For most people, $224m (£168m) is a lot of money, especially if you spend it and get nothing in return. But Elon Musk is richer than most people. In fact, there is no one richer.
As the wealthiest of the US’s tech oligarchs Musk could afford to blow huge sums on a failed bid to prop up Republican candidates in Texas, his adoptive home state, in last week’s midterm congressional elections. He is reported to have spent a further $250m failing to engineer results in other races.
His riches plausibly swung voters the other way in Texas. James Talarico, who last week became the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in the state since 1988, made defiance of Musk’s meddling a rallying cry in his campaign.
In political campaigns, as in other forms of marketing, it isn’t always easy to know what kind of spending moves the dial or how far. But donors wouldn’t donate if they thought the result was beyond their powers of procurement. In the US, that market is out of control and the sums involved are bonkers.
British politics is cheap by comparison. According to the Electoral Commission, the total combined expenditure of all parties and campaign organisations in the year running up to the last general election was £94.5m. A shot at becoming mayor of a mid-sized US city might cost twice as much.
That is significant context for the kind of money Reform UK and its leader have taken from just two individuals, dipping into fortunes earned in the cryptocurrency trade. A verdict will soon be delivered by the parliamentary standards commissioner in the case of a £5m gift that Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based billionaire, bestowed on Nigel Farage shortly before he ran for parliament in 2024, and that he did not register once elected. Farage denies any wrongdoing.
Harborne gave Reform UK another £9m in 2025 and then £36m earlier this year. That number was chosen in a competitive flourish to equal the £36m that Ben Delo, another crypto billionaire, had given Farage’s party days before. This is unprecedented, gamechanging spending. But it skews the game in unpredictable ways.
Farage’s political fortunes have not been boosted along with his personal finances. When the scandal of the first £5m infusion broke, he tried to pre-empt the standards commissioner’s investigation by putting his case before the “court of public opinion” in a quixotic byelection, which he ended up fighting against a novelty candidate dressed as a space-travelling dustbin. When the report finally lands, a damning verdict could lead to a suspension from the Commons and a recall petition, forcing Farage into another byelection.
He may not bother contesting it. He doesn’t attend the Commons much anyway and doesn’t appear to be enjoying himself as much as he was before his financial affairs came under scrutiny. His newly sullen mood has coincided with Reform UK losing its lead in opinion polls. The party has fallen behind Labour in all surveys and dipped to third place, behind the Tories, in some.
Farage is personally disliked by a majority of voters; deeply so by enough that they form tactical-voting blocs to obstruct Reform UK candidates in byelections. That would probably form a formidable barrier to the party’s leader ever becoming prime minister.
Most of the aversion has accrued over the long years of Farage’s nationalist posturing. Brexit-induced animus and liberal outrage at demagogic immigrant-bashing antedates the conspicuous influx of crypto money and other high-profile scandals. But there is polling evidence that even voters who count as the target demographic for Reform UK, and who might once have accepted the party’s pleas of victimisation at the hands of establishment conspiracy, are put off by the smell of seemingly dodgy deals.
Research conducted over the summer by More in Common found that perceptions of Farage as being seen as “sleazy or corrupt” were emerging as an obstacle to support even among “dissenting disruptors” – the polling company’s label for the electoral segment, roughly one in five, who most mistrust institutions and would gladly see the system torn down by a strongman leader.
A lot of those people were habitual non-voters, stirred out of apathy by the leave campaign in the Brexit referendum. Farage used to have a near monopoly on their allegiance but now faces competition from Rupert Lowe’s even more aggressively far-right Restore Britain party.
Lowe, elected to parliament as a Reform candidate, broke with Farage and has since been elevated from relative obscurity by Musk. The X proprietor’s enthusiastic reposting and deployment of algorithmic privileges have given the Restore Britain leader a profile and audience that rivals the reach of world leaders. His earnings as a digital demagogue, demanding expulsions of non-white migrants from Britain, potentially match his £98,599 annual salary as an MP.
Farage appears to be trying to buy his way back to social media primacy. Research by Who Targets Me, an organisation that campaigns for transparency in digital political advertising, shows Reform UK outspending the rest of the field on platforms for which data is available. Over the past month, the party poured £301,433 into Facebook and Instagram ads, an unusual volume, sustained at unusual pitch for a period with no elections. That’s more than four times as much as the Tories; six times more than Labour.
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The return on that investment looks poor so far, if a polling bounce is the goal. But it is too early to know what a prolonged campaign could achieve. And it is pretty much impossible to know what happens in the murkier depths of monetised online influence, especially on TikTok and X. Lowe’s lucrative sideline is only visible because parliament demands a declaration.
A bill ostensibly tightening the rules on political funding, currently in the Lords, barely skims the surface of that trade. It includes a moratorium on donations made in cryptocurrency. That should be a ban, given how vanishingly few reasons there are for an eligible donor to want to avoid paying in old-fashioned sterling.
The government rejected an amendment that would have capped individual donations at £100,000, apparently for fear that future trade union funding would be in jeopardy. Surely not as much peril as it would face under a far-right government that surfed into office on a tide of billionaire cash.
This is a fight Labour can pick with some confidence. There is encouraging evidence that swing voters are sensitive to the cynical hypocrisy of swaggering pseudo-radicals whose anti-establishment postures are choreographed to serve a plutocrat agenda.
When Persuasion UK, a not-for-profit research agency, tested various campaign messages for and against Reform, the lines that most effectively shaved points off the party’s support and depressed its leader’s favourability ratings were the ones highlighting sources of income and how they appeared to correlate with policy positions. Farage says his donors expect nothing in return for their gifts. His well-documented enthusiasm for deregulating crypto, in that case, is an uncanny coincidence.
Comparisons with US politics are made too often in Westminster and never wholly reliable, given the different regulatory regimes and countless cultural disparities. Democrats were the underdog challengers in battleground states in last week’s midterms. Andy Burnham faces a populist threat as the incumbent. But there is one important common factor. British voters don’t like the idea of democracy getting warped to the will of arrogant oligarchs any more than Texans do.
