Nigel Farage has a confirmed talent for upending the laws of political gravity, and this weekend has been no exception, as he declared himself “humbled” by two donations of £36m each from cryptocurrency tycoons Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne. I’d shoehorn a joke about buses in here but, honestly, this feels too consequential for that. The largest single donations in British political history were made after a dismal party conference, the substance of which was all but obscured by the financial scandals engulfing Reform.
As the financial dubiety continues, and the numbers of millions tick upwards to seem almost meaningless, it might be tempting to roll your eyes and focus elsewhere – but this is not the time to look away. These are gamechanging donations, transformative if used effectively at this stage in the election cycle, just as Labour has regained its confidence and the Tories are contemplating a comeback. As a bill that could stop donations like this in their tracks returns to the Lords later today, I spoke to Jessica Elgot, the Guardian’s deputy political editor, about what these millions mean and why they matter.
First, a wrap-up of this weekend’s headlines. Economy | Former chancellor George Osborne said Britain’s economy had “fallen off a cliff” since Brexit – and that rejoining the European Union’s customs union would be the fastest route to recovery. Technology | Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call to “slow the pace” of AI development.
Amodei had cautioned that an AI swarm could otherwise become capable of “taking over the entire internet” within a year. Sweden | With most of the votes counted, Sweden’s national election remained too close to call on Sunday night, with left-wing parties holding a lead of just a single seat according to a partial tally by the election authority. Ukraine | A train carrying Boris Johnson and the former CIA chief David Petraeus may have been the target of a Russian drone strike that hit a train engine near the Poland-Ukraine border, according to Ukrainian Railways.
Travel | The air traffic control outage that caused thousands of flights to be grounded across the UK earlier in the week was caused by a military aircraft entering “spurious” flight data into the system, according to a report. Let’s start with more detail on the donations, by businessmen who have amassed astronomical fortunes trading in cryptocurrency. Ben Delo, a previous Reform donor, has given £36m.
Delo was convicted in the US in 2022 for failing to implement adequate anti-money-laundering controls in his trillion-dollar cryptocurrency business BitMEX, before being pardoned by Donald Trump last year. (A brief note here on how that story came to light: the Sunday Times approached Reform and Farage after a confidential source told them that Delo had donated to the party. Soon after, the Telegraph published an opinion piece by Delo himself, announcing the donation and trouncing the Sunday Times scoop. As Sunday Times political editor Ben Riley-Smith noted on X: “A fundamental part of political reporting – approaching for comment before publishing – just totally breaks down if this is what happens.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
