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Hello and welcome to The Restis Politics with me Rory Stewart.

And with me, Alastair Campbell, and we have very exciting news about a four-part mini-series

that we are doing on the funding of Reform UK.

And we're doing it with The Observer, and it's been an amazing piece of work.

The series is put together by Kat Neelan, who's the Observer's Whitehall editor.

In episode one, we begin the story of who funds Reform UK.

So it's something that Alastair and I have been fascinated by it for a very long time.

And of course, we get glimpses of it.

Many people will have heard that Nigel Farage received a five million pound contribution

towards his inverted commerce security from Chris Harbourn, who is a crypto billionaire based

in Thailand. But as this investigation shows, the story of reforms funding is much, much more complicated. and they've got some unique interviews here. They've interviewed Ben Habib, who was very close to Nigel Farage, and is now beginning to talk much more openly about where some of this funding is coming from. We're talking about Tory donors crossing the aisles. We're talking about the kinds of motivations that drive them in.

And above all, we're talking about how opaque it is and how mysterious it is. And what on earth

you have to do to save your democracy from a few very wealthy people, putting in sums of money,

which are colossal. I mean, so much larger in anything that you and I would have seen in politics.

One of the reasons why we were interested in doing this is because we've seen what has

happened in other countries where money is just allowed to flood in to the parties, to

individuals.

We're seeing it now with Trump in America.

We saw it recently with Orban, who when he lost, his kind of wealth was exposed.

We've seen it with Russia, with Putin, who has gone from being, you know, the guy who took

over saying he was going to lead Russia in a more modern Western direction, who's becoming

...