Back in the 1970s 'The Six Million Dollar Man' was an extraordinarily popular TV science fiction series, about an astronaut - Steve Austin - who crashes in a test flight and is rebuilt at considerable cost with "bionic" limbs that give him the ability to perform superhuman feats.
He becomes a spy and sees off the usual collection of bad guys.
The show made a star of Lee Majors, who got 99 episodes and six TV movies out of the role. He also got to marry Farrah Fawcett.
As it happens, British politics has its own ‘six-million-dollar man’ - Nigel Farage. But instead of bionic limbs and Farah Fawcett, he just took the cash.
$6.73m to be exact - which is Friday night's conversion rate for £5m.
That’s the money he got from a hitherto little-known billionaire called Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 UK general election, which finally brought him into parliament in Westminster.
But while Lee Majors/Steve Austin used his multi-million-dollar enhancement to escape danger, Mr Farage is finding his expensive upgrade is having the opposite effect.
He is now coming under increasing media and political scrutiny over this £5m gift from a generous benefactor.
And that personal attention is acting as something of a battering ram for the media and rival political organisations to break into the wider world of political financing in the UK.
And they may be aided by the Metropolitan Police, the National Cyber Security Centre and Parliamentary Standards Commission (described by Politico as Westminster’s "anti-sleaze" unit).
So how did we get here: In April The Guardian reported that Mr Farage had received a payment of £5m from Mr Harborne, a Thailand based crypto-currency billionaire.
The money had not been disclosed in Mr Farage’s entry to the register of MPs' interests.
He said he did not have to declare the money because he was not an MP - or an active politician - at the time the gift was given. However, a few months after he got the money, Mr Farage returned to politics to lead the Brexit party, and won a Parliamentary seat in Clacton, after seven previous attempts to become an MP had not succeeded.
The parliamentary rules state that any gifts received in the 12 months prior to an election have to be declared within one month of a member being elected.
The Conservative Party referred Mr Farage to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner.
The commissioner, Daniel Greenberg, announced he would investigate the matter in early May, after local election results were out.
Mr Farage and Mr Harborne said the £5m was a no-strings attached gift to pay for Mr Farage’s personal security arrangements. Mr Harborne said there was no expectation of anything in return.
That led to more attention on Mr Harborne, who it swiftly emerged had donated £9m to the newly minted Reform UK party in a single donation - making him by far the biggest single living donor in British politics.
But there were other donations as well - totaling £22.3m, two-thirds of all the money the Reform Party - and its predecessor, the Brexit Party - has raised since its foundation (Reform UK is structured as a private Limited company, with a not-for-profit status).
The big donations came in 2019 - the year of Boris Johnson’s election victory, when he gave £9.7m, and last year, when he donated £12m. (Mr Harborne also donated £1.6m to the Conservative Party since 2012).
In 2015, 1% of donations were for £1m or more
The UK branch of Transparency International (TI) said the big bucks donations from Mr Harbourne were part of a trend it has seen over the past decade. It said back in 2015 just 1% of donations to political parties from individuals or companies were for £1m or more.
By 2024 - the last election year here - that figure had climbed to 35%.
Last year saw the highest amount of election spending ever in Britain - £90m. That was an increase of 80% since 2015. Cumulative inflation in this period was 38%.
TI warned that at this rate, around half of all political spending in the UK could come from around a dozen individuals less than 0.00002% of voters.
Mr Farage railed against The Guardian, suggesting the disclosure of the £5m gift was the result of an unauthorised leak of personal information, hinting that the "deep state" was out to get him.
It also sparked more investigations into how he paid for a £1.4m house in Surrey, bought in cash in May of 2024: the party say it was from his appearance fee from the ‘I’m a celebrity get me out of here’ TV show. Analysis by a tax accountant for the Financial Times questioned this claim, saying published accounts from Mr Farage’s media company, Thorn in the Side Ltd, show it increased its cash holding from £300,00 in 2023 to £1.7m in 2024 after he had appeared on the TV show, and then to £2m by May 2025.
It says the property was bought by Mr Farage, not Thorn in the Side Ltd.
Russian spies
But then his story started to change. In an interview with The Sun, he said the gift was in recognition of 27 years of campaigning for Britain to leave the EU.
Then last weekend he claimed in The Mail on Sunday that the information about the £5m gift was obtained by hackers who broke into his mobile phone and stole his data.
"My phone was hacked by Moscow says Farage", screamed the page one lead of The Mail on Sunday, adding "deeply concerned Reform leader claims Russian spies leaked details of £5m gift that could lead to ban from Commons".
The paper cited a party source as saying "only four people in the world knew" about the £5m, so he gave his phone to unnamed "cyber security experts" who concluded that "hostile state actors almost certainly linked to Moscow".
Mr Farage was quoted by The Mail as saying "these actions by Russia are deeply concerning and highlight the threat they pose to British security".
Indeed, they do. So, people wondered, ‘had Mr Farage reported this hack to the relevant counter-espionage authorities?’ A Reform Party spokesman said they had reported the matter to the relevant authorities and said further comment would be inappropriate while an investigation was ongoing.
The Labour Party jumped on the espionage claim, with party Chair Anna Turley calling for Mr Farage to confirm he had formally reported the incident to the Metropolitan Police (responsible for political security) and the Nationals Cyber Security Centre, which polices the world of hacking and online security.
Helpfully, she offered to file the report for him if he could not confirm he had done so by Friday lunchtime.
"Quite apart from the implications for you personally, the alleged crime is an incredibly serious one with potential wider implications for Britain’s national security, the integrity of our politics and public confidence in our democratic system," she wrote in a letter to Mr Farage, made public by the party.
"Please confirm when the report was made and to which authority," she requested.
Friday’s deadline came and went, and the Labour chair released another letter, this time formally reporting the incident to the Met and the NCSC and asking if they were already investigating it.
The NCSC told the BBC they "stand ready to support with any suspected cyber incident that is reported to us".
Tax implications?
Some commentators have also raised questions about the tax treatment of Mr Harborn’s gift to Mr Farage, including the podcaster and former Conservative politician Rory Stewart, who noted that ordinarily you would have to earn around £10 million to be able to trouser £5m after tax.
But as the money from Mr Harborne was a gift, then it is tax free.
Analysis by Tax Policy Associates, a non-profit tax law research organisation, thinks - on the basis of available information - that Mr Farage is in the clear:
In their analysis they say:
"We would summarise the basic principles broadly like this
- Gifts can be subject to inheritance tax, but only if the donor is UK domiciled (or, now, long term resident) or the gift is of an asset that was in the UK.
- A gift unconnected to your work is (as a general matter) otherwise not taxable in the UK.
- If there is a connection to your work (past, present or future), and it’s strong enough, then you will be taxed on it in the same way as your work is taxed.
- If you create a document regarding the gift, then (if you are not careful) that document could make the gift taxable as a capital gain.
"Applying these to the currently-known facts of the gift to Mr Farage, in our view the gift is probably not taxable. It’s connected to Mr Farage’s historic and current political campaigning activity, and not to any trade, profession, employment or office that he carries on or holds."
But if the story keeps changing, it might expose him to jeopardy on the tax front as well.
And Rory Stewart’s popular podcast ‘The rest is Politics’ - which he co-presents with former Labour spin doctor Alaisdair Campbell - has just begun a four-part investigative series by the Observer newspaper’s Whitehall editor into the funding of Reform UK, featuring an interview with Reform’s former deputy leader Ben Habib, who has made some colourful claims about the party’s finances.
One is that Mr Habib - once the richest MEP in Strasbourg, where he sat for the Brexit Party - also took a judicial review of the Northern Ireland Protocol in 2021 with Jim Allister and Kate Hoey, claiming it was unconstitutional for being incompatible with the 1801 act of Union.
With the squeeze coming on from all sides perhaps Mr Farage wishes he had the "bionic" powers of the original ‘six million dollar man’ to help him escape (and yes, some bore on the internet has calculated that $6m dollars from 1973 would be worth $44m today).
But these days it's not only the US government and its agencies who, in the show’s famous intro lines, "have the technology, have the capability ... "And have the money too: and a lot more than $6m. Or $44m.
One of these is Elon Musk.
He used to support Mr Farage, but has become disillusioned as Farage tacked away from anti-immigrant figure Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, AKA Tommy Robinson.
Mr Musk threw his support, and social media algorithm, behind Rupert Lowe - a former Reform Party MP who was kicked out over the immigration issue around the same time as Mr Habib.
On Friday, the Financial Times published analysis showing the impact that Mr Musk’s support has had on Mr Lowe, a hitherto pretty obscure (albeit wealthy) figure.
Since launching his rival party Restore UK in February, Mr Lowe has had 10 posts on X that have had at least 10 million views. Mr Farage has had no posts that broke the 10 million mark, despite having three times as many followers as Mr Lowe on the platform.
The FT notes that "nine of Lowe’s posts since Restore’s launch have garnered more views than Kier Starmer’s most seen post in the same period".
The day after Restore was launched Mr Musk posted "Join Rupert Lowe in Restore Britain" - a post that had 24 million views. He posted seven other messages mentioning Restore, all but one of them getting more than 10 million views, according to the FT.
This level of engagement has been profitable for Mr Lowe.
According to the Register of Members Interests, he has earned £72,000 from posting on X since October 2024. By contrast Mr Farage has earned just over £20,000 from the platform.
It may also be politically unprofitable for Mr Farage, as it is giving Restore an outsize reach into the Makerfield by-election, which is currently under way.
Early polling put the Restore candidate on about 7% - significant for a new party to the right of Reform, and if carried into polling day would likely bleed enough votes from Reform to allow Andy Burnham of Labour a narrow victory.
Mr Farage has criticised Mr Musk, accusing him of splitting the right-wing vote ahead of the by-election, and has called Restore "a party that's one man with a social media account".
But Mr Musk - who is planning an IPO of his SpaceX company, with a prospectus that speaks of ringing the earth with solar-powered data centres in space, mining on the moon and a payout linked to a colony on Mars hitting one million inhabitants – is already the world's richest person, and might well become history’s first trillionaire.
A devotee of science fiction, who has dabbled in the Trump administration and Javier Milei’s Argentina, for Mr Musk, six million dollars is just chump change.
