters would never support them anyway. Farage denies it. Sked expelled Farage and two others after that election. The three took legal action, UKIP faced bankruptcy and had to let them back, and Sked resigned shortly afterwards. Status: denied and untested. It also comes from a man Farage helped force out, which is worth saying.
Janice Atkinson, 2015. Atkinson, then UKIP MEP for the South East and the candidate for Folkestone and Hythe, was suspended after a Sun investigation into an apparent expenses claim by a member of her staff. Kent Police investigated a fraud allegation. Farage said the allegations looked very bad and could not look worse. Status: concluded, suspension.
Hope Not Hate, 2017. Farage said on LBC that the campaign group pursued violent and undemocratic means. Hope Not Hate began libel proceedings and he withdrew the claim before the case started, accepting the group does not use violence while maintaining that some people claiming to support it had behaved violently. He noted he had paid nothing, given no apology and offered no undertaking to the court. Status: claim withdrawn.
Breaking Point: the poster he unveiled on the day Jo Cox was murdered
On 16 June 2016, in the final week of the referendum campaign, Farage unveiled a poster showing a long queue of overwhelmingly non-white refugees at the Croatia and Slovenia border in 2015, under the words "Breaking Point" and "the EU has failed us all". Dave Prentis of the union Unison wrote to the Metropolitan Police calling it a blatant attempt to incite racial hatred. George Osborne said it had echoes of 1930s Nazi propaganda. Michael Gove, campaigning on the same side of the referendum, said he shuddered when he saw it. Caroline Lucas called it the politics of the gutter. The official Vote Leave campaign, which Farage had no part in, condemned it too.
Farage said the photograph was accurate and undoctored, that it showed the consequences of Angela Merkel's decision, and that most of the people in it were young men. No charges followed. The same photograph was later used by Fidesz in Hungary ahead of the 2018 election.
The poster was unveiled on the day Jo Cox was murdered. Status: no action.
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Is London Safe?
Safer than New York, Berlin and every US state.
Read more →Sources are linked inline throughout. Figures change with each filing and each hearing. Last updated 4 August 2026.
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