A senior Reform UK official raised questions about whether major donations from billionaire backers Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo would be legal under the proposed new foreign donors cap three months before they gave £72m to the party. James Orr, who was then Reform UK’s head of policy and a Cambridge professor, discussed potential difficulties around future donations from Harborne and Delo in undercover footage captured by the investigative reporting group Verbatim. A reporter was posing as a potential donor when Orr talked to him about “filling the war chest in anticipation” of tougher donations rules, describing it as the establishment trying to “kneecap” the party.
Orr was suspended as Reform’s head of policy last month after Channel 4 broadcast some of Verbatim’s undercover filming in which he appeared to discuss ways to get around funding laws to allow donations from a US-based donor. The matter is under police investigation and he remains suspended, although Reform has released its own report clearing Orr and another official of wrongdoing. The new footage has been shared with the Guardian after a public debate about whether the two £36m donations from Harborne and Delo to Reform UK will be allowed under the cap.
The party maintains the donations are legal, pointing out that the retrospective overseas donor cap has not yet been passed into law. In the footage, recorded in July this year, Orr expressed doubt about whether Delo and Harborne would still be able to donate given, when it does become law, the £100,000 overseas donor cap is to cover party donations dating back to March this year. Orr believed Delo would probably meet the residency test as long as he was not required to have been a tax resident, in which case he would be “stuffed”.
He said Harborne was “probably more of a challenge” in terms of avoiding the overseas cap and he “can’t do anything for 12 months” after moving back. Harborne had been living in Thailand until he registered to vote in Hampshire this summer, and Delo has long been resident in Hong Kong, though he has been on the UK domestic register for some years. The new law will put a £100,000 limit on how much overseas donors can give to a political party.
It will apply to donations made after March 2026, and will require any domestic donor who wants to give more than £100,000 to have been resident in the UK for at least a calendar year. In the discussion, Orr was recorded as saying the party was too reliant on Harborne and Delo as “two big whales”. He said the new law was “a retrospective law, which is unheard of.
So, we’re going to challenge it in the courts.” Orr added: “We’ll push it through judicial review. And then … so, we’ll have a big fight. But, yeah, the last few days we’ve been working hard on just filling the war chest as best we can, in anticipation of something quite brutal.” On whether the two men would be caught by the overseas cap, he said: “I mean, there’s going to be a huge fight over that.
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