July 6 2026 - 7:00am
In a party with little fondness for strictures, Reform UK insiders maintain that there is one rule: “Don’t ask what Posh George does.” That George is George Cottrell, the aristocratic Reform fixer and convicted criminal who was the subject of an extensive investigation in this weekend’s Sunday Times. The paper alleges that Cottrell, who has been a member of Nigel Farage’s inner circle for over a decade and previously served eight months in a US prison on wire fraud charges, funded private security and staffing for the party leader, which Reform then failed to declare to parliamentary authorities.
The Sunday Times claims that politicians found to be in breach of these rules “face investigation and sanctions up to and including suspension from the Commons, potentially leading to a by-election”. Yesterday morning, the Guardian published an article questioning whether Farage might quit his role due to fatigue and a looming investigation over another undeclared gift, this time a cool £5 million from cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne. Put together, these revelations have given succor to his opponents, with Conservative Party Chairman Kevin Hollinrake demanding an investigation into “Reform’s murky crypto connections”. Whether it will move the public, and more specifically the party’s voters, is another matter.
That’s because, while accusations of a lack of financial transparency should be taken seriously, the technicalities of this case mean that it is less likely to cut through to Reform supporters who are by now used to media attacks on the party leader. Headlines which reduce the investigation to “Farage receives funding from convicted fraudster” won’t be adding any information which was unknown before this weekend: though Cottrell’s exact role isn’t clearly defined, he has long been a visible presence within the Reform set-up, while his criminal background is well-documented. On Sunday morning, the party’s economic spokesman Robert Jenrick described it as a “very old story that has been dredged up”. His colleague Sarah Pochin pointed to “relentless” establishment attacks on their leader.
If anything, the Harborne story has more capacity to hurt Farage, and yet it has barely dented Reform’s polling numbers. In the weeks after the undisclosed £5 million fee was first reported in late April, the party’s support actually increased to 26%, before settling at 25%. Likewise, allegations of schoolboy racism made by Farage’s former classmates and covered by the British press for several weeks at the end of last year have now been largely forgotten. Suggestions that he praised Hitler in the playground haven’t stopped Reform from becoming the second most popular party among British Jews.
The idea that Farage is on the verge of being forced out of his role over his financial dealings, therefore, looks like wishful thinking. He is aided here by the fact that he has never positioned himself as a model of probity. He weathered a series of racism scandals long before establishing Reform UK, while his declared payments reveal significant sources of income beyond politics, including £270,000 for 12 hours of work promoting a gold bullion dealer. Farage has previously acknowledged that he is “deeply flawed”, adding that “voters actually quite like people who have got a few flaws.”
These personal failings are now so familiar, and seen by many Reform supporters as evidence of his authenticity, that they are less likely to damage Farage than policy-based attack lines, for instance concerning perceived economic coherence or an ambivalent stance on Russia. When Partygate and the Chris Pincher affair turned Tory MPs — and the public — against Boris Johnson, it was because those scandals were easy to package as evidence of a prime minister who was entirely unsuited to the office, who “partied” while Britons were unable to visit dying relatives and who ignored allegations of sexual assault to promote an ally. The case mounted by the Sunday Times this weekend may not be as clear-cut.
Allegations that Farage didn’t declare gifts he received from party donors should be investigated and official procedures followed, but his “debanking” at the hands of Coutts three years ago has entrenched the feeling among his supporters that he is held to different standards compared to other politicians. Harborne and Cottrell have both made much of their fortunes through cryptocurrency trading, a practice which the British public tends to see as shorthand for “dodgy”. Yet Farage has survived associations with far less palatable figures. Like his great friend Donald Trump in the US, his personal flaws only make him much harder to bring down.
