On Friday 11 September a man who lives in Hong Kong gave Nigel Farage's party thirty six million pounds. On Saturday a man who lives in Bangkok matched it. Seventy two million pounds in two days, the two largest donations to a British political party in history and the previous record was held by the second man anyway.
Both of them made their fortunes in cryptocurrency. Both of them have said they want nothing in return. One of them pleaded guilty in a New York court to running what American prosecutors called, in effect, a money laundering platform. The other has a second name, a second citizenship and a company registry entry that has said Thailand since 2018.
Between them, before this weekend, they had already supplied three quarters of the money Reform declared in the first three months of this year. Reform wants to run the country. So it is worth knowing, in the way you would want to know who owns the water company, who owns the party.
Here is the field guide. Two specimens, their habitat, their markings, what they built, what they have been convicted of, what they say they want and what they have actually bought before. All of it from the public record, most of it from court documents and the Electoral Commission, none of it from Reform's press office, which has been busy this month with a police investigation.
Read it once and you will not be able to hear the phrase "party of the people" the same way again.
Specimen one. Ben Delo
Habitat. Born in Sheffield in 1984, double first in maths and computer science at Oxford, software engineer at IBM, then high frequency trading systems at hedge funds and at JP Morgan. Moved to Hong Kong in 2012 and stayed there until this year.
What he built. BitMEX, co-founded in 2014, a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange that let people bet on the price of Bitcoin with borrowed money. By 2018 he was being described as Britain's youngest self made billionaire.
The conviction. In February 2022 Delo pleaded guilty in the Southern District of New York to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, by wilfully failing to set up any anti money laundering programme at BitMEX. He paid a ten million dollar fine and was sentenced to thirty months' probation.
The US Attorney's words, not mine. BitMEX was "in effect a money laundering platform". The founders "built a company designed to flout" its obligations. It filed no suspicious activity reports at all between 2014 and 2020, and Delo and his co-founder "both communicated directly with BitMEX customers who self identified as being based in Iran" and did nothing.
The pardon. On 27 March 2025, two months into his second term, Donald Trump pardoned Delo and his BitMEX co-founders. The conviction is wiped in America. It is not wiped from the record.
That is a man reading the legislation, not a man who has not noticed it.
What he says he wants. To level the playing field against Labour and the Conservatives. In April, still apparently in Hong Kong, he wrote in the Telegraph that the government's £100,000 cap on donors living abroad was a rigged game, that England was his home and that he would move back to give more. He did.
He has also given £25 million to an autism charity he founded and £20 million to a maths institute, which is worth saying, because it is true.
What he actually did. He had planned, the BBC reported, to give Reform a million pounds a month until the last possible election date in 2029. He gave the whole thirty six million at once instead, because, he said, the government might try to limit mega donations in the meantime.
Specimen two. Christopher Harborne
Habitat. Born in Derbyshire in 1962, Westminster School, Cambridge, McKinsey, INSEAD. Has lived in Thailand for more than twenty years and holds Thai citizenship under a second name. Companies House has recorded his country of residence as Thailand, continuously, since 2018. A claim form he filed in the High Court on 9 June this year gives an address in Bangkok.
Markings. Sixth on this year's Sunday Times Rich List at just over eighteen billion pounds. An early investor in Bitcoin and Ethereum. Owns a stake in Tether, the company behind the biggest stablecoin, reported at around twelve per cent and in the Bitfinex exchange alongside it.
Runs a firm that trades private jets and another that sells aviation fuel. The Times found his name in the Panama Papers as an intermediary for companies linked to offshore accounts.
What he has bought before. Around £270,000 to the Conservatives over twenty years. More than six million to the Brexit Party in 2019, making him its biggest donor. A million pounds to Boris Johnson's private office in November 2022. Two months later a defence company in which he was a major shareholder won an eighty million pound Ministry of Defence contract. He then went with Johnson to Kyiv as an adviser.
A man who paid a million pounds to a former Prime Minister and watched his company win an eighty million pound contract two months later says he expects nothing in return.
In 2024 he gave Nigel Farage five million pounds personally, shortly before Farage decided to stand for Parliament. Farage did not declare it. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards opened an inquiry in May, and Farage resigned his seat in July to fight a by-election over it, which he won.
In February this year he paid £25,000 for Farage to visit the Maldives, declared as a benefit in kind. By April his donations to Reform had passed £22 million. Then, on Saturday, thirty six more.
What he says he wants. "Nothing. No peerage, no policy change, just a party that is ready for government." He wrote that in the Telegraph too, and added that it was competitive spirit that made him match Delo.
What it buys
You do not have to guess at the policy, because Farage announced it, in Las Vegas, at a Bitcoin conference, in May 2025. A Bitcoin reserve held at the Bank of England. Capital gains tax on cryptoassets cut to ten per cent. Banks banned from closing a customer's account over their crypto activity.
Line those up against the donors. A national Bitcoin reserve is public money buying the asset that made both men rich, at scale, which is the single most reliable way to push its price up. A ten per cent rate on crypto gains is a special rate, for one kind of asset, that happens to be the kind they hold.
And a ban on banks closing crypto accounts is the reform that a man convicted of running an exchange with no anti money laundering programme, and a man with a large stake in Tether, would put at the top of any list.
Farage publicly promoted Tether, the company Harborne holds a stake in, shortly after the first nine million arrived. Reform says the two things are unconnected.
Nobody has to have asked for any of it. That is what the "no policy change" line misunderstands, or hopes you will. The policy was announced first. The money came after. You do not bribe a man to do what he is already promising to do. You pay for him to be in a position to do it.
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The fortnight it arrived in
The seventy two million landed in the same fortnight that two of Reform's most senior aides resigned. Channel 4 had sent an undercover reporter posing as a donor, and broadcast the result as the party conference opened. The footage appeared to show discussions about an American company paying for the party's polling, and a suggestion that a larger foreign donation could be routed through a British account.
The Metropolitan Police said on 9 September that it would investigate. Farage called it entrapment and said no money had been taken.
Two days later the largest donation in British history arrived, from a man who until recently lived in Hong Kong, and the day after that it was matched by a man whose company filings still say Thailand. A party under police investigation for how it handles foreign money took seventy two million pounds from abroad, or near enough and said the people asking questions were terrified of it.
You do not bribe a man to do what he is already promising to do. You pay for him to be in a position to do it.
The law they ran in front of
Here is the part Reform would like framed as persecution. The Representation of the People Bill, going through Parliament now, caps donations from overseas electors at £100,000 a year. It applies retrospectively to 25 March 2026, the day the policy was announced, precisely so that nobody could shovel money in before it passed. Anyone who moved back during 2026 stays capped until the start of 2028.
So for Harborne's donation to be legal, by Byline Times' reading of the bill, three things have to have happened by three dates. Off the overseas register before the cap was announced in March. Living in Britain without a break from July. On the ordinary electoral register by the day he paid.
Richard Tice was asked on breakfast television when Harborne moved back and could not say.
If the Electoral Commission decides the donations are not permissible, the party has to return them. Byline's calculation is that Reform could keep around half a million pounds in interest while it argues. Tice says Labour is terrified. Labour did not write a law in March to catch a donation in September. That is just how calendars work.
Fact box
Two men. Seventy two million pounds. The GMB, half a million workers, gave Labour £600,000 in a year.
That is 0.8 per cent of one weekend. Before the weekend, Delo and Harborne already accounted for roughly 76 per cent of the £9.26 million Reform declared in the first quarter of 2026.
What it means for you
It means the party currently favourite to run your country is a two man company. Not in spirit. On the books. When three quarters of a party's money comes from two people, the party's real constituency is two people and every other member is a customer.
It means the phrase "the elites" has been retired. A man on the Rich List with a Thai passport and a private jet business is not fighting the elite. He is buying a franchise of it, and the man who wrote in the Telegraph that the problem with Britain is the self deception of its elites did so from Hong Kong, with a presidential pardon in the drawer.
And it means something a previous piece on this site already said about Mosley, the National Front, the BNP and UKIP. Parties like this are held together by one man and one cheque. Remove either and there is no machine underneath. Reform has just doubled the size of the cheque and reduced the number of people who can write it to two.
That is not strength. That is a party with a very short list of people it cannot afford to annoy.
What to do with this
The Representation of the People Bill caps overseas donors. It does not cap anyone else, and a domestic cap is the argument now being had. Canada, whose Parliament is a copy of ours, caps every individual at around a thousand pounds a year and bans company donations entirely and the sky has not fallen in.
Write to your MP and ask whether they support a cap on all donations, and ask for the answer in writing.
Then, next time a Reform candidate tells you they are the party of ordinary people, ask them one question and wait. Who paid for the leaflet.
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