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The Reform leader is Westminster’s best paid MP – by far.
Over the course of the last parliament, GB News, the conservative talk TV station launched in 2021, paid MPs almost £1.5 million. That figure is set to be dwarfed quickly in the new parliament thanks largely to the £97,928 a month GB News is paying the Reform MP Nigel Farage for a reported 32 hours of work.
The first update since the UK’s recent election to the official register of MPs’ interests indicates that over the course of a year, assuming nothing changes, Farage claimed on X the nearly £100,000 sum was for several months’ work but the register clearly states it’s £97,928.40 a month.
That would make the Reform leader the best paid MP in Westminster. His fellow Reform MP Lee Anderson receives £100,000 a year for his role as “presenter/contributor” for roughly the same number of hours registered, while the former Conservative minister Esther McVey has clocked up £22,799 for presenting “a current affairs programme”.
This first glimpse of the money flowing into Westminster for the 2024 parliament also shows which donors are backing which politicians.
Farage, who made a £32,000 trip to see Donald Trump after last month’s assassination attempt, had his expenses covered by Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based businessman who 18 months ago gave Boris Johnson a record-breaking sum. Farage registered the purpose of the trip as “to support a friend who was almost killed and to represent Clacton on the world stage”.
George Cottrell, an aristocrat who was head of fundraising for Farage’s previous party, UKIP, until his arrest and conviction in the US for wire fraud, paid for a £9,000 trip Farage took to a recent NatCon conference in Belgium.
Lord Michael Hintze appears to be hedging his bets, having donated both to Reform’s Lee Anderson and the former Conservative minister – and leadership contender – Tom Tugendhat.
His leadership rival Kemi Badenoch, in a sign that her campaign has the backing of senior Tory figures, has registered a £12,000 donation from the Conservative Party treasurer and board member Graham Edwards. In a sign that she is perhaps hoping to appeal to the libertarian right, she also accepted £10,000 from Neil Record, who is chairman of the Institute for Economic Affairs.
On the Labour side, interesting alliances are starting to emerge.
Liam Conlon, MP for Beckenham and Penge and the son of Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Sue Gray, has received donations from several unions as well as £10,000 from Lord Waheed Alli, a Labour fundraiser. He has also received £2,000 from Mike Craven, head of the Lexington public affairs firm and director of Labour Together, a think tank built into a powerful platform within the party by Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s head of political strategy. Conlon has already joined the government in a junior role as a parliamentary private secretary in the Department for Transport.
Imogen Walker, MP for Hamilton and Clyde Valley and McSweeney’s wife, received £15,000 from Gary Lubner, a Labour Together backer, as well as £10,000 directly from Labour Together.
Lubner has also backed Miatta Fahnbulleh, the newly minted MP for Peckham who took an immediate ministerial role, while Craven has donated to Hamish Falconer, son of the Blairite former minister Charlie Falconer and another fast-track MP who has already entered the secured a junior ministerial role at the Foreign Office.
Meanwhile Dan Neidle, a tax lawyer who investigated the tax affairs of the former Conservative party chair Nadhim Zahawi, has donated £2,000 to Luke Akehurst, the Labour MP who has played a key role under Starmer in removing left-wing colleagues from positions of influence.