The £36 Million Man and the Law That Waved Him Through

Ben Delo wrote his cheque to Reform UK and then wrote an article about it, which is the correct order of operations for a donor who wants credit as well as access. In the Telegraph he explained that he wanted "a fair fight and a level playing field", which is one way to describe the largest single donation ever made to a British political party arriving at a party currently under police investigation for how it handles donations. Nigel Farage said he was "honoured and humbled". Twenty-six years ago a different party leader accepted a donation from a man who wanted a fair fight too, and it is worth remembering how that one ended.

The figure is £36m. Christopher Harborne's £9m, given last year, held the previous record for less than twelve months, which tells you something about the trajectory here even before you get to the mechanics. Delo made his fortune co-founding the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX; he was convicted in the United States for failing to implement anti-money-laundering checks there. He is now, by some distance, the single most important financial backer of a party whose deputy leader received £1m from Fiona Cottrell in June 2024, whose accounts have since been frozen over the Cottrell donations, and whose founder's undercover admission — that he "wasn't listening" during discussions with a prospective foreign donor filmed by Channel 4 — is now part of a live Metropolitan Police inquiry.

Here is the part that should trouble you more than the size of the number. None of this required anyone to break the law as currently drafted, and that is not an accident of drafting. It is the design.

The Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 exists because of an earlier donor scandal — Bernie Ecclestone's £1m to Labour in 1997, followed with unhelpful speed by an exemption for Formula One from the tobacco advertising ban Labour had just legislated. Blair returned the money, looked faintly ill on television, and Parliament built a regulator, the Electoral Commission, to make sure it never had to happen again. The Commission's job, then and now, is to check that a donor is "permissible" — registered to vote in the UK, or a UK-registered company trading here. That is the entire test. Not fitness. Not source of wealth. Not whether the sum is proportionate to anything a functioning democracy might recognise as normal political participation. Whether the name is on a list.

So the honest answer to who decided that a convicted fraudster in one jurisdiction could hand £36m to a party under investigation in another is: nobody did, because nobody was ever asked to. The Commission can refer a suspicious donation to the police after the fact — which is precisely what happened with the Cottrells, where George Cottrell transferred $2m to his mother Fiona days before her donations to the party, a sequence two individuals have now been interviewed under caution about, with no arrests made and the money, so far, unreturned. The machinery exists to investigate. It does not exist to prevent. Those are different jobs, and Parliament built only the first one, then patted itself on the back for building a regulator at all.

The case for leaving this alone is not stupid, and it deserves stating properly rather than as a strawman to be knocked over. Reform is an insurgent party competing against institutions with decades of accumulated advantage — trade union affiliation fees on one side, historic donor networks and estate money on the other. If you tell an outsider party it cannot raise large sums quickly, you are not levelling the field, you are entrenching the incumbents who already have theirs. Delo's own framing — that people who profess concern for democracy are really protecting a cartel — lands because there is something to it. Insurgency is expensive, and the two established parties have never much fancied a rule that would have applied retrospectively to their own history.

But the argument for large donations as democratic ballast assumes the money is at least traceable, timely, and answerable to something before the cheque clears — not two years later, in a police interview room, with the party's bank account already frozen. Reform's pattern is not one donation under a cloud; it is four: Harborne, the Cottrells, the undercover foreign-donor talks, and now Delo, arriving in the middle of all of it as though the investigation were background noise rather than the story. A regulator that can only ever arrive after the money has been spent is not oversight. It is an inquest with better funding.

The Representation of the People Bill, having its second reading in the Lords on Monday, will cap donations from overseas voters at £100,000 in their first year back — a narrow, defensive fix aimed at one loophole among several, arrived at not because anyone examined the system and found it wanting but because Reform's own donors made the loophole too visible to ignore. It will not touch the actual gap, which is that British law asks who you are and never asks where the money came from or what it is for. The Ecclestone scandal produced a regulator with no teeth. A quarter of a century on, the teeth are still theoretical, and the cheques have simply grown by a factor of thirty-six.