The other day I happened to express curiosity about how the Farage vehicle, Reform UK, was financed, Farage himself, as far as I was aware, not being a particularly rich man. It was suggested that a good chunk was coming from one Christopher Mills of Harwood Capital Management, to be found at reference 1. His achievements include serving on the boards of Augean (a waste disposal operation, named for the famous stables) and Renalytix AI (diagnostic tools for management of kidney disease).
I can't find out much about him, so perhaps he has taken the trouble to scrub his Internet record, but from something called Financial News, I do get 'Christopher Mills, the UK activist investor and grandson of Bertram Mills, the circus owner, has never seen the point of big game hunting. “I don’t want to compete in the big league,” he says...'.
Contrariwise, Farage gets a substantial Wikipedia article at reference 2. Suburban parents, left Dulwich College for a ten year stint in commodities trading and then entered politics in a serious way - as a Euro MP - in 1999. He made his name there with attacks on senior Europeans, attacks usually involving their personal finances. While the late Jean-Claude Juncker got it for turning Luxembourg into a destination for corporate tax avoiders. Maybe we should check out the company he now keeps?
While while at Dulwich he made something for a name for himself as a racist. This corroborated by the Guardian piece at reference 3.
Turning to the superficially glossy reference 4, one learns little about how the party is organised, leading one to suspect that it is very much a one man band. Farage at the top of a small heap of helpers who do his bidding, more or less enthusiastically. A manifesto is to be found at reference 5: 28 pages in which the leader promises to sort everything out, while chopping out all kinds of unfair, unhelpful or unnecessary taxes on the way.
With the headline stuff being snapped above. The man is clearly obsessed with foreigners, perhaps because his own bloodline might have been tainted with German and French infusions. Perhaps because the suave (and mostly foreign) Eurocrats of Brussels and Luxembourg treated him like a barrow boy?
Next stop Companies House, where Reform UK is alive and well, the inheritor of the UKIP mantle. A not-for-profit private limited company which appears to be more or less under Farage's sole control. We are also told that any assets that there might be when and if the company is dissolved will go to charity.
Lots of filings, including accounts which look pretty thin to me, even by the standards of private companies.
So despite an hour's or so effort, not much the wiser about where the money is coming from. Perhaps I will have to leave further digging to the Guardian.
PS: glad to be able to report that all is still well at the Texas Mequite grill. Some good things just keep rising to the top, despite all the troubles of the world around. To the point where they were able to extend the deadline in the snap above yet again. Perhaps the sort of place that Farage should pop into when he is next over visiting Trump. In jail?
References
Reference 1: https://www.harwoodcapital.co.uk/.
Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Farage.
Reference 3: ‘He was a deeply unembarrassed racist’: Nigel Farage, by those who have known him - Daniel Boffey, Guardian - 2024.
Reference 4: https://www.reformparty.uk/.
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