Of course Nigel Farage and his chums are benefitting financially from a “gold-plated” pension scheme of a type that they intend to prevent other people from enjoying. It could hardly be more on brand.
No matter that the Reform UK leader has described “defined benefit pensions”, which guarantee some public sector workers an income for life, as “the single biggest ticking bomb in our government finances”, he and his fellow Reform MPs are, as this newspaper revealed yesterday, all signed up for the scheme despite pledging to abolish it for future council workers.
Weapons-grade hypocrisy seems to be a job requirement for these people. Their self-styled “shadow home secretary” Zia Yusuf, not even an MP despite his grandiose job title, complained this week that: “For too long Westminster has run on who you know and what school you went to. That’s how Britain got the rotten political class it has.”
How shocked he must have been to discover not only that he himself attended an exclusive west London private school, but also that his colleagues actually in Parliament almost all attended fee-paying institutions. Danny Kruger, for example, went to Eton and Farage to Dulwich College. Perhaps most surprisingly, Richard Tice apparently received a first-class education at Uppingham School. I hope his parents kept the receipts. Someone is surely due a refund.
But apart from providing yet more evidence of extraordinary double standards and “for thee but not for me” thinking, the “gold-plated” pensions story confirmed a theory that has been percolating for some time. Namely, that for every moral or fiscal outrage attributed to Donald Trump, there is a smaller, shabbier version being presided over by Farage.
Where the latter enjoys a pension arrangement he would deny to others, the former sought to prevent himself, his family and his businesses from having their past tax returns audited by the Internal Revenue Service in a way unavailable to ordinary taxpayers.
In Washington DC, Trump celebrated his (and the country’s) birthday with a wrestling extravaganza on the White House lawn that saw organisers, the UFC, chalk up losses of $30m (£22m). In Clacton, Farage celebrated his essentially uncontested by-election victory by claiming the police told him to stay away from the official announcement (the police themselves disputed this) and instead charging supporters to celebrate with him at the so-called “FarageFest”. In a new twist on the old adage about p*ss-ups in breweries, organisers are currently being investigated for failing to get permission to hold it. Reform have said they are “confident that no rules were broken”.
According to his own mandatory financial report, Trump reported more than $1.4bn (£1.1bn) in income last year from business dealings in cryptocurrency. Farage, meanwhile, was revealed earlier this year to have trousered £5m in a previously undisclosed gift from the Thailand-based cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne. By an extraordinary coincidence, a little over a year after receiving but failing to tell anyone about the “gift”, Farage unveiled his party’s draft “crypto assets and digital finance bill” at the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas. By another extraordinary coincidence, the party quietly removed the bill from its own website after news of the secret gift broke, though Reform claimed it regularly updates its website and that it was still party policy.
Both men seem committed to the rehabilitation of a very particular type of criminal. In March 2025, Trump pardoned the founders of a crypto exchange after they had pleaded guilty to failing to maintain anti-money laundering programmes. The following April he pardoned a nursing home chief executive, Paul Walczak, whose mother is a major Republican donor, and in October, it was the turn of Changpeng Zhao, a billionaire with connections to the Trump family’s crypto investments.
Back in Britain, the Temu Trump remains loyal to George Cottrell, a convicted fraudster who reportedly calls Farage “daddy” and was travelling with him when US authorities arrested him in 2016. Farage later said: “I always stand by my friends”. And this is where, when you think about it properly, all the parallels between Trump and Farage stop being funny.
Cottrell has been accused of making undeclared “donations in kind” to Farage, allegations which both men deny. reported last month that he had transferred more than $2m (£1.5m) to his mother, Fiona, in 2024 shortly before she made donations both to Reform and a business controlled by its deputy leader, Tice. The Metropolitan Police are currently investigating the source of the donations to Reform and whether their ultimate source was disguised.
Tice’s business, Britain Means Business, made two donations of £250,000 to Reform in the weeks before the 2024 general election. At around the same time, Yusuf donated £200,000 to the party. Yusuf, of course, subsequently became party chairman and now has a regular place on the party platform alongside elected politicians like Robert Jenrick (whose ill-fated Tory leadership campaign is currently being investigated by the police over £37,500 worth of donations).
It is surely time to ask why so many people, both within and without the party ranks, are donating so much money to Reform and, in Harborne’s case, directly and in an undisclosed manner to Farage. The question is what they believe they are really getting for their money, except the continuing pleasure of Farage’s company in Cottrell’s case?
Alex Andreou, on the excellent podcast, suggested last week that one way to understand reported frictions between members of Reform’s donor class like Yusuf, Cottrell and Tice and recent arrivals like Kruger, Jenrick and Suella Braverman is to see it as disquiet among “ground-level investors” about the performance of their investments. It is impossible to look at events on the other side of the Atlantic without wondering precisely what it is that these people think they have invested in.