Evening all,

It’s Carole here on a sunny pre-Bank Holiday evening bringing you another small parcel of joy: some Nigel Farage accountability journalism!

I’ve been on the Farage beat for a decade and this is the first time that there has been anything like an appropriate level of scrutiny into the source of his finances. In recent weeks, the shock revelation by Anna Isaac in the Guardian that he’d received an undisclosed £5m from cryptobillionaire Christopher Harborne has set the hares running. 

We think our contribution to the effort to untangle Farage’s relationship with Harborne and his complex finances this week is a significant addition and I thought I’d explain a little bit about the process behind it. 

Something I picked up during my legal travails is the importance of a chronology. It’s where lawyers always begin and so that’s what I suggested to the Nerve’s Charlie Young. He went away and created an incredibly detailed timeline with the dates of every donation from Harborne to three political parties and Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, which we discovered nobody had added up before (an astonishing £30m since 2001). 

Harborne’s wealth derives in large part from the cryptocurrency Tether, a so-called “stablecoin”, so next, Charlie doggedly tracked down Farage’s announcements and policy statements on crypto and, specifically, stablecoins. And then he set them side by side. 

The result was striking, starting with the £5m donation. Two months later was the start of a new-found Farage enthusiasm for crypto. And the timeline then tracks an escalating flow of money from Harborne to Reform. 

A coincidence? It could be. But then Charlie went further back and did the same exercise with Boris Johnson. And it revealed a similar pattern. The donations and the public statements track in exactly the same way. 

The resulting story by Charlie and new recruit Lucia Osborne-Crowley is pretty eye-popping and, because we don’t think you should take our word for it, we’ve published the entire timeline too. As Margaret Hodge, the government’s anti-corruption champion, told us, “There are questions to answer”. Thank you to everyone who’s a paid member: it’s your subs that are paying for this work. 

I’m going to let the rest of the team tell you what’s in today’s edition but not before highlighting the great Stewart Lee’s column on whatever it is that's going on inside Labour. Does anybody know?

Thanks for reading,

Carole

We’ve spent weeks collating a timeline of cryptobillionaire Christopher Harborne’s donations to three political parties (the Brexit Party, the Tories and Reform UK) and to Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson and then mapping Farage and Johnson’s pro-crypto statements and policy announcements. For example, the stablecoin investor’s £5m gift to Reform’s leader coincided with the party’s advocacy of digital assets. Read Charlie Young and Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s report - and the full timeline - here.

"In the wake of last weekend’s Unite the Kingdom festival of al fresco cocaine consumption, competitive street urination and unambiguous amplified Islamophobia," writes Stewart Lee in the opening to his column, why is the Labour party engaged in a spat over who should lead their party? Racism is on the rise here, urged on by the Reform party and the far right in the US, and Labour has chosen the precise moment when Nigel Farage is in trouble over that £5m gift from Christopher Harborne to rearrange the deckchairs...Read his brilliant column here

As we slide into a sunny bank holiday weekend, it seems a good moment for the photographer Sophie Green to tell us about her witty, warm and colourful images capturing the subcultures and social gatherings that shape contemporary Britain. For her project Tangerine Dreams, she’s shot everyone from banger car racers to beachgoers, dog show competitors to Irish dancing hopefuls. “In a world fractured by nationalism, culture wars, individualism and loneliness,” she says, “these practices anchor us in our shared humanity.” Ahead of a solo exhibition opening at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol, she shares some of her favourite images.

“Can a millionaire be homeless?” asks American blues poet Aja Monet on track Hollyweird, a response to celebrities fleeing the 2025 wildfires in her hometown of LA, from her new album, The Color of Rain, which moves from neo-soul and sonic lushness to spiky social commentary. “Three years after her debut album, When the Poems Do What They Do,” writes music critic Jude Rogers, “Aja Monet’s poetic star enters the mainstream.” Read Jude’s full review of Aja Monet’s new album here.

It’s been a huge couple of years for the 29-year-old Peterborough-born artist, writer and poet Rene Matić: last April they became the second youngest Turner-prize nominee ever (youngest = Damien Hirst) and this month they won the Deutsche Börse photography prize for a show exploring identity, class and queer love. Today they share some of their recent cultural highlights including a musical that had them “laughing from start to finish”, the perfect spot for nibbles and wine and why they can’t get enough of Nina Simone. Read Rene’s Recommender here.

Husband and wife Itamar Srulovich and Sarit Packer - the force behind the popular Honey & Co brand - have written a new cookbook. This one adds to the trend for simple and fast recipes with its promise of “easy food for your everyday pleasure”. Ahead of this long weekend’s BBQ weather, the couple share their recipe for Middle East inspired chicken burgers. Get the recipe here. 

Have a great weekend and don’t forget to click the Proton ad below to help us earn some money to fund our journalism!

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