Nigel Farage seeks to distance Reform UK from Donald Trump amid funding scandal

BIRMINGHAM, England — Nigel Farage has one overriding task: to convince voters he’s ready to take over as British prime minister in an election he believes may be just months away.

“When that election comes we will be ready, and when that election comes we will fight to win,” he told his party’s conference in Birmingham, central England, on Friday.

Core to his effort to portray himself as a prime minister-in-waiting was a joint appearance at the conference with the darling of the French far right, Jordan Bardella, who is hoping to become leader of the French government after a presidential election next year.

The pair signed a “memorandum of understanding” pledging to stop the flow of small boats trafficking migrants across the English Channel to British shores. For Farage, it was a chance to prove he can cut a deal with a foreign political leader even before he’s elected to office.

The surprise was that the leader wasn’t Donald Trump.

Showing off a French connection — and even suggesting he would speak in French when he repays the visit — might just help dilute the impression that Farage is a disciple of the world’s most divisive and disruptive head of state.

Farage has long made a point of his ideological kinship with the American president, but these connections to the “Make America Great Again” universe now pose perhaps the most serious threat to his campaign to win power in the U.K.

Farage’s set-piece Friday press conference alongside Bardella was overshadowed by a storm of controversy over an alleged funding scandal that hours earlier had claimed the scalps of two of his most senior aides.

One of them, policy chief James Orr, is almost as well plugged into Trump’s world as the Reform leader himself. Orr has nurtured a friendship with U.S. Vice President JD Vance, whom he has described as a kind of “mentor.” For his part, the vice president has called Orr his “British sherpa.”

This week, however, Orr was at the center of an undercover sting operation and featured prominently in a Channel 4 TV report, apparently planning to arrange potentially rule-breaking funding from a foreign benefactor — via a U.K. middleman — to produce favorable polling.

Farage brushed off the furor on Friday, insisting the party had broken no laws and received no dubious money.

Orr has now stood down, along with another aide, pending an investigation. It’s not clear whether he could return to Farage’s team if the procedure finds he wasn’t seriously at fault.

But Farage needs to distance himself from Trump’s world for other reasons, not least because the two men have a long friendship.

Early last year, Farage told his supporters that Trump’s victory in the U.S. 2024 presidential election should serve as an “inspiration” to their movement.

Since then, however, Trump has dismayed some of the most important voter groups in the U.K. that Farage needs to win over if he is to succeed, first over his stance toward Ukraine and then over the Iran war.

Trump was unpopular in many European countries even before Iran. The fallout from that conflict, including the impact on fuel prices, has only deepened the animosity that many European voters feel toward the U.S. president.

Luke Tryl, from the More in Common think tank, presented new research at the Reform conference showing how a key group of British swing voters are skeptical of Trump and “worry about the turbulence on the world stage.”

“There is a core of Reform voters for whom there is a Trump problem,” Tryl told a meeting on the fringes of the conference. This group of voters, whom he calls “rooted patriots,” want to tackle immigration but are worried about the chaotic scenes involving officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the U.S., Tryl added.

“[They are] the absolutely crucial group when it comes to Reform. This is the swing group that has decided elections for the past 20 years,” he said. “They are patriotic, socially conservative, actually a bit more economically left-leaning as well.”

Tryl said Reform may need “a distancing exercise” from some of Trump’s policies to reassure these voters. “Iran really further damaged Trump, and in fact the angriest I’ve seen a group of Reform voters was over the Oval Office treatment of [Ukraine President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy,” Tryl told POLITICO, referring to the infamous on-camera dressing-down the wartime leader took from Trump and Vance in February 2025.

There are signs that Farage gets the point.

While Reform’s themes chime with MAGA priorities, there were few explicit displays of affinity between the British and American populist right on show at the gathering in Birmingham. On Friday, Farage didn’t mention Trump —the man he used to proudly call his “friend” — during his speech at all.

Instead, he turned to his ally from France for political assistance. “Hold it for me,” Farage told Bardella on stage as they took turns signing the theatrically large printout of their migration deal. “It’s quite heavy.”