Nigel Farage’s insurgent Reform U.K. party has attracted more than a dozen donors from Britain’s once dominant Conservative Party, an analysis of new data reveals, underlining the threat the Tories face from a right-wing populist party that models itself on President Trump’s MAGA movement.
In total, Reform U.K. raised 4.75 million pounds ($6.1 million) last year, a sharp increase from the less than $200,000 that the party raised in 2023. A third of the money came from former donors to the Conservatives.
The New York Times analyzed every donation that Reform U.K. reported to Britain’s campaign finance watchdog in 2024, including figures for the final quarter of the year that were released on Thursday, to get the first major snapshot of who is funding the party.
The biggest single donation in the last quarter came from Roger Nagioff, a former Conservative donor, former Lehman Brothers banker and Monaco-based investor, who donated £100,000 in December. Other major donations in 2024 included one million pounds from a company owned by Reform’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, and £500,000 from Fiona Cottrell.
The Conservative exodus began after Mr. Farage, an ideological ally of Mr. Trump, took over last year as Reform’s leader just before Britain’s July general election. A longtime political disrupter and former commodities trader who campaigned for Brexit, Mr. Farage has pledged to remake British conservatism, pushing the movement to the right on a nationalistic platform that he frames as anti-establishment and anti-immigration.
Reform has surged in national polls, overtaking the Conservative Party, and taken its first municipal seats. Although the governing Labour Party does not have to hold a general election until 2029, Reform’s fund-raising success underlines Mr. Farage’s momentum and could help his party professionalize as it challenges the two main parties at local elections in May.
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