Reform UK bailed out by cross-party group run by Richard Tice in 2020

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK benefited from almost £1mn from a group intended to be a cross-party effort to support Brexit.

In early 2020, Leave Means Leave — a campaign group run by Reform chair Richard Tice — made the donation to Reform, which was called the Brexit party at the time.

Former Tory deputy chair Paul Scully, who is listed as a Leave Means Leave supporter, said the donations were not in the spirit of the organisation. “Leave Means Leave was a cross-party thing, that was the whole point,” he told the Financial Times.

Leave Means Leave was founded in 2016 by Tice and businessman John Longworth to push for a “hard” Brexit following the referendum.

Longworth told the FT the cross-party campaign group was intended to be separate from the Brexit party. “They were two separate things as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “The vast majority of contributions were small donations from thousands of supporters.”

He resigned as a director of Leave Means Leave on January 3 2020, leaving Tice as its owner and sole director.

The donation to Reform in March 2020 was made weeks after the campaign group tapped supporters to fund a non-partisan Brexit “celebration event” in London’s Trafalgar Square, according to archived web pages.

At the end of 2019, the party had a deficit of roughly £1.6mn — though donations totalling £3mn received during 2020 helped cover the party’s losses.

The FT reported last month on a £7.3mn “black hole” consisting of undefined and opaque “other” expenditure in Reform’s 2019 accounts.

Leave Means Leave’s £1mn gift was the single largest donation the party received in the wake of the 2019 general election, according to filings made to UK watchdog the Electoral Commission.

Legislation covering political activities does not prevent a company from making a donation to a specific party.

But Justin Fisher, professor of politics at Brunel University, said Leave Means Leave needed to be explicit with donors about the destination of potential funds.

Fisher noted the Scottish National party had been subject to a police probe since 2021 following complaints that donations raised via a crowdfunding campaign for a second independence referendum were used for general party activity. 

In May 2020, Tice changed the legal name of Leave Means Leave to Britain Means Business Ltd, and in March 2022 used it to help launch Vote Power Not Poverty, a campaign for a referendum on net zero. While the campaign has since disbanded, the company continues to make donations to Reform.

Leave Means Leave and Britain Means Business Ltd have made donations totalling £1.7mn to Reform since 2020, including £500,000 in the first two weeks of this year’s election campaign.

Steve Goodrich, head of research and investigations at Transparency International UK, said the decision to register Leave Means Leave as a limited company enabled it to obscure the ultimate source of donations. “That’s not what the rules were supposed to do,” he said.

Asked how Reform ensured all donations made to the party via the company were from permissible donors, and for the source of these contributions, Tice said, “I have better things to do with my life. As do your readers”.

The website of Leave Means Leave listed senior figures from the Conservatives and Democratic Unionist party as supporters, including James Cleverly, the Tory home secretary.

Accounts show the pressure group began 2020 with assets below £30,000, indicating that the bulk of its £990,000 donation to Reform was raised between January and March.

The donation page for the Brexit celebration event told supporters “all proceeds go towards the cost of the Brexit celebration event”, according to an archived web page from January 28 2020.

Reform has leapt from 11 per cent in the first week of the campaign to roughly 16 per cent. At present levels of support it could help deny the Conservatives dozens of seats by splitting the rightwing vote, according to the FT’s analysis of polling data.