Jonathan Hoad

Labour Leeds Central CLP. Two grown up children, two cats. Politics, history, geography & science. Door knocking, reading, litter picking.

[Jonathan Hoad @JonathanHoad]

@KemiBadenoch
Burnham warns that his generation of politicians hasn’t been honest, and has engaged in “finger pointing and point scoring” - which is “dangerous and destructive” of public trust in politics.

[Kitty Donaldson @kitty_donaldson]

Kemi Badenoch calls the women around Andy Burnham his "handmaidens" as she punches the bruise that Labour has never had a female leader.

[Reform Party UK Exposed 🇬🇧 @reformexposed]

It is time for @Nigel_Farage to put his money where his mouth is.

Release your tax returns, Nigel.

Anyone claiming they aspire to be British Prime Minister should adhere to the highest standards of transparency.

https://t.co/3fBOh02EKv

[ALASTAIR CAMPBELL @campbellclaret]

If true that @andyburnham not taking media questions after speech today then good move. Speeches matter and when important should speak for themselves. A problem with Keir S communications was that he would make a speech, then take Qs and the broadcast journalists in particular would make it more about them and their “take” than him. If and when he becomes PM Burnham will be answerable to Parliament, not the showbiz style media coverage of politics. The blah factory will go into overdrive today with journalists interviewing each other about how they ought to be allowed to ask Qs. The speech itself is more important than anything they say before during or after. Setting the agenda vital from the off.

[Jonathan Hinder MP @Jonathan_Hinder]

Lou Haigh is right 👇

It’s time to abolish stamp duty, and overhaul council tax.

[Geoffrey Lean @GeoffreyLean]

Madness. Putting solar panels over car parks, as is required in France, makes every kind of sense. It generates clean power, provides shade to the cars, and protects countryside from solar farms. But the Government has inexplicably rejected it.

https://t.co/TbfDeoV1UF

[Reform Party UK Exposed 🇬🇧 @reformexposed]

Questions for @Nigel_Farage:

Why didn't you declare the $5m?

Was the donation for personal security, a reward for your role in Brexit, or a purely unconditional gift?

Has Harborne ever discussed policy, regulation or crypto with you?

Why didn't you declare a spear-phishing attack on your phone to security services?

Why is there no evidence that you were "hacked"?

Why did you lie about buying a house in Clacton?

What happened to the micro-targeting data you had in NationBuilder?

Why did you u-turn on Iran?

Why did you lie about meeting the Russian Ambassador?

How much did Russia Today pay you?

[Jonathan Hoad @JonathanHoad]

And this is the arse who wants to be Prime Minister. 🆘‼️‼️where’s Nige? 🌴🌴🍹

[Daily Mail @DailyMail]

Reform UK's former chairman says Nigel Farage needs a 'break' from 'ruthless' politics https://t.co/PDOWQuDz6v

[Bridget Phillipson @bphillipsonMP]

The constant chatter about private schools reminds me exactly why I do this job.

We’re raising more money than expected, school offer days passed smoothly and we’re investing in state schools. My focus remains on the schools attended by the majority of kids in this country.

[Parody Nigel Farage @Parody_PM]

I proudly boasted about having claimed "zero personal expenses". Which is not surprising when you consider that there is no such thing as 'personal expenses' for MPs, so nobody has claimed any. But I have claimed over £150k in office expenses.

[Jonathan Hoad @JonathanHoad]

@Channel4News @BethRigby As he 81 MPs?

[Jonathan Hoad @JonathanHoad]

@david_hollas @annaturley Grifting, grifting the night away. 🎶🎶🎶

[Jonathan Hoad @JonathanHoad]

@nw_nicholas The Grifters, Save The Last Million For Me.

[Jonathan Hoad @JonathanHoad]

Wine drinking toad gifted £5M for grifting.

[Sam @SamCKx]

For those who doubt it, this is the timeline of corruption:

Late May 2024: Christopher Harborne secretly transfers £5 million to Nigel Farage.

3 June 2024: Days after the transfer, Farage announces he will stand for Parliament.

4 July 2024: Farage is elected MP for Clacton.

29 May 2025: Farage announces that Reform UK will become the first British political party to accept donations in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

29 May 2025: Speaking at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, Farage unveils plans for a Crypto Assets and Digital Finance Bill, including reducing capital gains tax on crypto assets from 24% to 10%, creating a Bitcoin reserve at the Bank of England, and preventing banks from debanking crypto users.

September 2025: Farage publicly namechecks Tether and Bitfinex, companies in which Christopher Harborne is a major shareholder, and says he is going to the Bank of England to argue against restrictions on crypto and against the proposed digital pound.

13 October 2025: At the Digital Asset Summit in London, Farage says he wants to “bring crypto in from the cold” and immediately halt work on a UK central bank digital currency (“Britcoin”).

25 October 2025: At the Zebu Live crypto conference in London, Farage positions himself as a political champion of the crypto industry and repeats calls for lower crypto taxation and wider adoption.

3 November 2025: In a speech in the City of London, Farage again calls for crypto deregulation and for the UK to become a global crypto hub.

If it could be proven that the £5 million secret payment influenced Farage’s actions as a sitting MP, that raises extremely serious questions. Potential issues could include parliamentary standards breaches, tax issues, bribery or corruption offences. Under the Bribery Act 2010, the most serious bribery offences carry a maximum sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment.

[The Receipts UK ♿ @david_hollas]

Nigel Farage has spent today on the media rounds repeating the same defence on the £5m he took from Christopher Harborne. He wasn't an MP when the money arrived, he says, so it wasn't his business to declare, and it certainly wasn't political. The first half of that is true. The second half doesn't survive contact with Companies House.
The money landed in June 2024, weeks before Farage's late U-turn to stand for Parliament, and he's right that he wasn't yet an MP when it did. That's the basis for his defence against the specific charge now sitting with the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, that he failed to register a financial interest within the required 28 days. If the rule only bites once you're an MP, and you weren't one yet, the rule arguably doesn't bite. Fine.
But "not an MP" and "not political" are two different claims, and Farage has been running them together as if proving one proves both. It doesn't. Reform UK was set up from its inception in November 2018 as a private company limited by shares, structured that way deliberately, in Farage's own words, to fast track the creation of the Brexit Party ahead of the 2019 European elections and to stop the party being hijacked by bad people. He held the majority of those shares personally. He kept holding them, by his own account, until February 2025, when the party was finally restructured as Reform 2025 Ltd, a company limited by guarantee with no persons of significant control, handing nominal ownership to the membership.
That means in June 2024, when Harborne's £5m arrived, Farage was the controlling owner of the company that was Reform UK. Harborne was not a stranger making a personal gift to a private citizen. He was, by that point, the party's largest financial backer by a wide margin, with a giving history stretching back to 2019 that would eventually total more than £22m, including a desk at Brexit Party campaign HQ in 2019 and tens of millions more in the years since. A donation of that size from that donor, to the man who personally owned the company behind the party, arriving in the run up to a general election Farage then decided at the last minute to contest, is political by any ordinary reading of the word, whatever his parliamentary status happened to be on the day the payment cleared.
None of this changes the narrow legal question the Commissioner is actually examining, which turns on registration timing rather than motive. But it does mean Farage's broader defence, that this was simply a private matter between two individuals with no bearing on politics, doesn't really hold. He wasn't a backbencher waiting to be elected. He was the owner of the vehicle the money was, in every meaningful sense, flowing towards.
Sources: BBC, Companies House filings for Reform UK / Reform 2025 Ltd, Channel 4 FactCheck, The Lead, GB News, City AM.

[Jonathan Hoad @JonathanHoad]

@Parody_PM And his MEP’s pension.

[Jonathan Hoad @JonathanHoad]

@Parody_PM Mr N Farage, allegedly of Clacton-on-Sea, has done OK. At least £5M worth of swag in the bank.

[Jonathan Hoad @JonathanHoad]

@Number10cat @Mariapullen25

[Jonathan Hoad @JonathanHoad]

@BBCNews It’s only five million.

[Jonathan Hoad @JonathanHoad]

@bbcnickrobinson @Nigel_Farage