As Farage is investigated ... did Boris Johnson also fail to disclose a gift from Christopher Harborne?

Boris Johnson failed to disclose flights aboard a private jet provided by cryptobillionaire Christopher Harborne, the same political donor whose gift of £5m to Nigel Farage is now the subject of a parliamentary inquiry, the Nerve can reveal. 

The Nerve has seen leaked documents from Boris Johnson’s private office that show Harborne providing his $50m private jet and pilot to Johnson for his personal use after he had stepped down as prime minister. At the time, January 2023, Johnson was still the MP for Uxbridge, but there is no record of the flights in disclosures made in the Register of Members’ Interests. 

Under parliamentary rules, all gifts including travel and other expenses must be disclosed. 

The new revelations put Boris Johnson in the frame for having potentially broken the same parliamentary rules as Farage with a gift from the same donor. 

Neither he nor Harborne responded to questions from the Nerve but Clive Lewis, Labour MP for Norwich South and a former infantry officer who served in Afghanistan, said Harborne’s relationship with both Farage and Johnson – including their financial ties – now had to be investigated as a matter of national security. “There’s a rat here and it stinks,” he said.

The flights in question date from January 2023, when the documents seen by the Nerve show Johnson flying to Poland as part of an onward trip to Ukraine to meet President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. 

Johnson should have declared all costs of the trip not borne by himself. But his schedule shows him flying on board Harborne’s Dassault Falcon jet, flown by the billionaire’s private pilot. 

In fact, none of the expenses from this trip were declared, including any provided by the Ukrainian government. The documents note that Johnson would be transferred from the UK’s state security to Ukraine’s upon boarding the sleeper train from Przemyśl in Poland to Kyiv. 

And according to the documents, Johnson travelled with the man who had become his personal patron: Harborne. He not only provided the use of his jet to fly Johnson to Rzeszów in Poland, but the schedule reveals Johnson transferring to the overnight sleeper train to Kyiv “with CH”. 

At the time, Harborne was the largest individual investor in QinetiQ, a UK military technology company. Although Harborne’s fortune derives in large part from his stake in the cryptocurrency issuer Tether, his investment in QinetiQ and its connection to his relationship with Johnson has so far gone under the radar. Harborne began investing in the firm in early 2022, at the same time that he became friendly with Johnson, a relationship which took off when Harborne began donating significant sums to the Conservative party. 

QinetiQ, Britain’s most advanced military testing lab, won new multimillion-pound contracts with the Ministry of Defence throughout 2022 as part of the UK’s efforts to support Ukraine. It is the only defence stock that Harborne has a significant holding in, according to publicly available records.

The Nerve has examined the reporting of the trip, official video and photographs released by Zelenskyy’s office and articles in the international press, including Johnson’s own account in the Daily Mail, and has found no mention of Harborne or photographs of Harborne on the trip.

Neither Johnson or Harborne would answer the Nerve’s questions about why the political donor and defence investor was on the trip, whether it was related to his holding in QinetiQ, or why Johnson failed to disclose the use of his private jet to parliament, especially given he had previously declared the £1m gift from Harborne. It also raises the question whether Boris Johnson failed to disclose specific other personal gifts from Harborne or other individuals. 

Harborne, through his lawyers, Schillings, threatened defamation proceedings against the Nerve but would not identify any defamatory statements or erroneous information in the evidence we supplied. He has previously filed a defamation claim against the Wall Street Journal for its reporting on his ownership of Tether and in the UK against Ben Habib, the former deputy leader of Reform. Habib’s claim relates to his allegation that Harborne paid both Farage and Johnson to strike a deal in the 2019 general election to stand down the Brexit party’s candidates. The Nerve has conducted its own investigation into that claim. 

Another trip that Johnson and Harborne took to Kyiv is already public. A previous report in the Guardian revealed Johnson and Harborne travelled to Ukraine together in September 2023. But that trip was after Johnson had stepped down as an MP, when he was no longer bound by parliamentary rules. The new details uncovered by the Nerve are in the set of 1,820 leaked documents from Johnson’s private office known as the Boris Files, first published by the website Distributed Denial of Secrets, but previously overlooked and unreported.

At the time of the January 2023 trip – almost a year into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – Johnson was a humbled man. Partygate had finally forced him from the office of PM, he’d moved out of No 10 and had returned to the backbenches. He didn’t even have anywhere to live and was being hosted by another of his political patrons, Lord and Lady Bamford. 

And he’d embarked on making money. The previous autumn saw him earn hundreds of thousands of pounds from speaking gigs, including an event in Singapore where his office records show he also dined with Harborne. It was the first of two such speaking events in Singapore, and two dinners with Harborne two weeks apart, in November and December 2022. 

In between these two dinners, Harborne gave Johnson a personal gift of £1m. Unlike the later flights, that donation was recorded as “£1,000,000 to The Office of Boris Johnson Ltd” in the Register of Members’ Interests. But what was the money for? Johnson has refused to answer our questions and Harborne again didn’t respond to queries from the Nerve. (When the Guardian previously reported on the leaked documents Johnson said: “Your pathetic non-stories… seem mostly to be derived from some illegal Russian hack job. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”) But the new revelations raise fresh questions about the pattern of Harborne’s donations and what influence he is seeking. 

Harborne is now the biggest donor to Reform UK, but he previously gave to the Brexit party and the Conservatives. And the sums gifted personally to both Nigel Farage and Johnson are unprecedented in UK politics, as is their timing. Harborne gave £5m to Farage shortly before he returned to frontline politics and ran for parliament in 2024. And £1m to Johnson after he stepped down as prime minister. 

But for what? Services rendered? Something yet to come? Or simply one friend helping out another friend?

In some ways, the January Ukraine visit was a nostalgia trip for Johnson. He had travelled to Ukraine while prime minister and was popular there because of his outspoken support for the country. The schedule shows that he was still treated as a quasi-head of state: he was received with full honours, a welcome ceremony, official visits and a one-on-one bilateral with Zelenskyy. 

The difference this time around was that instead of being accompanied by civil servants, he was with a billionaire – one who’d bailed him out with £1m in cash and who was also the single biggest investor in QinetiQ, the military technology company that had won millions of pounds of Ministry of Defence contracts, including during Johnson’s time in office.

Harborne had his own interest in Ukraine’s prospects and the likely trajectory of the war, including a financial one. 

For Johnson, it was a timely departure from the UK: that weekend, yet another scandal would erupt. The Sunday Times revealed that businessman and Conservative supporter Richard Sharp had helped to arrange an £800,000 loan to the perennially cash-strapped Johnson back in 2020. Johnson had gone on to appoint him to the influential role of chairman of the BBC. 

But in Kyiv, Johnson was welcomed as a hero. Video footage shows Zelenskyy warmly greeting him, and Johnson telling the Ukrainian president that he wished to be of service to him, however he could be, whether as a “foot soldier or spear carrier”. 

We can only assume that on the train ride back to Poland, Johnson wrote an account of the trip for the Daily Mail: an emotive description of what he’d seen was published the next day. 

For Ukraine, it was an important demonstration of international support, a chance to keep the country’s plight in the headlines. For Johnson – after years of accepting party donations from Russian oligarchs, refusing to investigate Russian interference in UK politics, and personally intervening to prevent the publication of the Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia Report – Ukraine had become a passion project. 

And it didn’t end there. 

A week later, Johnson travelled to the US to meet key officials in the Biden administration and explicitly drum up support for Ukraine. Records seen by the Nerve reveal that Johnson talked to Harborne before departing on this trip and then over consecutive days while he was first in New York and then Washington, where he made a speech to 80 members of the House of Representatives. While in New York, the schedule notes, Johnson would apparently be giving Harborne a “Ukraine readout”. 

Harborne’s presence on the Ukraine trip, what he was seeking to get out of his relationships with Farage and Johnson, the influence of the millions of pounds he has spent on UK politics, and the questions of national security it raises, must now be investigated as a matter of priority, Clive Lewis told the Nerve. 

“Johnson needs to be questioned and so does Christopher Harborne,” Lewis said. “He is a person of great interest to parliamentarians because he is clearly connected into a network of individuals, defence contractors and the authoritarian far right, some of the key things that hobbled this country, both economically and democratically. 

“We need a big dose of sunlight to see more clearly the relationships between Christopher Harborne, defence contractors and QinetiQ. If there's nothing to hide, then no one should have a problem with this.”