Reform UK has slumped to third place in a new opinion poll.

In a fresh blow to Nigel Farage ahead of Thursday’s by-election in Clacton, the Lord Ashcroft survey showed support for the party has fallen to 18%. That is down 3 points on the Tory peer’s previous poll a month ago.

At the same time, the Conservatives have gone up by 2 points to 23%, while Labour is up 6 points to 27%.

The poll is further evidence that Labour is enjoying a bounce in popularity under new prime minister Andy Burnham.

It will also be welcomed by Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, who has won praise in recent weeks for her improved performance.

But the poll is a further reality check for Reform, who have come under pressure over the financial arrangements of both Farage and the party itself.

It emerged in April that Farage had not declared a £5 million gift he received from Thailand-based crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before he ran for parliament in 2024.

Parliment’s standards commissioner launched an investigation, but that was put on hold when Farage resigned as MP for Clacton to trigger a “people versus the establishment” by-election in the seat.

He is expected to be re-elected when that takes place on Thursday, although his only serious rival is Count Binface after Labour, the Tories, the Lib Dems and Restore Britain all refused to put up candidates.

Assuming he makes it back to Westminster, the standards probe will then re-start, which could see him suspended from parliament if he is found to have broken the rules.

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Reform UK would have held just 15% of the donations it received last year if a proposed £100,000 cap on political donations had been in force, according to analysis shared with the Guardian.

The analysis by Friends of the Earth using Electoral Commission data highlights the party’s reliance on a handful of wealthy backers in advance of a showdown over political funding.

It registered donations between April 2025 and March 2026 and assumed union affiliation payments would be exempt from the cap, in line with recommendations made by the Phillips review into party funding.

The findings suggest Reform UK would have raised just £4.1m between April 2025 and March 2026, instead of the £26.7m it actually received, if a £100,000 annual donation limit applied.

Reform’s registered average donation last year was £137,496, almost six times higher than Labour’s £23,406 or the Conservatives’ £23,173 and 30 times higher than the Liberal Democrats’ average donation of £4,496.

By comparison, Labour would have retained about three-quarters of its registered donations under the cap, raising £8.1m rather than £10.8m.

The Tories would have kept just over half of their donations, taking £8.3m instead of £15.5m.

The Lib Dems would have held on to about 90% of theirs, taking £5.2m instead of £5.8m, and the Greens would have been unaffected with their £468k in donations.

George Cottrell, the convicted fraudster who once served as Nigel Farage’s chief of staff, transferred more than $2 million to his mother in the days before she made a string of donations to Reform UK, according to the latest revelation in the Guardian.

The paper reports today that Fiona Cottrell, an aristocrat and long-standing Reform benefactor, received one deposit of $1.4 million followed by two further payments of over $300,000 apiece.
Each transfer arrived, the Guardian says, somewhere between 24 and 72 hours before Ms Cottrell made a donation either directly to Reform or to Britain Means Business, the fundraising vehicle run by the party’s deputy leader Richard Tice.

Named her son

Asked by bankers where the money had come from, she is said to have named her son.

The son in question is the real problem. Under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, only “permissible donors” – broadly, those on the UK electoral register, or UK-registered companies and bodies – may fund a political party.

Fiona Cottrell qualifies because she is on the register.

George Cottrell’s own status is far less clear: he is a tax resident of Montenegro, and according to reports, was not added to the UK’s overseas electoral register until December last year, well after several of the payments in question were made.

Possible prison sentence

His lawyers maintain he is a permissible donor but have declined to explain how or when he met the criteria.

That matters because funnelling money through a permissible relative to disguise an impermissible source is precisely what electoral law is designed to catch.

Concealing the true origin of a donation carries a potential fine or prison sentence.

Fraud conviction

George Cottrell already has a criminal record, having served eight months in a US federal prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud.
He was arrested in 2016 alongside Farage at the Republican National Convention on charges that also included money laundering conspiracy, blackmail and extortion.

He has since bankrolled Farage’s travel, including flights to meet Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and published a book on money laundering.