Nigel Farage’s party suspends top officials after undercover sting makes foreign funding claims

LONDON (AP) — Anti-immigration party Reform UK suspended two senior officials on Friday after they were filmed appearing to discuss accepting funds from a foreign donor in potential breach of British electoral law.

Leader Nigel Farage downplayed the aides’ conversations as “loose pub talk,” but the party said Dan Jukes, a longtime Farage adviser, and policy chief James Orr “have stepped down from their respective positions” pending the outcome of an internal investigation.

On Thursday, broadcaster Channel 4 aired footage of Jukes and Farage having lunch with two men purporting to be a U.S. financier and his U.K.-based son. Farage listens to the others discussing how a 500,000 pound ($675,000) donation could be channeled to the party through the son, and thanks the men for their support. The “son” was actually a reporter from investigative group Verbatim, and the “father” an actor.

In separate footage, Orr, a Cambridge University theologian, appears to discuss getting the U.S. donor to pay for opinion polls commissioned by Reform UK. Orr tells the undercover reporter that “we just don’t have British-resident donors, British entities, that would support us.”

U.K. electoral law says parties can only accept donations from British voters or U.K.-registered businesses.

The allegations overshadowed Reform’s annual conference, being held Friday and Saturday in Birmingham, central England.

In a keynote address that was interrupted several times by protesters, Farage said Reform UK was being targeted “because they’re scared of us.”

He insisted the party had not broken any rules or accepted “dodgy money” and accused “foreign-funded hard-left activists” of being behind what he called “entrapment.” Verbatim is an offshoot of the Centre for Climate Reporting, a nonprofit investigative group that says it is funded by grants and donations.

He said Jukes and Orr were “contractors that work for us, who’ve said … some injudicious things at best.” Their claims were “loose pub talk, including a couple of boasts that simply were not true,” Farage said.

“The party has done nothing wrong, taken no illegal money,” Farage said at a news conference Friday alongside far-right French politician Jordan Bardella.

The governing Labour Party and opposition Liberal Democrats said they had reported the claims to London’s Metropolitan Police. Kemi Badenoch, leader of the rival right-leaning Conservative Party, also urged police to investigate, saying that “what I saw on camera looked like illegal activity.”

The Electoral Commission, which oversees U.K. elections, said it was “considering all relevant information, in line with our regulatory remit, and we are in touch with the Met Police.”

Founded in 2018 as the Brexit Party to push for a hard break from the European Union, Reform UK has grown rapidly in membership and support since changing its name in 2021 and honing its anti-establishment, anti-immigration message.

Though it holds just eight of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, it has often led opinion polls and was the big winner in local elections in May, a result that helped spur a panicky Labour Party to replace then-leader Keir Starmer with new Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

But Reform has recently suffered reverses, losing several special elections and facing questions about funding. Farage quit his House of Commons seat in July while facing a parliamentary ethics probe over an undeclared 5 million pound gift he received from a Thailand-based cryptocurrency billionaire in 2024, before he was elected to Parliament.

Farage said he would run for reelection and let voters be his judge. He easily won the August election, which was dismissed as a stunt by his critics and boycotted by all the other main parties.