The Observer. Hello, I'm James Harding. I'm the editor of The Observer and welcome to the slow newscast extra.

There's one of those old jokes in newsrooms that we spend a lot of time reporting things that we find interesting

but don't understand at the expense of things we do understand but perhaps are not so interesting

and this week when the drama of Downing Street is consuming everyone's attention in Westminster

we are deliberately going to put our attention elsewhere. I'm joined

by the great John Unger Thomas, who's one of the great investigative reporters in this country,

and I'm proud to say out the observer. And we're trying to dig in to understand the strangely

underreported fact that a billionaire who's made his fortune in crypto, who lives in Thailand,

who's given probably more than 20 million pounds to British politics on the right,

and a five million pound gift, quote unquote, to Nigel Farage, is getting quite so little attention

and yet seems to be one of the strangest moments of financing politics that I can remember.

And so this is really an attempt to try and make sense of that, to understand it.

John, where do we start?

Well, I suppose we start with Chris Harbourn, dare we? He's made a lot of his money from cryptocurrency. So he's got interest in

aviation, but he's got a very significant stake in a cryptocurrency company called tether.

Now, Nigel Farage, as we know, is a big champion of cryptocurrency.

And any money that Mr Harbourn gives to the reform party has to be disclosed

because clearly it could be a conflict of interest here

and he has given more than 22 million pounds to reform

but is it reform what's reform and the Brexit party

I think it's just to reform

because I think it's before it became the

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