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Shortly before Christmas 2022, Chakrit Sakunkrit, owner of the Kamalaya Wellness Sanctuary on the Thai island of Koh Samui, invited 200 guests to spend a few days celebrating his 60th birthday. One sultry afternoon, Sakunkrit and a small group gathered around a table near the shore, surrounded by the burgundy foliage of Good Luck plants. To his right, dressed down in a polo shirt, sat Nigel Farage.

Since Brexit marked the achievement of his life’s work three years earlier, Farage had fizzled. Even some of his supporters had pronounced him finished. Now, with the Conservatives in disarray after Liz Truss’s disastrous budget that September, Farage was hinting at a still more ambitious project: to make himself prime minister.

In the talks he hosts for paying guests at Kamalaya, Sakunkrit’s topics are micronutrients or Tibetan bells. Once, he recounted a brush with mortality in his late 40s. “I was eating and drinking chocolate milk, cookies, to give me energy during the day to work 18 hours per day, day after day after day,” he said. Now, in his measured, soothing voice, he muses about living to 120.

Sakunkrit speaks perfect English. In fact, he is English. He chose a Thai name (Chakrit means he who is awake, or the watchful one) when he naturalised there in 2011. It appears on some of his business filings. On others, he goes by the name he was born with in Mosborough, a village near Sheffield, on 18 December 1962: Christopher Charles Sherriff Harborne.

Over the past seven years, Harborne has given more than £22m to Farage’s political party. That accounts for two-thirds of all funding received by Reform UK (previously called the Brexit party), making it uniquely dependent among British parties on a single benefactor. August’s £9m was the largest single amount ever given by a living donor. Another £3m followed in November.

At the time of the Thailand meeting just over three years ago, the idea of Farage becoming prime minister would have been laughable to many. Today, his war chest for May’s crunch local elections overflowing with Harborne’s cash, Farage’s party is the bookmakers’ favourite to win the most seats at the next general election.

Harborne is, his lawyers say, an “intensely private person”. He has given no public explanation of his reasons for donating. Asked in December about his donations, Farage said, “Does he want anything from me? No. Absolutely nothing in return at all. He just happens to think that we’ve not made the most of Brexit, that we’re not getting into the 21st-century technologies.”

One 21st-century technology in particular has turbocharged Harborne’s wealth: cryptocurrency. He was an early buyer of digital tokens that have soared in value. And he is one of half a dozen enigmatic tech types who own Tether, the company that issues the most widely traded cryptocurrency.

Registered in the Central American dictatorship of El Salvador, with a tiny staff, Tether has been described as the most profitable company per employee in history. It has issued $184bn in digital cash known as stablecoins. They have grown popular as a way to move money across borders, and in places where inflation erodes the value of local currency. But billions of Tether’s stablecoins are also known to have been put to illicit purposes by gangsters, scammers, Russian sanctions-busters, North Korean hackers and others who would rather avoid the scrutiny of moving money via a bank.

Yet Farage champions Tether. “Tether is a stablecoin,” Farage said on LBC radio in September, the month after Harborne’s record donation. “Stablecoins are the way which money goes from conventional currencies through into cryptocurrencies and back again. Tether is about to be valued as a $500bn company.”

He went on: “Stablecoins, crypto, this world is enormous, and I’ve been urging for years that London should embrace it. We should become a global trading centre for this stuff.” He called for “proper regulation” but then said he would be seeing the Bank of England’s governor to demand he scrap a proposed cap on stablecoin ownership that had led “some of my friends” to consider emigrating. “Why is the bank so out of touch? Why is it behaving like a dinosaur? Why not get with the 21st century? These new technologies aren’t going away. They’re here.”

If Farage helps Tether become a $500bn company – worth more than Mastercard and nearly twice as much as HSBC – it will make the proprietor of the Kamalaya Wellness Sanctuary one of the richest people on the planet.

***

The Harbornes have English heritage of the kind Farage and part of his base cherish. Christopher’s ancestor RC Sherriff wrote the wartime dramas The Dam Busters and Journey’s End.

Harborne appears to have taken after his mother in temperament and his father in profession. Mark Vellacott, an aerospace businessman, close friend of Harborne’s late sister Katharine, and candidate for Reform in the local elections, tells me about the family. He describes Joan as a resilient Yorkshirewoman from a well-off background who kept the home steady, in contrast to the quick‑tempered Edgar, an insurance investor. Harborne, the middle of their three children, is level, gentle and extremely clever, Vellacott says. “Chris does not like anything that’s going to control him.”

After private school at Westminster, Harborne followed his father to Cambridge, where he studied engineering and rowed for his college. He proceeded to the McKinsey management consultancy, a prestigious French business school, and senior positions at multinationals such as PepsiCo. Arriving in Thailand in 1996, Harborne joined a market research firm owned by a member of the powerful Bulakul family. He came across as “bright but a bit odd and intense”, according to one account of him from those days. The Asian financial crisis struck in 1997. Like crises before and since, it was a bonanza for those who made the right bets. Harborne did well enough that, in 2000, he set up on his own, founding an investment firm called Sherriff Global.

The following year he made his first political donation: £10,000 to the Conservatives. Harborne’s lawyers have said, in court filings, that he has given money to a variety of causes: victims of the 2004 tsunami, a blockchain research institute, remote Thai tribes for whom he bought books. They added that “many of his business activities and investments flow from his passion for aviation”. In 2005, he founded AML Global, a jet fuel broker that operates at more than 1,200 locations worldwide.

Marriage and fatherhood did not dim his love of flying, even in high winds. An episode from 2008 suggests a man who may feel that rules – even those of nature – are for other people. Harborne took off from Hertfordshire in his lightweight two-seater and made for the Hampshire village of Highclere. Twice, strong gusts forced him to divert. On the third attempt to land, the plane crashed into Frank and Jacki Seymour’s patio. They were out. “We could easily have been in the garden and been killed,” Frank, 60, told a reporter. “It was a very lucky escape.” Harborne was helped from the wreckage by the Seymours’ neighbours and airlifted to hospital with serious head injuries and broken ribs. (Farage, by coincidence, survived a small -plane crash two years later.)

As Harborne recovered, a crash of a different sort was unfolding. Northern Rock had gone bust; Lehman Brothers soon followed. Homeowners were evicted, banks were bailed out, and revulsion at self-serving financial elites suffused the public mood. In the heat of the crisis, a coder going by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published his invention. “A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash,” he wrote, “would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.” He called it bitcoin.

***

Cryptocurrency can seem forbiddingly complex but is essentially simple. You own a bitcoin if you hold the encryption key that verifies it. How many everyone has is recorded on the blockchain, basically a spreadsheet. How much they are worth depends, like the value of stocks or paintings, on what someone is willing to pay for them.

Harborne revealed details of his crypto interests in a defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal over a story about his role in Tether. He started buying bitcoin in 2011, the suit says. By 2014, the price had risen a thousandfold. That year, Harborne became a “whale” – a major trader – in a new cryptocurrency on Ethereum, a platform devised by a Russian-Canadian teenager, Vitalik Buterin. Harborne’s “early investment in Ethereum now accounts for a major portion of his net worth”, the suit says.

While sceptics say crypto trading is, at best, a new form of gambling and, at worst, a means for insiders to rip off the gullible and the desperate, proponents speak of digital currency as the gateway to liberation. Though the rhetoric chimes with that of self-styled rebels like Farage, for years he paid crypto little heed. He had been a trader in physical commodities and his image was decidedly analogue: fags, pints, the past. Then something changed.

Reform has become the first UK party to accept crypto donations, drafted legislation to cut taxes on crypto profits and proposed that the Treasury hold a crypto reserve. Farage has said he wants to “bring crypto in from the cold”. Recently, he invested £215,000 in a crypto venture run by Truss’s shortlived chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng. For a fee, he has plugged obscure cryptocurrencies on the video site Cameo.

“I led a political insurgency, I took on the establishment,” Farage told a bitcoin conference in Amsterdam shortly before his 2022 trip to Thailand. “This is an economic insurgency and it’s being driven and led by people who are worried about the sheer size, scale of big government, and, hey, they want to be free, they want to be independent, masters of their own destiny.”

I want to know the origin of Farage’s crypto enthusiasm. A Reform representative tells me, “Mr Farage’s support of cryptocurrencies came as a result of him being debanked.” That does not seem to make sense. Coutts made the decision to close Farage’s accounts in November 2022. By then, he had been promoting crypto for at least two years. During the pandemic in 2020, Farage told followers of his Fortune & Freedom investment newsletter that bitcoin was “the ultimate anti-lockdown investment”.

Gawain Towler spent years as Farage’s communications chief and sits on Reform’s board. I ask him whether Farage’s interest in crypto began with his debanking.

“No,” says Towler. “Far prior to that.” He believes it dates back to early 2019 – when Harborne arrived on the scene.

Those were the tense months when both leavers and remainers still believed they could prevail. Harborne had given the Tories a total of £200,000 over two decades. Now flush with crypto money, he handed over that amount in one go to what had hitherto been a hastily launched shambles. More money came in from a couple of other big contributors plus a rush of small online donations.

The next month, the Brexit party came first in the UK’s European parliament elections with 32% of the vote. That helped sink Theresa May, already wounded by her failure to clinch a Brexit deal. In July, Harborne gave the party £1m. Two more £1m donations followed in August. He suggested trying to conjure the image of a broader donor base by sending £50,000 via a proxy, though this did not go ahead. Harborne gave another £6.5m in his own name after Boris Johnson, May’s successor in No 10, called a snap election.

Harborne took a desk in the Brexit party’s campaign headquarters. He brought in four screens for crypto business and a fridge for gin and tonics. “He sat in the office doing his blockchain weirdness,” says Towler, who found him charming and diffident.

I ask Towler why he thinks Harborne wanted to be there. “He was excited by it. He was interested in it. He believed in the basic premise that Britain should govern itself. But his involvement in the party was sitting there and watching us working our fucking socks off and enjoying the banter, the thinking and all the rest of it.” He adds, “I never heard him say, ‘And I want you to have this policy.’ Because, you’ve got to remember, the Brexit party had only one policy, and that was to have Brexit.”

In February 2020, with Brexit done, Harborne’s donations stopped. A deadly new coronavirus was spreading fast. Harborne’s sister, Katharine, had flown to his home town of Bangkok. A vibrant Conservative councillor and lifelong Eurosceptic, she had defected to the Brexit party and stood in the European elections. She missed out on a seat and had been diagnosed with late‑stage breast cancer. Trying all manner of conventional and alternative treatments, I was told that during her time in Thailand she visited a wellness sanctuary on Koh Samui – Kamalaya, the one her brother went on to buy.

Katharine died in 2021. Emma Nicholson, a Conservative peer, gave the eulogy at her funeral. Over a slice of Earl Grey cake in the House of Lords tea room, Nicholson tells me that she met Harborne through her friendship with Katharine. “He’s good‑looking, attractive, lots of excitements in his head.” He took them to Wimbledon to watch the tennis.

“The Conservative party worked hard to cultivate his donations,” Nicholson says. “But he’s not a person who can accept stability. He’s a breaker.” She goes on, “I think Nigel is mad to accept his money.

***

In the LBC radio interview championing Tether, Farage explained that stablecoins are popular because they are used to convert money between crypto and conventional currencies issued by nation states.

Harborne’s own view, set out in his lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal, is that stablecoins may fulfil cryptocurrency’s potential “to enable international transfers that, without bank fees and bureaucratic red tape, are both immediate and frictionless”.

The value of bitcoin and others like it seesaws by the minute. Each Tether stablecoin is worth a dollar. Tether guarantees that by holding reserves containing one real dollar, or an asset worth one real dollar, for each stablecoin it issues. Or so it says.

Despite its $10bn annual profits – more than those of McDonald’s – Tether has never published full accounts or an audit of its reserves. In its early days, mainstream banks declined its business. Tether’s founder, Giancarlo Devasini, is a reclusive Italian former plastic surgeon who struck a plea bargain on a 1995 software piracy charge. When the crypto writer Zeke Faux sought an interview, Devasini replied, “Bees don’t waste their time explaining to flies that honey is better than shit.” Tether did not respond to my request for comment.

Harborne is not just a major user of Tether’s stablecoins. Although, as his lawyers stress, he is not an executive, he has joined Devasini and two others whom leaked documents have identified as the company’s main owners, with a 12% stake. Harborne achieved this by snapping up tokens – effectively shares – issued to him and other users of an exchange called Bitfinex, Tether’s sister company, to compensate them for crypto that hackers stole in 2016.

As Tether issued more and more of its stablecoins, questions about whether it really had the reserves to back up their value grew louder. In 2018, as the total in circulation passed $2bn, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, issued subpoenas to Tether and Bitfinex. She suspected their bosses had been diverting large sums from Tether’s reserves.

By the time James announced a fraud investigation into Tether in April 2019, Harborne had wired his first donation to Farage’s party.

I asked Harborne about the timing of his donations. His lawyers said connections should not be drawn between their dates and “unrelated events”, without elaborating. Harborne does have a political agenda, says Vellacott, the businessman who knows the family. But he also wants to be “king of crypto”. Vellacott tells me, “When I see Chris involved in UK politics, I think it’s with an eye to the opportunity to influence where crypto is going in the country and globally.”

In 2019, almost £3.5m of his donations to the Brexit party came after Farage had been outmanoeuvred by Boris Johnson and opted to stand down most of his candidates. The party slumped to 2% of the vote and won no seats, whereupon Harborne sent nearly half a million more.

Likewise, the timing of a series of large donations to the Conservative party seems odd. There was £500,000 in February 2022, just after the Metropolitan police launched its investigation into Johnson’s Partygate lockdown breaches. Then the same amount on 6 May, as the Tories lost 500 councillors in local elections. And again in September, the week after Truss’s fiscal meltdown. In November, Harborne transferred £1m to Johnson’s private office, his premiership having ended in disgrace.

There does, though, appear to be a pattern. Some big beneficiaries of Harborne’s largesse have undergone conversions to the crypto cause. Even if he did not seek a quid pro quo, they adopted policy positions that align with his interests.

Johnson has said he “suspected from the outset that all cryptocurrencies were basically a Ponzi scheme”, yet he became a noisy crypto booster as prime minister. During the three months between Harborne’s first and second £500,000 Tory donations in 2022, Johnson’s government announced measures to make the UK “a global hub for cryptoasset technology and investment”. Top of the list was a plan for stablecoins like Tether’s to become a recognised form of payment. (A Conservative spokesperson said, “Donations to the party were not a material consideration in policy decisions.”)

When Rishi Sunak became prime minister on 25 October 2022, he gave every indication of perpetuating the party’s evangelism for digital currencies, having fronted the pro-crypto policy as chancellor. But the following week, the CoinDesk site published an article suggesting that the billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire might largely rest on “printed‑out-of-thin-air” crypto. As it became clear that $8bn of customers’ money was missing, his FTX exchange collapsed, sending crypto prices tumbling.

Bankman-Fried, a geeky Californian who had only recently been proclaiming from his $35m Bahamian penthouse that he sought riches merely to fund “effective altruism”, was heading for a 25-year sentence in a US prison for fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering and other crimes. The Economist’s cover declared “Crypto’s downfall”.

Labour taunted Sunak. “The Conservatives’ wild west approach to crypto has put millions of people’s savings at risk and crypto-related crime in the UK – such as fraud and money laundering – is now at record levels,” said Tulip Siddiq, then a shadow Treasury minister.

Farage remained a crypto guy (though Reform’s representative insists that “no donor, including Mr Harborne, has sought or been offered any form of influence, benefit or preferential treatment in connection with donations”). More than a year had passed since he quit frontline politics. He was still honorary president of his party, renamed Reform UK, but it was polling as low as 4% and needed loans from its new leader, the property developer Richard Tice, to stay alive. In the days before FTX collapsed, Farage had been at the Amsterdam bitcoin conference excoriating “the establishment” for trying to thwart crypto’s rise. Now he had another flight to catch – to Thailand.

***

One of Kamalaya’s paying guests was taken aback, even uncomfortable, to see the figurehead of the British right among them. “I felt like I’d entered some Tory private club in the home counties,” the guest tells me.

The sanctuary was changing as Harborne took over from the founders. They would soon depart, telling a spa industry publication they had “come to the conclusion that our business and wellness philosophies vis a vis those of the controlling shareholders are simply divergent and incompatible”.

Guests with bookings in December 2022 received an apologetic email from the management warning them that the sanctuary would be busier than usual due to the birthday celebrations. Those who declined the offer of alternative dates witnessed Harborne’s clique making themselves at home.

Farage and his entourage eschewed the extensive juice menu, the guest recalls, opening a few bottles of wine one lunchtime instead. (The Reform representative disputed this, saying that “as a wellness retreat” Kamalaya does not permit drinking, though its website says fine wines with low alcohol content are available.)

An event management company seemed to be making a film about Harborne, to be shown on the final night of the festivities. For one scene, the guest tells me, Harborne was filmed by the pool posing as a barefoot James Bond in black tie holding what looked like a martini, presumably shaken, not stirred.

When Harborne sat down with Farage at the shoreside table, they were joined by Farage’s pollster Chris Bruni‑Lowe and a couple: George Cottrell, known in Reform circles as Posh George, and his sometime girlfriend, the reality television personality Georgia Toffolo. So constant is Cottrell’s presence in Farage’s life that the politician is said to treat the young aristocrat like a son. Cottrell’s mother dated then-Prince Charles in the 1970s. In 2024-25, she gave Reform £750,000.

Cottrell spent eight months in a US prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud in the context of a money ‑laundering conspiracy. Now he passes much of his time in Montenegro, a regular at the casino in Tivat. He has been alleged in court papers – which his lawyers dispute – to have a “financial interest” in Tether.bet, a gambling site for users of the cryptocurrency. When, six months after the Thai gathering, Harborne set up a new company called Longevity Biotech Systems, he incorporated it not in Thailand but Tivat, at the address of Cottrell’s local lawyer. (Cottrell’s London lawyers told me the one in Montenegro has lots of other clients, too.)

Reform’s representative warned me not to read too much into the Kamalaya gathering. “It was just a birthday party,” they said. “Any attempt to characterise this event as giving rise to, or evidencing, any form of coordination or alignment between Mr Harborne and Reform UK or Mr Farage is entirely unfounded,” the representative added, threatening legal action if I did so.

The Reform representative pointed out that Farage had retired from frontline politics the previous year and said he was not at the time “contemplating a return of the kind suggested and it was a number of important years before he even considered doing so”. Yet Farage had contemplated a return in a Daily Telegraph column published days before he went to Thailand. He reminded readers that Tice was Reform’s leader and he was only honorary president, but took it upon himself to announce that the party would field a full slate of candidates at the next general election.

With the Conservatives imploding post-Truss, Farage had accused the “Goldman Sachs globalist” Sunak of betraying Brexit. Citing polling showing popular support for a “Farage-led party”, he ended his column: “Whether I take a more active role in Reform UK in future will depend on the extent of the betrayal of Brexit. But, at the risk of stating the obvious, I didn’t spend 25 years of my life battling to secure a seemingly hopeless cause only to watch [then chancellor of the exchequer] Jeremy Hunt give it away.” Within a year and a half, Farage would formally be leader once more.

Harborne’s donations to the Conservatives had ceased by the Kamalaya meeting but he maintained his relationship with Johnson, Farage’s great rival as Brexit standard-bearer. In September 2023, Harborne accompanied Johnson on a trip to Ukraine. Quite why is unclear, although Harborne does have experience in military matters: his jet fuel venture makes millions from Pentagon contracts and he holds a stake in QinetiQ, the privatised weapons-research arm of the UK’s armed forces.

None of Harborne’s money flowed to Reform in the run-up to the 2024 general election, as Keir Starmer returned Labour to power. Nonetheless, at the eighth attempt, Farage won a seat in the Commons as MP for Clacton. Soon he was back on the road, flying to the US to appear at the Republican convention in Milwaukee. After surviving an assassination attempt by the width of an ear, Donald Trump was to accept the party’s nomination for president.

Farage declared the trip’s purpose as “to support a friend who was almost killed and to represent Clacton on the world stage”. When his entry on the register of MPs’ interests was published, it showed that the £32,000 cost of flights and accommodation for him and a staffer had been paid by Harborne. For the first time since Brexit, Harborne was once again putting his money behind Farage. It may yet carry him all the way to Downing Street.

***

The luminaries of the transatlantic right who assembled on a Washington DC hotel rooftop for Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025 hoped, one remarked, to be gathering again soon “to celebrate Nigel Farage becoming the prime minister of Great Britain”.

Harborne paid the £27,000 cost of Farage’s trip to DC. For once, they attended the same public event: the Stars and Stripes Union Jack reception, at which Farage was guest of honour. (That is rare. There are no publicly available images of Farage and Harborne together. The grainy photographs of them at Kamalaya are the first.)

The inauguration party was a triumph not just for the right but for crypto. Indeed, the two have long been entangled. Another partygoer, the Maga agitator and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, has declared cryptocurrency “the future” and promoted one called Patriot Pay (some buyers are now suing him). He has collaborated with Brock Pierce, a child movie star who was involved in the conception of Tether’s stablecoin.

Under Joe Biden, the justice department had taken on the industry. Bankman-Fried was convicted. Others went to jail, too, or paid fines. Faced with this existential threat, the industry raised hundreds of millions for political donations, sums to match those spent by big oil and Wall Street.

Trump had once dismissed digital currencies as scams that were “based on thin air”. Donations may have helped change his mind, plus his experience, like Farage, of being “debanked” by mainstream financial institutions. During the campaign, Trump told a bitcoin conference in Nashville he wanted to make the US the “crypto capital of the planet”. He vowed to remove the regulator who had led the crackdown. “We will have regulations,” he told the crowd, “but from now on the rules will be written by people who love your industry, not hate your industry.”

Tether settled the New York fraud case in 2021 by paying a $18.5m fine and undertaking not to trade in the state. But ever more episodes of its stablecoins’ nefarious uses were coming to light, not just by organised crime and scammers but reportedly by Hamas and pariah regimes like those in Iran and Venezuela. On the eve of the election, it was reported that the US Department of Justice had begun an investigation into Tether for possible violations of sanctions and anti-money-laundering rules. Tether executives were warned to avoid the US for fear of arrest.

That US investigation, like many crypto cases, appears to have stopped since Trump returned to power. As a foreign company, Tether could not contribute to the industry’s political spending. But it found an influential ally in Howard Lutnick, a Washington operator whose investment house held billions of Tether’s lucrative reserves. Trump chose Lutnick to run his transition team – selecting, among others, those who would oversee the crypto industry – then appointed him secretary of commerce. Tether has been one of the donors to Trump’s East Wing ballroom. When Bo Hines, Trump’s crypto policy chief, left the White House last year, he took a job at Tether.

The Trumps have launched their own crypto ventures. They now account for an estimated 90% of the family’s ballooning income. Powerful figures from China, the Gulf and elsewhere who funnel money into them appear to have been rewarded with the administration’s favour, seemingly including a crypto tycoon granted a pardon. The Genius Act, regulating stablecoins, is regarded by critics as legislation Tether might as well have written itself.

Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s spokeswoman, tells me, “The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public’s distrust in what they read.” The president’s crypto policies are “driving innovation and economic opportunity for all Americans”, she says.

As demand for Tether stablecoins grows, so do its reserves, and so does the interest and investment returns on those reserves. The company does not reveal how the profits are distributed, but if Harborne’s share is equal to his stake, that would make him about $1bn a year.

Although the blockchain logs transactions, it does not record users’ names. This anonymity is the point of crypto for some. Harborne son’s Will was Tether’s 10th employee, writing crucial code, and now runs a stablecoin venture that started as part of Tether. Unlike his father, he has articulated his vision for digital money in public. In a 2019 interview, he criticised the systems banks use to check the identities of their customers. Rules, Will said, “that we all know and hate today in most western democracies”. He objected to “giving away lots about our identities which isn’t necessarily going to be kept safe, or used in ways that we want”. Asked about this today, Will tells me his views have changed, adding that his goal for stablecoins is “not to replace the financial system overnight, but to improve how money moves”.

Experts say banks’ systems are flawed and burdensome but that they can help stem illicit finance. One prominent voice on the risks of crypto is Richard Sanders, a US military veteran who has developed sleuthing techniques that can sometimes pierce crypto’s anonymity, allowing him to crack dozens of scams and hacks. He lives in Kyiv, working with Ukrainian intelligence and mapping worldwide networks of digital dirty money.

Tether’s stablecoins, Sanders believes, are used for much of the illicit activity in cryptocurrency. Its bosses have agreed to requests from law enforcement agencies to freeze stablecoins worth more than $3bn. “We are active players in the global fight against financial crime,” its representative once told me, adding that, after it issues its currency, “flows are not controlled by Tether but we remain vigilant and ready to act when law enforcement identifies illicit activity.” Harborne’s lawyers say neither he nor the company could be considered “guilty of the alleged crimes perpetrated by unassociated random users of Tether”.

Sanders doesn’t buy that. “They are responsible because they make money off it,” he tells me. Sanders says he has held discussions with UK government officials about how Tether could be forced to freeze more of its stablecoins. And the UK’s National Crime Agency has taken an interest in Tether. Recently, NCA investigators said they had rumbled a money-laundering scheme enabling “sanctions evasions and the highest levels of organised crime” that was helping the Russian war effort in Ukraine. The scheme, the investigators tell me, was running on Tether stablecoins.

Thanks to Trump, Tether appears unlikely to face scrutiny from the US authorities. But its bosses, Sanders suggests, may “fear a country like the UK stepping up in the US’s absence”.

***

If Farage’s prediction comes true – perhaps with his own assistance as prime minister – and Tether’s valuation reaches half a trillion dollars, Harborne’s stake in that company alone would make him something like the 30th richest person alive, with double the fortune of Google’s Eric Schmidt or Harborne’s fellow tech tycoon and rightwing donor Peter Thiel.

Like Thiel, Harborne has lately displayed a readiness to intervene in global affairs. In February, he spent £25,000 to fly Farage to the Maldives as part of a failed attempt to reach the Chagos Islands military base. Farage opposes the government’s proposed decision to hand sovereignty to Mauritius. It appears Harborne also may have helped organise a flight by a group of Chagossian campaigners to Sri Lanka before they set out for the islands by boat.

Harborne does not give interviews. His lawyers at the London reputation-management firm Schillings said he would not “reward” me for my prior coverage by granting one. “Our client has not sought to influence, nor has he influenced, any politician to support cryptocurrencies or any other of his business interests,” they wrote. “The prime ministers and senior politicians to whom you refer are fully capable of making their own informed decisions on matters such as cryptocurrencies.”

Harborne does appear to believe that – on other occasions – he who pays the piper calls the tune. The lawyers said his sole on-record response to my questions was a line from the media critic Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” (The inference: my employer would not want me to treat him fairly.)

In February, the Labour MP Phil Brickell used a Commons debate about democracy to express concerns about the sources of Reform’s funding. He said, “Let me also mention Chakrit Sakunkrit – sound familiar? I can see blank faces around the chamber. I will use his old name: Christopher Harborne.”

Brickell referred to the NCA’s Russia investigation. “That is not to say that Harborne himself is complicit in any wrongdoing. But the fact is that we now have a large political party bankrolled by an overseas billionaire whose wealth is tied to a cryptoasset that our own law enforcement agencies have flagged as a tool used in Russia-linked illicit finance.” Brickell used to work at Barclays and NatWest running teams combatting corruption and money-laundering. “Let me summarise what I have just said in six short words: red flag, red flag, red flag.”

Harborne’s money may help Farage topple Starmer in the local elections as it helped him topple May six years ago. As of last month, however, there is what looks like a concerted effort to limit how much more he can give. Starmer’s government has announced a ban on donations over £100,000 by those who are otherwise eligible but live abroad. There are loopholes. Overseas donors can still give via UK companies. Harborne has at least two, but there are restrictions that could curb how much he can channel through them.

Or he could come home. He still has family in the UK. Some are involved in politics. Harborne’s daughter-in-law, Will’s wife, Sophie, wants to run as a Liberal Democrat candidate for parliament – though she has left the family name off her website.

For years, two people who know him tell me, Harborne was a non-dom. That meant he enjoyed a special status allowing rich Britons to avoid UK tax on their foreign earnings if they limit the number of days they spend in the country each year. Harborne is said to have taken great care not to exceed his quota and trigger a tax bill. As a non‑dom, Harborne might have been able to get round the foreign donor rules. But Labour scrapped the non-dom regime last year. So it seems that if he wants to go on backing Farage as lavishly as he has been, Harborne will have to be willing to live in the country whose fate he is shaping, even if it means handing some of his fortune to the public purse.

Another expat billionaire this month announced he was going back to the UK to fund Farage. Ben Delo has given £4m this year already but would have been prevented from giving further such sums had he stayed in Hong Kong. “Labour seems antagonised by one man in particular: Christopher Harborne,” Delo wrote in the Daily Telegraph. “For Labour, sitting on its cushion of trade union funding, the idea that someone might create a level playing field by giving Reform as much money to spend as the other parties is intolerable.”

Delo’s wealth, like Harborne’s, comes from crypto. In 2022 he pleaded guilty to violating the US Bank Secrecy Act by failing to implement adequate anti money-laundering controls on his crypto exchange. Trump pardoned him last year. Now Delo wants others with such riches to unite. “Let’s build a war chest,” he wrote, “and win back our country.”

• Additional reporting by Navaon Siradapuvadol in Bangkok and Rowena Mason and Henry Dyer in London