Nigel Farage once said he could spend his £5m gift from Christopher Harborne on Ferraris if he wanted to, given its unconditional nature.
With the new donations to his party from Harborne and his fellow crypto billionaire Ben Delo of £72m over the past weekend alone, Farage’s party now has nearly enough cash to buy a Reform UK branded Ferrari for a party organiser in each of Britain’s 632 constituencies (though that would certainly be a waste and a bit of a tax headache).
But what the cash can buy first and foremost for Reform is manpower. Already the party is seeking to recruit more than 60 local organisers in key areas of the country.
Though the donation is certainly enough to staff every constituency in England, Scotland and Wales with organisers, that would also be a massive waste of resources in seats Reform UK is never likely to win. Instead, experienced regional staff can build impeccable targeting data for the seats Reform UK needs to win a majority.
Reform has already invested heavily in improving its canvassing tools and its ReformPro software – but it is boots on the ground that ensure the data being fed into those tools is as accurate as it can be. That requires door-to-door canvassing to identify switching voters and non-voters who might be persuaded to turn out.
For most parties, those kinds of local resources are only really deployed far closer to an election. Beginning that level of organising and data collection this far out could give Reform UK a massive head start at the next election, though other parties have very valuable legacy data from previous elections of which Reform has much less available.
Local parties could also print and send a many more direct mail drops, which are uncapped outside of the election period, with voters receiving “local newspapers” which are in fact Reform UK campaigning mailouts.
As well as on the ground, the cash also gives Reform UK massive potential power in the air war, on social media in particular with paid ads that can be micro-targeted locally and professionally produced and filmed. It can spend large amounts of money buying social media advertising completely legally and without limit, including on YouTube and Facebook.
Again, there will be little competition in this space as many parties will not use their resources on this so early in the electoral cycle. Already Reform has professionally built broadcast studios, and splashes the cash liberally on major policy announcements at aircraft hangars, and stadiums for rallies.
Theo Bertram, the director of the Social Market Foundation thinktank, who was previously a Labour adviser and vice-president at TikTok, said in a post on X that he believed Reform would also wish to invest the money in getting in serious policy expertise and preparation for government.
Parties often rely on goodwill from expert supporters to help prepare for government or draft their manifesto. But Reform UK could recruit some of the best legal and constitutional experts to help it find ways of implementing some of its most radical and controversial policies, including mass deportations and evicting non-UK citizens from social housing. Bertram estimates that getting the best and most expensive consultants on the issues would cost the party about £25m.
Candidate vetting has also been a nightmare for Reform and cash could be used to considerably sharpen the process. There would be a vast war chest for legal challenges – Reform UK has often threatened or begun judicial reviews of government policies – which keep the party in the headlines.
There is one way that Reform UK may come a cropper if it spends the money like water over the coming months. Should Andy Burnham call a snap general election before next autumn, election spending rules are retrospective for the previous years.
That means the spending cap, roughly £34m across Great Britain, applies for the previous 12 months, leaving the party in a bit of a trap if it has already outspent that amount outside the six-week election campaign. Might that be one reason to tempt Burnham into an early poll?
