Will Nigel Farage's latest ploy to avoid scrutiny work?

Nigel Farage's latest wheeze to avoid scrutiny is to pose as the anti-establishment candidate in a by-election he himself is initiating.

Will it work?

After weeks of being on the ropes from media investigations into his rich friends giving him large sums of money that he didn't declare, Mr Farage has decided to try and get ahead of things in what appears a high stakes gamble - going to the people and letting them decide on his future.

His message is that people who make lots of money should be celebrated, not hounded from public office, that the government needs business people in cabinet if the country is to be run successfully, not full-time politicians, which Mr Farage - a one time metals trader in the city of London - pretty much has been for the past 27 years (apart from the last four or five, when he did rather well from media appearances).

But his constituency - Clacton-on-Sea - is rather deprived (one town, Jaywick, topped the deprivation list for three years in a row out of 32,000 local authority areas, and has an unemployment rate of close to 50%).

He will be asking rather poor people to say not only is it ok to get rich (which it is), but it is ok to get a £5 million gift from an offshore crypto billionaire, and a clutch of other lifestyle benefits from a young aristocrat, nicknamed "Posh George", which is a rather different proposition.

A by-election was probably coming for Mr Farage anyway, due to the investigation by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner into his receipt of that £5m from Thailand-based crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne.

His problem is not the £5m itself, but the fact that he did not disclose it in the Register of Parliamentary Interests.

The rules of being an MP state that any valuable gifts received in the 12 months prior to being elected must be disclosed, unless they come from family or very close friends (and the understanding is those gifts would be valued in the hundreds, not millions, of pounds).

Mr Farage has claimed the £5m was a purely personal gift, came with no strings attached, and was "none of your business" when asked what it was for and why he didn’t enter it in the Register of Interests.

His central claim is that it was not a political donation as he was not a member of parliament, and had not decided on standing for election, which he did three or four months after getting the money.

However this ignores one very important fact - Nigel Farage was the owner of the Reform UK political party when Mr Harborne gave him £5m.

Reform's untraditional setup

Reform is not set up like a traditional political party, it is a private limited company. The company was registered at Companies House in 2018, with Mr Farage owning the majority of shares.

Mr Harborne was the main donor - indeed main source of all funds - for the Reform party, donating £12m in two tranches, plus £5m to Mr Farage personally in the spring of 2024.

That was before Mr Farage became an MP, but when he was the majority owner of a political party that was gearing up to fight a general election.

In February 2025, after the election, the ownership of Reform UK was transferred to a new company, Reform 2025 Ltd, in which shares were held by Mr Farage and the then Party chairman Zia Yusuf.

The party constitution makes it extremely hard to remove the leader of the party - even harder than Labour’s, and much harder than the Conservatives.

Under Reform's new constitution, which was agreed at the party's conference in September 2025, members can remove their leader in a no-confidence vote, triggered if 50% of them write to the chairman requesting one.

Reform MPs can also force a vote if 50 of them, or 50% of them, request one. But this only applies if there are more than 100 Reform MPs in Parliament. The party currently only has five.

Under the constitution, only three members of the party's board would be elected, with the remainder made up of the leader, chairman and other members chosen by the leader.

Asked why the board was not made up solely of elected members, Mr Farage told GB News that the party he previously led, UKIP, had a fully elected National Executive Commission and it "became completely and utterly and totally ungovernable".

"There has to be some degree of trust amongst the members in the leader, in the leadership team," he said.

"But ultimately, if they don't like what I'm doing, they now have the means of removing me."

Mr Farage is also a shareholder in the company that owns GB News (circa half a million shares - the main shareholders are a hedge fund billionaire and a Dubai-based investment company) and is one of the stations highest paid broadcasters, with a salary of just over £1m.

He is in the fortunate position of being a political party leader/owner with a regular presenter slot on a TV news network.

'Nobody cares'

Mr Farage has claimed for weeks that "nobody cares" about the gifts he got from rich people.

He says people don’t care that he and his partner Laure Ferrari own five houses in Essex, Surrey and Kent, worth a collective £4m – even though he only declared two of them in the parliamentary register.

He says they don’t care that George Cottrell - "Posh George" - was paying for accommodation, travel, security and social media staff for Mr Farage, even though Cottrell did jail time in the United States for wire fraud, after getting caught in an FBI sting operation offering money laundering services on the dark web.

He was arrested in Mr Farage's presence in 2016 in Chicago.

The "Posh George" story was set out at length in the Sunday Times at the weekend, and is the subject of a podcast series from Times Radio, helping to ensure the story does not go away.

It was the Times that broke the story of Mr Farage’s five houses. Mr Farage has, rather improbably, claimed the Sunday Times is a Labour-supporting newspaper, and is part of an establishment "stitch-up".

It - along with the Times and Times Radio - are owned by Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, neither of them noted friends of Labour. But they may well have decided to unleash the money, power and investigative skill of News Group and its reporters on Mr Farage.

After all, his party is leading in the opinion polls, and that alone makes him worthy of more-than-usual scrutiny.

Mr Farage claims that scrutiny has crossed the line. He says information has been obtained unlawfully about his finances, and more recently has claimed that Sky News harassed his daughter, after the Times published a photo of the house she lives in.

He says this is a security threat and the very reason he says he needs the £5m from Mr Harborne.

Mr Farage claims the public only knows a fraction of the security threats - indeed assaults - he has suffered from taking his political positions. He says despite numerous requests, he has not been provided with any police protection and has to pay for his own.

All of this he will pitch to the electors of Clacton-on Sea, the East Essex constituency that voted very strongly in favour of Brexit, and which elected the country’s first UKIP MP, Douglas Carswell in 2014.

There is always danger in a by-election, but if anywhere is going to re-elect Nigel Farage, it's Clacton.

The moving of the writ for the election is likely to complicate the arrival in 10 Downing Street of Andy Burnham.

His defeat of Reform UK in the Makerfield by election established him as the standard-bearer for the fight against Reform, which Labour now sees as its main political enemy, not the Conservatives.

How will the by-election be handled?

Westminster sages are already pointing to David Davis, the one-time Minister for Brexit, who resigned in 2008 to force a by-election in protest at the Labour government extending the amount of time people could be held by police without facing charge.

Labour and other parties refused to play along and did not contest the election.

Even though he was returned to office, it was in a humbling fashion. Could Labour and the Conservatives do the same? Certainly.

But the personal animus towards Mr Farage from former Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe - who now runs his own party, Restore Britain - makes it almost certain there will be a battle for the hard right in Clacton, whenever the election is called.

Read More: Nigel Farage resigns as MP, vows to fight by-election

As for the Parliamentary Standards Commission (PSC) an investigation into the £5m, it seems that will be suspended, as the commission only has jurisdiction over sitting MPs.

So, he goes into the by-election without a verdict from the PSC. The investigation would restart if Mr Farage is re-elected.

Reporting by the Daily Telegraph today said the PSC was not due to report on the £5m gift until the autumn, which would have prolonged the issue into the new political season.

There were also calls for the PSC inquiry to be extended to cover the "Posh George" undeclared support.

After weeks of damaging revelations - and the prospect of more to come - Mr Farage has decided to try and regain the initiative, and take his case to the voters who finally put him into Westminster, at the eighth time of asking.