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Hello and welcome to The Bunker.

You'll Need to Know on News and politics. I'm Seth Teville.

Nigel Farage's party, Reform UK, delivered a political thunderbolt, winning the council elections,

including seizing control of ten councils. They also won their first-ever parliamentary by-election

in Runcorn and Helsby.

For months beforehand, reports had circulated about how reform were increasingly well-funded and well-resourced.

So today we ask, who funds Reform UK?

Here to make sense of it all is the award-winning investigative journalist Peter Gaghan,

who edits the Democracy for Sale newsletter on Substack.

Welcome to the bunker, Peter.

Thank you very much, Seth. I'm delighted to be here with you.

This is endlessly fascinating. I mean, I'd really just like to kick off by asking what kind of people fund Reform UK?

Well, in some ways, the people who give reform money are very much like the kind of people who give money to British political parties in general.

We have a political system that effectively runs in private money.

You can make unlimited donations.

And the kind of people who give money to reform are, they're generally very wealthy, they're generally male, overwhelming men, and they're mainly white. But beyond that, I think there's a bit

more we can start to see. It's a bit more, especially over the last year, we can start to kind of

see about where reforms get in their money. So if you look at 2023, reform struggles to raise any

money at all. They barely raised 100,000 pounds in 2023. 2024, which is last year,

...