In early 2019, a suited man with short silver hair arrived at the offices of Nigel Farage’s Brexit party in central London and began settling in ahead of the European elections that May.
Christopher Harborne, who had recently given the party £200,000, set up several work screens along with a coffee machine and a fridge stocked with gin, tonic and limes, according to a person present in the office at the time.
“He’s not a back-seat driver. He didn’t interfere in any way, he just enjoyed being there and watching it all happen through osmosis,” said the person, now a senior figure in Reform UK, the Brexit party’s successor.
Harborne had made a critical promise to Farage: he would cover the Brexit party’s 2019 general election costs, according to messages between the Thai-based businessman and an associate seen by the Financial Times.
He ended up donating a total of £10mn to the Brexit party before and after the 2019 poll, money that allowed Farage to apply intense pressure on Westminster to withdraw fully from the EU.
Half a decade later, Harborne has filled Farage’s coffers again with a record £9mn donation that gives Reform a big war chest ahead of pivotal elections in May in Scotland, Wales and across English local councils.
Another associate of Harborne’s said he was “slightly geeky” and viewed the UK “like a mathematical equation that is producing the wrong answer”.
The person added that Harborne’s £9mn donation to Reform, just as Farage is trying to supplant the Conservatives, Britain’s traditional party of the right, was the “biggest ‘fuck you’ the Tories could have received”.
Another significant Reform donor described the sum given by Harborne, an aviation entrepreneur and crypto investor, as “absolutely staggering”, adding that it would be a “game-changer” for Reform.
“They’ve been one hand behind their back,” they said, referring to the party’s previously constrained finances, despite surging ahead of Labour and the Tories in opinion polls.
Harborne, who is in his early sixties, was born in Britain but for more than two decades has lived and worked in Thailand, where he has business interests and is known by the name Chakrit Sakunkrit.
After graduating from Cambridge university with a master’s in engineering, Harborne went on to study at the Insead business school.
After working as a management consultant at McKinsey, Harborne, a trained pilot, made his first millions in aviation, founding a jet fuel broker called AML Global in 2005.
The company has been awarded more than $39mn in contracts with the US Department of Defense, Harborne’s lawyers have said in a libel action he brought last year against the Wall Street Journal.
“[He] may be an international businessman but he is a merchant-adventurer with a great belief in this country,” said the senior Reform figure. “There’s a romantic side to him.”
Harborne’s fortunes really exploded after he took an early bet on cryptocurrencies, trading bitcoin from 2011 and ethereum from 2014.
His early ethereum investment “now accounts for a major portion of his net worth”, according to disclosures he made in the WSJ case. The token launched in 2014 at about $0.30 and is worth about $3,100 today.
He is also an investor in Tether, the issuer of the biggest stablecoin and a company with close links to US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, and its sister crypto exchange Bitfinex.
In 2024, Harborne paid for a trip for Farage to visit US President Donald Trump during his inauguration, at an estimated cost of £28,000, according to the register of MPs’ interests.
An associate of Harborne said he was “very canny”, noting that he “went for crypto when no one else was doing it”. They added that “£9mn is pocket change for him. It’s nothing.”
Reform has courted crypto investors, as Trump did, with Farage saying he would slash capital gains tax on crypto if he wins power, and embraces the sector far more enthusiastically than British governments to date.
Farage said on Thursday that he and Harborne spoke every four to six weeks, and that the businessman wanted “absolutely nothing in return at all” for his money.
Harborne’s lawyers have called him an “intensely private person” who “does not proselytise his views” and “does not give speeches or media interviews”.
The businessman has not just developed a close political relationship with Farage. He has also funded the Tories and, in particular, the man who ultimately delivered Brexit, former prime minister Boris Johnson.
Harborne gave the Conservative party £1.5mn in 2022 and donated £1mn to Johnson’s private office after he stood down as Tory leader.
Leaked documents from Johnson’s private office earlier this year showed that Harborne attended two meetings at Chequers with Johnson in May and August 2022, the latter alongside other Tory party donors.
At about the same time, in May 2022, he took a stake in British defence company Qinetiq, when defence was high on the agenda following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He has since built his stake to become its largest shareholder.
The following year, Harborne travelled to Ukraine with Johnson, who has continued his strong support for the country’s defence since leaving Downing Street.
The documents show that in October 2023, Johnson penned a reference for Harborne to an unknown person in which he referred to the crypto entrepreneur as both a personal friend and a supporter of his office.
In the letter, Johnson wrote that he was “aware of no suggestion or evidence whatsoever” that Harborne was in “any way supportive of the Russian government, or has links to Russia commercial or otherwise”.
Johnson added that “on the contrary, I know him to be a long-standing supporter of Nato and Ukraine and indeed Poland”. The reason for the letter is unknown.
Johnson did not respond to a request for comment.
The senior Reform figure said he believed Harborne had given the Tories and Johnson money in 2022 because “Nigel had stopped being in politics and Boris was — it was all about getting Brexit done”.
But some saw the flip as a betrayal. Ben Habib, a former co-leader of Reform who fell out with Farage, said: “I think it’s rotten. Harborne is on every side of the trade.”
He added that during the 2019 election campaign, Harborne and Farage “lived in each other’s pockets”, and Harborne was regularly in the Brexit party offices helping to discuss strategy.
Figures in Reform today say they have not seen Harborne around the offices or at events recently, and that he spends most of his time overseas.
The FT reported last year that in 2019, Harborne asked an associate to donate £50,000 on his behalf so that it would appear that the Brexit party had a broader donor base.
In one message, seen by the FT, he wrote: “I would like to ask whether I can gift you money to onward donate to the party.”
The money was ultimately not gifted and Harborne gave large sums in his own name then, as he has done now.
A spokesperson for Harborne said last year: “All of Mr Harborne’s political donations and disclosures concerning those donations, including throughout 2019, were made in full compliance with electoral laws.”
Along with their politics, Farage and Harborne have a more unusual thing in common: surviving plane crashes.
In 2008, a plane that Harborne was piloting crashed into a residential home in Hampshire. Two years later, a light aircraft in which Farage was a passenger plummeted to the ground after getting wrapped in a banner it was flying.
Both men suffered injuries, both recovered. And both are now trying to overturn Britain’s political order.
Additional reporting by Sylvia Pfeifer and David Sheppard