On 11 November 2019, Nigel Farage stood up at a press conference in Hartlepool’s Best Western hotel and announced, without warning to his own candidates, that the Brexit Party would not contest any of the 317 seats the Conservatives had won in 2017. The decision destroyed his party, handed Boris Johnson the parliamentary majority he needed to pass his Brexit deal, and has never been fully explained. A new investigation by the Nerve, written by Carole Cadwalladr and Lucia Osborne-Crowley, now places Christopher Harborne, the crypto billionaire at the centre of the £5m scandal involving Farage, at the heart of the events surrounding that decision.
The man in pink trousers
The Nerve’s central new piece of evidence is photographic. A Getty Images photo taken in Hartlepool on the day of Farage’s announcement, published at the time by the Guardian and the BBC, shows a figure in the background that drew no attention in 2019. Two independent researchers, one using facial recognition technology, have since identified the man as Christopher Harborne.
At the time, almost nobody in British politics or journalism had heard of Harborne, despite the fact he had already donated £6.2m to the Brexit Party. Due to the Electoral Commission’s quarterly reporting cycle, only £220,000 of that had been publicly disclosed. The Brexit Party’s former spokesman, Gawain Towler, has separately described how Harborne had immersed himself in the campaign and had a desk in the corner of party HQ.
The secret meeting in Blackfriars
The most serious new claim concerns a meeting in the week before Farage’s announcement. Rupert Lowe, the former Brexit Party MEP who now leads Restore Britain and is locked in open conflict with Farage’s Reform UK in the Makerfield byelection, told the Nerve he was ordered to “rush back” from the European Parliament for what he described as a “secret meeting” with Conservative “fixers” at a Blackfriars townhouse owned by a Conservative grandee.
Lowe claims the Conservatives offered seven peerages in exchange for the Brexit Party standing down its 317 candidates, but refused to reciprocate by withdrawing Tory candidates in Labour-held seats, a dealbreaker. Farage has separately said at the time that he personally was offered a peerage, and later claimed eight other peerages had been offered, with the proposal coming from the heart of Downing Street. Johnson has denied all of this. If true, such an offer would have been illegal, and Lord Falconer wrote to the Metropolitan Police and the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time arguing exactly that. The police took no further action.
Lowe claims that when the Brexit team returned to HQ to brief Farage that no deal had been reached, Harborne was present at that meeting too, and was “bullish,” even offering to fund more candidates to stand. According to Lowe, it was agreed there would be no deal. Days later, with no apparent explanation, Farage conceded to the Conservative terms anyway, standing down all 317 candidates for nothing in return.
The Habib allegation and the legal fallout
This is where the story connects directly to the present day. Ben Habib, Reform’s former deputy leader, has alleged that Harborne paid both Farage and Boris Johnson £1m each as part of a deal to secure the 2019 pact, claiming the election that delivered Brexit was, in his words, “a monetary deal.” Harborne has filed a defamation claim against Habib in the High Court over these comments. The Nerve notes that Harborne did gift Johnson £1m, but not until 2022, three years after the alleged deal and after Johnson had left office, with no evidence connecting that payment to the events of 2019. Farage denies Habib’s claim entirely and says his lawyers have demanded an apology. Neither Farage nor Johnson responded to the Nerve’s questions.
Habib began speaking to the Nerve while still leader of his own party, Advance UK. Shortly after Harborne filed the defamation claim against him, Habib announced Advance would “take a step back” to clear space for Lowe’s Restore Britain, a sequence of events that itself raises questions about the pressure being applied across the fractured right of British politics.
The WhatsApp messages
The Nerve also references a set of WhatsApp messages, previously cited in a 2024 Financial Times report, apparently from Harborne, in which he tells an anonymised contact he has “assured Nigel that I will underwrite/guarantee all the expenses of the campaign” but is concerned “it does not look great if there is one major funder so we need to diversify funding.” He reportedly asks whether he can “gift you money to onward donate to the party,” adding “there are no tax or legal issues.” It would be illegal under UK electoral law to disguise the true source of a donation in this way. The Nerve could not independently verify the origin of the messages, and Harborne’s spokesperson told the FT in 2024 that “all of Mr Harborne’s political donations and disclosures… were made in full compliance with electoral laws.” Harborne, through his lawyers Schillings, declined to engage with any of the Nerve’s questions for this latest investigation.
The consequences
The political consequences of the Hartlepool announcement were severe and immediate. The Brexit Party had topped national polls earlier in 2019 and still commanded around 10% support going into the announcement. By election day, fielding candidates in non-Tory seats, it collapsed to 2% and won no seats. Multiple candidates told the Nerve they found out from television news with no warning, having spent their own money on campaigns that were abandoned overnight. One described feeling like “cannon fodder.”
Three days after the announcement, Harborne donated a further £2m to the Brexit Party. He gave £9.5m in total in the final six months of 2019, then ceased donating altogether in February 2020, the same month the Brexit Party’s relevance effectively ended. Farage’s “wilderness years” lasted until 2024, when Harborne’s donations resumed, this time as personal gifts and crypto-aligned policy advocacy that form the basis of the current Parliamentary Standards investigation into Farage’s undeclared £5m gift.
Why this matters now
The renewed scrutiny of 2019 lands at a moment of maximum tension on the British right. Reform and Lowe’s Restore Britain are openly at war over the Makerfield byelection, and Lowe, who has “an evident interest in harming Farage’s chances” as the Nerve itself notes, is the primary source for the Blackfriars meeting claims. That doesn’t make his account false, but it is a relevant consideration in weighing it.
What is harder to dispute is the photographic evidence placing Harborne in Hartlepool, the WhatsApp messages previously verified by the Financial Times, and the verified timeline of Harborne’s donations, which surged before the announcement, continued through the campaign, and then stopped entirely once the Brexit Party’s usefulness to him had ended. The full pattern of Harborne’s giving since then, including the £5m gift to Farage personally in 2024, the property bought in cash weeks later, and his attempt to register to vote in the UK as a donation cap looms, now forms a continuous thread running from the Hartlepool announcement to the present day.
No charges have been brought against Farage, Johnson or Harborne in connection with any of these events. The defamation claim against Habib is ongoing. But the question the Nerve poses, “was there a deal, and if so, cui bono,” remains unanswered six years on, at the exact moment its central figures are once again at the centre of British politics.
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