Reform took £72m in two days. No big donation since 2001 brought a cap in a month.
Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne each gave Reform UK £36m on 11 and 12 September. Rayner says a new law could reach back to March. A cap is possible.
What happened
On Angela Rayner, the Housing and Communities Secretary, told the BBC that the £100,000 overseas donor cap in the Representation of the People Bill would apply from and that a wider cap remained under review, a day after Christopher Harborne matched Ben Delo’s record £36m gift to Reform UK.
Reform UK got the two largest gifts ever made to a British party. Both came inside 24 hours. Ben Delo, a British crypto billionaire lately based in Hong Kong, announced £36m on the evening of Friday . Christopher Harborne, a British-Thai crypto investor, matched it on Saturday afternoon.
The £72m is more than the £69m all UK parties declared in 2025. Reform says it will hire up to 400 campaign managers and get ready for an election.
The government answered on Sunday with a bill already going through Parliament, the Representation of the People Bill. Angela Rayner said it limits donations from overseas voters to £100,000 a year from .
Anyone who moves back to Britain stays under the same limit for the rest of that year and a full calendar year after. A party holding money it may not accept would have 60 days to return it.
Rayner said she had written to the Electoral Commission, the elections watchdog, and did not rule out a cap for donors who live in the UK. Robert Jenrick, Reform’s economy spokesman, said both gifts are legal under the law as it stands and as proposed, and that Delo moved home partly to comply.
The House of Lords debates the bill on Monday . At this second reading the Labour peer Michael Wills will table amendments against large donors.
A cap on UK donors was on the table two weeks ago and came off it. Andy Burnham told a campaigner in May that he favoured a limit of about £500,000. On he declined to back one after trade unions warned it could catch their funding.
On Stella Creasy withdrew her cap amendment, signed by 60 MPs, when the democracy minister Florence Eshalomi promised a taskforce across government that would work quickly. MPs then passed the bill at third reading, its last Commons vote, by 411 to 102. The question below is whether the government puts a cap in front of Parliament within a month.
Sources: BBC (2, 3), Guardian (2, 3, 4), Politico, Observer
The Pattern
We looked for big gifts since 2001 to a party that was not in government: a single gift of £1m or more that set a record for that party or for the whole system. We included the UK and Australia’s Palmer returns. We found eight. In none of them did the government table a bill or amendment to limit donations within a month. Two got one within 90 days, both through bills already under way.
Show the other 6 cases
The Read
History says no government cap reaches Parliament by . None of the eight big gifts to rival parties since 2001 led to a bill or amendment within a month. The two that led to one within 90 days used bills already under way: the elections bill after Harborne’s £9m, and the amendments on returning donors after the June filings. This time the bill is already in the Lords and a taskforce has been promised. Sixty MPs are also waiting for a figure. So the market sits at 25, above history but well below even money.
The weak point is that the past governments had no live bill, and this one has a committee stage in weeks. If Burnham names a figure in his conference speech and the whips turn Creasy’s design, which leaves out the unions, into a government amendment, the market resolves YES once the amendment is tabled. The one fast change in the wider record sits outside this set: Labour changed its own Electoral Administration Bill within weeks of the 2006 loans row, a government protecting itself from its own donors. The Commission market fails if the regulator waits for Reform’s third-quarter return, due after the window. The poll market fails if the £72m story deepens Reform’s slide and does not reverse it.
Both sides’ reasons are on the record. Reform declared £102.5m in the past year against £11.7m for Labour, and Labour emailed supporters for money within hours of the news. So a cap would help the governing party survive as much as it serves the democratic case Labour makes for it. Union funding is why the same party stopped short in August. Delo said he paid the whole sum up front so that the government could not legislate against it, and that he wants a level playing field. Harborne said he expects nothing in return. Reform has 60 days to return any money ruled ineligible and says it will return none. The Electoral Commission now has Rayner’s letter. In the Lords, Wills’s amendments land on Monday while Labour’s conference runs in Brighton.
Sources: BBC (2), GOV.UK, Guardian (2), Independent (2), Politico, Observer
Disclaimer
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