Who Funds Reform? The Missing Millions

Who is the secretive billionaire bankrolling Reform — and what does he want? How did a brand new party raise and spend £17 million with no public explanation? As Farage inches toward power, who's really pulling the strings? This four part series, made in collaboration with The Observer’s Slow Newscast will explore the money, donors and power networks behind Reform UK. To hear all four episodes as they drop, sign up at therestispolitics.com Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter ⁠HERE⁠, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at ⁠fuseenergy.com/politics⁠ and get a free TRIP+ subscription. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ ⁠nordvpn.com/restispolitics⁠ It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ Reporter: Cat Neilan Series Reporter/Producer: Poppy Bullard Producer: Matt Russell Sound Design: Dominic Delargy Producer for Goalhanger: India Dunkley Executive Producer for Goalhanger: Tom Whiter Executive Producer for the Observer: Jasper Corbett Clips: Reform UK, BBC, The Times, House of Commons Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

  And I must thank NordVPN because on my grand European tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creef. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. And it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think, are you not already sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/rusthispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rusthispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:05Speaker 02

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• 1:43Rory Stewart?

  Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:46Alastair Campbell?

  And with me, Alastair Campbell. And we have very exciting news about a four-part mini-series that we are doing on...

• 1:56Alastair Campbell?

  The funding of Reform UK.

• 1:58Rory Stewart?

  And we're doing it with The Observer and it's been an amazing piece of work. The series is put together by Cat Nealan, who's the Observer's Whitehall editor. In episode one, we begin the story of who funds Reform UK. So it's something that Alistair and I have been fascinated by for a very long time. And of course, we get glimpses of it. Many people will have heard that Nigel Farage received a £5 million contribution towards his, in inverted commas, security from Chris Harborn, who is a crypto billionaire based in Thailand. But as this investigation shows, the story of Reform's 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

• 2:40Rory Stewart?

  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 than anything that you and I would have seen in politics.

• 3:05Alastair Campbell?

  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 allegedly one of the richest people on the planet. So I think this is going to be an important series. I think it's timely because Reform are on the march. And a lot of people who support them, I suspect, do see them as on their side,

• 3:50Alastair Campbell?

  men of the people, women of the people, who in fact are becoming hugely wealthy through politics.

• 3:56Rory Stewart?

  It's an audio-only series, so something to listen to rather than to watch. And we'll also be putting out links and more details in the trip newsletter, which you can please sign up to by going in the episode to the description box and clicking on the link.

• 4:08Alastair Campbell?

  So here is episode one of Who Funds Reform: The Missing Millions.

• 4:14Alastair Campbell?

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• 5:14Alastair Campbell?

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• 5:23Speaker 03

  Now, for me, Brexit being completed, albeit not perfectly, but being completed, marks the end of nearly 30 years of standing in elections and leading political parties.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  March 2021, a year into the Covid pandemic, and Nigel Farage makes a big decision.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  It's now time for somebody else to take the lead.

• 5:47Speaker 04

  The man who spent nearly 30 years campaigning for and helping to achieve Brexit has decided that he has had enough. Nigel Farage hands over the reins of his political party to Richard Tice, an ally and fellow Brexiteer.

• 6:03Speaker 05

  Reform UK is ambitious. Our country can indeed have a great future. But to achieve this goal, we are absolutely clear that the country needs real reform.

• 6:17Speaker 04

  Richard Tice is going to inject new energy and lead the newly-named Reform Party, while Farage rides off into the sunset.

• 6:28Speaker 04

  This isn't the first time Farage has stepped away from frontline politics, but he'll be back, perhaps sooner than anyone anticipates. Because, just as Richard Tice steps forward as the new leader of Reform, the Conservative establishment begins to crumble.

• 6:45Speaker 05

  Let me say immediately that I've paid the fine, and I once again offer a full apology. I am here to say to you, hand on heart, that I did not lie to the House when those statements were made.

• 7:00Speaker 06

  Clearly now the will of the Parliamentary Conservative Party, that there should be a new leader of that party and therefore a new Prime Minister.

• 7:10Speaker 07

  I have therefore spoken to His Majesty the King to notify him that I am resigning as leader of the Conservative Party.

• 7:21Speaker 04

  As the Conservatives disintegrate in a series of unforced errors, Reform becomes a magnet for figures across the right.

• 7:29Speaker 05

  I'm delighted to announce that I have found that champion of the Red Wall for Reform UK. He's also, coincidentally, going to be Reform UK's first Member of Parliament in the House of Commons. He is, of course, a person of great integrity, no-nonsense, and is the Member of Parliament in the County of Nottinghamshire for Ashfield. Please welcome Mr Lee Anderson.

• 7:59Speaker 04

  The party starts to attract not just Conservative MPs, but former donors too. And then, on the 22nd of May 2024...

• 8:11Speaker 08

  Now is the moment for Britain to choose its future, to decide whether we want to build on the progress we have made or risk going back to square one with no plan and no certainty.

• 8:22Speaker 04

  Standing behind a lectern in Downing Street, a rain-soaked Rishi Sunak announces a snap general election.

• 8:31Speaker 04

  The combination of an unpopular Conservative party and a disaffected British public presents Nigel Farage with an opportunity too good to miss.

• 8:41Speaker 09

  I'm coming back as leader of Reform UK, but not just for this election campaign. I'm coming back for the next five years.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  And a 30-year dream finally comes true for the man who said he was done with standing in elections.

• 8:59Speaker 10

  I therefore do hereby declare that Nigel Paul Farage is duly elected as the Member of Parliament for the Clacton constituency.

• 9:07Speaker 04

  Reform wins five seats. Labour wins a big majority. And the Conservatives suffer their worst electoral defeat in parliamentary history. But those five seats are just the start. Over the course of the next year, there's a steady stream of Conservative defections. And as the shine wears off the Labour government, Reform inches ahead in the polls. For the first time in his career, people are starting to talk about Nigel Farage as a possible future Prime Minister. Reform's rise isn't just a tale of how Nigel Farage has disrupted a century of norms.

• 9:48Speaker 04

  It's also the story of how Reform has done this, and who helped them get there. And it's a story about a system which allows people to buy their way into British politics. I've been a political journalist for 12 years. I've covered Nigel Farage in all his guises, from UKIP to the Brexit Party, and now to Reform UK. Farage is a very particular politician, and one who looks set to shake up the usual run of things. In the past year, I've been looking at his and Reform's relationship to money, and where they get it from. I want to know what it tells us about the man who could become the next Prime Minister,

• 10:30Speaker 04

  the type of government he might run, and the type of people he'll bring with him along the way. I'm Kat Nealan. From The Rest Is Politics and The Observer's Slow Newscast, this is Who Funds Reform? Episode One, The Missing Millions.

• 10:52Speaker 04

  Reform doesn't operate like other political parties. It has a start-up mentality and shuns the establishment. That means the party's attitude to money is different too. So when journalists try to make sense of how they're funded, sometimes we're left with more questions than answers. Looking back at their first year of operating, there's one big question which stands out. But to understand why reform works the way it does, you have to go back to 2014. The word Brexit is still barely in use. But already, the battle to secure a referendum on the issue is hotting up. Nigel Farage is leader of UKIP,

• 11:37Speaker 04

  and a brash, multimillionaire insurance magnate from Bristol makes a big entrance to the UK political scene.

• 11:44Speaker 08

  This businessman, Aaron Banks, whom nobody had heard of, was giving £100,000 to UKIP.

• 11:49Speaker 04

  This is Michael Crick, the political journalist and author of One Party After Another, which chronicles Nigel Farage's life and early political career. Until this point, Aaron Banks has been a Conservative supporter and donor. His defection to UKIP is memorable. When William Hague, then Conservative leader of the House, is asked about Aaron Banks, he dismisses him as a nobody, which doesn't go down well.

• 12:18Speaker 08

  Journalists were summoned from the Conservative conference, which was still going on, I think, in Birmingham, to this manor house just outside Bristol, where I'm at one of Aaron Banks's homes. I was among them. And we turned up and we assumed they were going to announce a new defector. But no, there we were. We were greeted by Aaron Banks.

• 12:38Speaker 04

  And Aaron Banks announces that he is now donating £1 million to UKIP.

• 12:45Speaker 08

  Perhaps the most expensive thing that William Hay ever said.

• 12:51Speaker 04

  Aaron Banks quickly becomes not just a donor to UKIP, but a close confidant of Nigel Farage.

• 12:58Speaker 08

  Banks was the only political person, you could say, who ended up being a close friend of Nigel Farage. He's a very engaging character. You know, he's always got a grin on his face. He's always got something to say. He's a sort of bar boy personality.

• 13:17Speaker 04

  His financial support for Brexit goes beyond the party, too. He becomes an active campaigner in the Brexit referendum, running and funding the unofficial Leave campaign, leave.eu. Working together with Nigel Farage, the campaign becomes a haze of stunts, billboards and slogans.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  Although they're not part of the formal Brexit creeping, they can fairly claim credit for having helped to secure the result.

• 13:43Speaker 10

  The British people have spoken and the answer is we're out.

• 13:48Speaker 04

  But in around 2018, Aaron Banks starts to become a reputational hazard for Nigel Farage.

• 13:54Speaker 08

  The problem was that there were lots of allegations about where did Aaron Banks get his money from and how rich was he really? Well, it was pointed out that Aaron Banks had had several meetings with Russian diplomats in London. He said it was a couple of boozy lunches.

• 14:12Speaker 04

  The Electoral Commission and the National Crime Agency launched separate investigations into Aaron Banks's finances.

• 14:19Speaker 08

  Banks vehemently denied that he was funded by Russian money.

• 14:23Speaker 04

  Eventually, in 2019, both investigations conclude there is no evidence of any foreign interference in the loans that Aaron Banks gave to leave.eu. But that is some time into the future.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  By late 2018, Nigel Farage is approaching a crossroads. British politics is in a volatile place. Theresa May is running a minority government and struggling to clarify what the referendum result really means.

• 14:51Speaker 11

  Yes, can I say to my honourable friend, there has been much sort of jocularity around the term Brexit means Brexit, but it does mean Brexit. People want to ensure.

• 15:00Speaker 04

  After two and a half years of negotiating, the Cabinet agrees a deal which immediately angers both Remainers and hardline Brexiteers. There are resignations from May's Cabinet, and people plotting to oust her from Number 10. Nigel Farage is watching Brexit unravel, and his main backer, Aaron Banks, is causing unwanted attention.

• 15:21Speaker 08

  After that, I think that Farage deliberately distanced himself from Banks for quite a while.

• 15:28Speaker 04

  So if he wants to keep campaigning for Brexit, he's going to need a new party,

• 15:35Speaker 04

  and some new financial backers.

• 15:39Speaker 04

  It's late December 2018, and Catherine Blakelock is at home. She's recently left UKIP, the party that had been her political home for years, concerned about Tommy Robinson's involvement.

• 15:50Speaker 12

  Anti-immigration is still my big thing. I think it would destroy the country, and I think it is destroying the country.

• 15:59Speaker 04

  She sits down to register a number of entities—small companies or organisations—that could germinate into a political party. But it's not a party she thinks she can lead.

• 16:09Speaker 12

  I know my position in the world, if you like. I'm a sort of, you know, tier-three person, and I'm not very well-known.

• 16:20Speaker 04

  She's acting, if not on instruction, then at least in agreement with veterans of the Leave campaign.

• 16:25Speaker 12

  So I bought the Brexit Party as a name, and Nigel liked that.

• 16:31Speaker 04

  So, very quietly, the Brexit Party is born.

• 16:35Speaker 12

  Well, it was always the idea that Nigel would be leader. That was agreed.

• 16:40Speaker 04

  Like many people we spoke to for this story, having given time and energy supporting Nigel Farage's political goals, she's since fallen out with him, and with the party as a whole. Remember, the Brexit Party simply rebrands when it becomes Reform, so the rise of the former, and how it got its money, is inextricably linked to the latter.

• 17:03Speaker 04

  By 2019, Nigel Farage has been out of frontline politics for nearly three years, having quit as leader of UKIP after the 2016 referendum. But, ever the political opportunist, he suddenly announces he's back.

• 17:18Speaker 09

  We're going to use these elections to change things. I said many years ago that I wanted to cause an earthquake in British politics. Well, now, what I'm fighting for, and with your support, what we will attempt to achieve is a democratic revolution in British politics.

• 17:35Speaker 04

  At the public launch of the Brexit Party in April, Nigel Farage unveils a raft of candidates to stand in the following month's European elections. These were the elections the party said shouldn't be happening. But, because of the stasis in the House of Commons, Nigel Farage says he's left with no choice but to return.

• 17:54Speaker 09

  I did say that if I ever had to come back into the political fray, next time, it'd be no more Mr. Nice Guy. And I mean it, I mean it.

• 18:04Speaker 04

  This new Brexit Party is a departure from Nigel Farage's old machine. Gone is UKIP's signature purple and gold, replaced with an icy cool blue. But this party is not just cosmetically different, it's set up as a business, a business with a mystery at the heart of it.

• 18:25Speaker 13

  That is just an absolutely huge figure. And for a new party, albeit with a history, it is a huge figure.

• 18:33Speaker 04

  This is Dr Sam Power, one of the UK's leading experts in political finance. By the end of its first year, the Brexit Party has raised millions. In fact, a lot more than you would expect for a party of its size or age. But if you wanted to know who has given them all that money, you'd struggle to find out. There's very little public information.

• 18:56Speaker 13

  There is just so much that we don't know. There are numbers here which just operate like a black hole. The donation income, the other expenditure.

• 19:08Speaker 04

  This mystery is a useful place to start, because it's also the starting point for reform, and some of the key people involved then are playing important roles now. Word is getting out that Nigel Farage has a new project.

• 19:23Speaker 14

  I was mailing off in our boardroom about my frustrations in February, I think, 2019.

• 19:30Speaker 04

  This is Ben Habib. He's a businessman who, until this point, has been a supporter of and donor to the Conservative Party.

• 19:38Speaker 14

  And there was, um, our PR guy was there who knew Nigel Farage and he said, "Do you want to meet Farage? He's setting up this new party called the Brexit Party." And I, in those days, I thought Farage was a racist, xenophobic, sort of like lunatic, because that was the portrayal of him, you know, through mainstream media. But I went to meet him and found him to be a perfectly reasonable, affable, charming guy.

• 20:02Speaker 04

  So he signs up.

• 20:04Speaker 14

  I offered to donate and I offered to help in any way I can.

• 20:07Speaker 04

  If you're setting up a party, Ben Habib is exactly the kind of person you might want to have around. He's a wealthy businessman with experience of working in politics already. But the Brexit Party isn't after his money, which is weird, because establishing a brand new party isn't cheap.

• 20:24Speaker 14

  So I became an MEP. I think I donated a small amount of money to the Brexit Party, a few thousand quid, but, you know, nothing substantial.

• 20:32Speaker 15

  Did you get the impression that they were like, they weren't short of money at that point?

• 20:35Speaker 14

  They weren't.

• 20:37Speaker 04

  That's my producer, Poppy Bullard, speaking to Ben Habib. So why wouldn't a small party be on the hunt for as many donors as it could find? This is where the party's money gets interesting.

• 20:53Speaker 16

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• 22:11Speaker 15

  How many party things like this do you think you've looked at?

• 22:15Speaker 13

  Um, far too many than I would care to admit on record. Um, that's between me and my god, how many of these that I have looked at.

• 22:26Speaker 15

  So you're pretty much, you're like a connoisseur of a party financial statement.

• 22:29Speaker 13

  It's certainly not something that I would find myself boasting about in the pub. But if you will, I am a connoisseur of party accounts.

• 22:35Speaker 15

  Yeah.

• 22:36Speaker 04

  That's Poppy Bullard again. She's speaking to Sam Power at the Observer offices. They're looking at the Brexit Party's financial statement from the end of 2019, essentially its first year of operating, and it's a peculiar document.

• 22:50Speaker 15

  When I was looking through this, and I know that when you looked through it too, something really jumped out to both of us, and that is the amount of donations that the Brexit Party got in the first year of its running. And I'm just going to get the page up here so we can have a look at this. And when I saw that, it struck me as being just the most enormous number, not a number that I'd necessarily seen reported out and about, and a number that doesn't seem to match up particularly with necessarily all the things that we know publicly about the party. So what did you think when you saw this, you know, this statement?

• 23:23Speaker 13

  That is just an absolutely huge figure.

• 23:26Speaker 04

  The number they're looking at is a single number in the donations column. It's 17.2 million pounds. There isn't really much more detail than that. No information about who the money came from or what it was spent on. In terms of donations, we know that around £11 million was declared to the Electoral Commission, and according to Nigel Farage, £5 million came from small donations. But that doesn't account for it all, and the number in the expenditure column is even bigger, nearly £19 million. Even accounting for the fact there were both European elections and a general election that year, Sam Power says the numbers just don't stack up.

• 24:07Speaker 13

  What that expenditure is, is just, it is bizarre more than anything else in that there is no good reason why the Brexit Party need to raise £17 million. There is no really good reason that I can see that they would need to spend nearly £19 million.

• 24:28Speaker 04

  We can see from the document that they spent £1.2 million on staffing costs and £9.3 million on campaigning, but there's another mystery figure in the spending column too.

• 24:40Speaker 13

  There is just so much that we don't know. There are numbers here which just operate like a black hole. The other expenditure.

• 24:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, other expenditure up at like seven million.

• 24:52Speaker 13

  Seven million, which is what we might expect that in a Conservative return of a Conservative account when they are, when they are accounting for 30, 40, 50 million pounds, for example.

• 25:04Speaker 04

  That's seven million pounds spent on, well, we have no idea, and short of someone telling us, no way of finding out.

• 25:12Speaker 13

  For a new party, albeit with, with a history, it is a huge figure. So a generous reading of it is that it is a start-up cost. An ungenerous reading is that it is just an awful lot of money, which we don't really know the provenance of. We can look through the Electoral Commission database to see, but we don't really know why they have, and why they need that much money. And then if you move on to the accounts immediately, immediately following this, they go back to looking like a niche party again. They go back to looking like a party that, that raises, that they raise one or two million pounds, if that. I think in one year even, it's, it's not even in the millions.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  And the most important thing to note about the Brexit Party's accounting in 2019 is that it's completely legal. The party isn't required, outside of an election period, to log what it spent all that cash on, nor is it obliged to say where it came from. No one we spoke to during the reporting of this story wanted to or could tell us what the money was spent on, nor did Reform respond to our request for clarification. But there are a few things we know about that enormous sum. We know that around £10 million of it came from the man who will go on to define the prospects and trajectory of Reform: Christopher Harborn.

• 26:37Speaker 04

  He was propelled into the headlines last year when he made the biggest single political donation in British history to Reform: £9 million. He's since topped that up with a further £3 million. But the truth is, he's been part of the project from the early Brexit Party days.

• 26:55Speaker 14

  I met Christopher Harborn in their office during those initial meetings, and he had been a Conservative donor himself.

• 27:03Speaker 04

  This is Ben Habib again.

• 27:05Speaker 14

  You know, we had a kind of shared history with the Conservative Party, and we both discussed how we loathe the way the Conservative Party had ceased to be Conservative. But I had no idea how rich Christopher Harborn was when I first met him. I knew he was richer than me, but I didn't realise how considerably, you know, how much more considerably rich he was than I am.

• 27:27Speaker 04

  Ben Habib is making an important point. To us mere mortals, the thought of giving away tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds seems enormous. For the donor class, which includes people like Ben Habib, these figures are small change. But even amongst the donor class, there are scales of wealth. And Christopher Harborn? He's in a league of his own. Ben Habib claims that Harborn was responsible for donating far more during 2019 than has been made public.

• 27:56Speaker 14

  I think the reported figure is £10 million donated to the Brexit Party by him during that six, nine-month period that the Brexit Party sort of functioned. But I, I think the figure's bigger than that. I think it's more like 14. And I know Tykes and Farage were flying up and down the country in helicopters and things, you know, for the campaign during the general election, even though we stood down against the Conservatives, even though Farage has stood us down against the Conservatives.

• 28:22Speaker 04

  What's interesting about Harborn is, at this point, he doesn't seem to have just been donating money. The enigmatic billionaire was plugged into the party machine. One source told The Observer that when they visited the Brexit Party offices during the run-up to the European elections in 2019, it seemed like Christopher Harborn was there full-time. He had a desk, the source said, where he was working on the algorithms.

• 28:49Speaker 04

  Christopher Harborn is a difficult person to get close to. He doesn't do interviews or make statements. So, to get an idea of what he wants, and whether he's loyal to a cause or a particular party, you have to read between the lines, or at least down the columns of the Electoral Commission declarations. After this enthusiastic involvement with the Brexit Party, he doesn't appear in the Reform Party accounts again until 2025. And what was he doing in the interim period?

• 29:20Speaker 14

  But one thing Harborn used to say to me in 2019 is that Boris is bidable, Boris Johnson is bidable.

• 29:29Speaker 04

  Ben Habib was suspicious of Harborn's generosity at the time. After the 2019 general election, Christopher Harborn stopped donating to the Brexit Party and gave more than 1.5 million pounds to the Conservatives. In the months after Boris Johnson stepped down as Prime Minister, Christopher Harborn donated a million pounds to him, the man who by then had become a backbench MP. According to The Guardian, the pair dined together twice in Singapore that same month. Christopher Harborn later joined Boris Johnson on a trip to Ukraine. Christopher Harborn's lawyers told the paper he had "no expectation of personal gain when he donated the money,

• 30:11Speaker 04

  but his proximity to power, even if it is party-agnostic, is worth considering as we look to the future." Harborn wants to see Brexit done? Support the Brexit Party. Want to shape the Brexit deal? Support the Conservatives as they thrash it out. Which begs the question: In the year 2026, a decade on from Brexit, what is the vision of Britain that Harborn thinks Reform can deliver? And what are his other passion projects?

• 30:48Speaker 04

  Next time on Who Funds Reform.

• 30:51Speaker 19

  Yeah, look, he's very successful. You know, whatever he's done, he's created huge success.

• 30:57Speaker 08

  Tice is one of the few people at the very top of these various parties that Farage has led at one point or another, who Farage hasn't fallen out with. Everybody seems to be just drinking from the same teapot. You know, they know you, you know them, you know what business they're in, they know what you're in.

• 31:13Speaker 04

  From hedge fund managers to metal magnates, we meet the men bankrolling reform.

• 31:22Rory Stewart?

  I thought that was a great episode and I hope other people enjoyed it as much as we did. And I'm really pleased that we're beginning to do this. I mean, those were some really tough interviews and we're beginning to get with our partners, proper investigative journalism. And I'm so pleased that someone's spending the time really getting to the bottom of some of these questions because, you know, you can talk about the rise of the far right as though it's a sort of organic thing that would just happen by itself. But actually, funding, social media, which is something we've talked about a great deal, networks and connections between these different groups, these are the engines that allow these parties to go from quite small reckonings in the polls to suddenly exploding.

• 31:59Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I hope you enjoyed that. That is episode one of our series done in conjunction with The Observer on the funding of reform, something about which I've been obsessed for a long time. And I hope that episode has made you think of the reasons to be obsessed about this as well. If you want to hear the rest of this series, every other episode as they drop, just go to therestispolitics.com and you can sign up.

• 32:30Speaker 20

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 32:41Speaker 21

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and the revenant.

• 32:47Speaker 22

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 32:51Speaker 21

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 32:54Speaker 22

  I'm not the first then.

• 32:56Speaker 21

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.90 without parent.

• 33:01Speaker 23

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• 33:09Speaker 24

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• 33:31Speaker 25

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• 33:41Speaker 21

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