Boris Johnson appears to have failed to declare two flights on Christopher Harborne’s private jet during a January 2023 trip to Ukraine, according to an investigation by the Nerve, citing leaked documents from Johnson’s private office. The story adds a significant new dimension to the Harborne story – and raises questions about whether the pattern of undisclosed relationships between the crypto and defence billionaire and senior British politicians goes well beyond Nigel Farage.
Harborne, the Thailand-based British billionaire at the centre of the Farage £5m scandal, provided his $50m Dassault Falcon jet and private pilot to Johnson for a trip to Poland, from where Johnson and Harborne travelled together on the overnight sleeper train to Kyiv. There is no record of the flights in Johnson’s declarations to the Register of Members’ Interests, despite parliamentary rules requiring disclosure of all gifts including travel and expenses. At the time, Johnson was still the MP for Uxbridge.
Who is Christopher Harborne?
Harborne is the mystery billionaire who has become the most consequential private funder of right-wing politics in Britain. His fortune derives primarily from his stake in Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin, though the Nerve investigation reveals a previously overlooked dimension: at the time of the January 2023 Ukraine trip, Harborne was the largest individual investor in QinetiQ, Britain’s most advanced military technology and testing company. QinetiQ won multiple multimillion-pound Ministry of Defence contracts throughout 2022 – including during Johnson’s time as prime minister – as part of Britain’s effort to support Ukraine. It is the only significant defence stock Harborne holds.
The full timeline of the Farage-Harborne relationship is already a matter of public record. Harborne gave Farage a £5m personal gift in 2024, shortly before Farage announced his return to frontline politics and stood for parliament in Clacton. Weeks after receiving the gift, Farage bought a £1.4m property in cash. He did not declare the gift to parliamentary authorities. The Parliamentary Standards investigation, FCA referral and multiple other inquiries are now running simultaneously.
The Johnson relationship
The Nerve documents reveal a pattern of contact between Johnson and Harborne stretching back to late 2022 – shortly after Johnson resigned as prime minister and began earning large sums from speaking engagements. Two events in Singapore in November and December 2022 included two dinners with Harborne two weeks apart. In between those dinners, Harborne gave Johnson a personal gift of £1m – recorded as “£1,000,000 to The Office of Boris Johnson Ltd” in the Register of Members’ Interests, making it the one disclosed payment in this relationship.
The January 2023 Ukraine trip was different. The leaked schedule shows Johnson flying to Rzeszów in Poland on Harborne’s jet, transferring to the overnight sleeper train to Kyiv – the document notes he travelled “with CH” – meeting President Zelensky for a bilateral with full honours, and flying back on the same jet. None of this was declared. A week later, Johnson travelled to the US to lobby the Biden administration on Ukraine, and the documents show he briefed Harborne on the Ukraine trip beforehand and gave him a “Ukraine readout” while in New York.
Harborne accompanied Johnson to Ukraine again in September 2023 – a trip that has previously been reported by the Guardian. By that point Johnson had resigned as an MP and was no longer bound by parliamentary disclosure rules.
The national security dimension
Labour MP Clive Lewis, a former infantry officer who served in Afghanistan, told the Nerve the relationship between Harborne, both politicians and defence contractors must now be investigated as a matter of national security. “There’s a rat here and it stinks,” he said. “Johnson needs to be questioned and so does Christopher Harborne. 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.”
Lewis added: “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.”
The concern is specific: Harborne had a direct financial interest in QinetiQ’s performance through his shareholding. QinetiQ won significant MoD contracts during Johnson’s premiership and continued to do so after it. Johnson, while still an MP, then flew to Ukraine on Harborne’s plane, travelled with him on the train to Kyiv, and gave him a detailed readout of the trip on his return. The question of what Harborne was seeking to gain from the Ukraine visit – and from his investment in QinetiQ – has not been answered.
The Habib allegation
The Nerve investigation also references a claim that has previously surfaced in British politics. Former Reform UK deputy leader Ben Habib has alleged that Harborne paid both Farage and Boris Johnson £1m each in a 2019 general election deal – specifically that Harborne funded a arrangement in which Brexit Party candidates stood down in Conservative-held seats, facilitating Johnson’s 2019 landslide. Habib has filed a defamation claim against Harborne in connection with this allegation. Harborne, through lawyers Schillings, threatened the Nerve with defamation proceedings but did not identify any erroneous information in the evidence supplied to them.
If the Habib allegation is accurate, the £1m declared gift to “The Office of Boris Johnson Ltd” in late 2022 may represent only part of the financial relationship between the two men. Neither Johnson nor Harborne responded to the Nerve’s questions.
The wider picture
The Nerve investigation establishes something that the Farage story alone could not: that Harborne’s relationships with senior British politicians are not limited to one individual or one political party. He gave money to the Brexit Party, then the Conservatives, then Reform UK. He gave £1m personally to Johnson and £5m personally to Farage. He appears to have provided his private jet to both. He accompanied Johnson to Ukraine at a moment when he was a major shareholder in Britain’s leading military technology company and that company was winning contracts related to the same conflict.
The questions this raises – about what Harborne is seeking from British politics, whether his relationships with politicians constitute impermissible donations or corrupt arrangements, and what the QinetiQ connection means for the integrity of UK defence procurement – go well beyond the parliamentary standards questions that are already under investigation in the Farage case. Clive Lewis’s call for a national security investigation is the appropriate response to a set of facts that, taken together, are considerably more alarming than each individual element suggests.
4 responses to “Harborne, Johnson, QinetiQ and Ukraine: the national security questions that go beyond Farage”
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I have a memory from early 1990s that what is now Qinetiq used to be UK MOD’s own research agency. Its locations were such as RSE Farnborough, Boscombe Down etc
It was privatised to its own executives for sum bearing no relation to the value it acquired overnight. I don’t recall the process being open to the market.-
You are correct: it was the Non-Nuclear Research Establishments: RARDE (Fort Halstead and Chertsey), RAE (Farnborough and Pyestock), RSRE (Malvern, Defford, Funtington and Pershore), A&AEE (Boscombe Down and Bedford), ARE (Portsdown West) and CDE Porton Down, along with various testing ranges at West Freugh, Pendine and Shoeburyness what were merged into the Defence Research Agency as part of the ‘Next Steps’ Agency programme – a cunning Treasury Plan to cut Defence expenditure and Civil Service headcount.
Eventually, DRA underwent reorganisation to beconme the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency. The intention was to privatise the whole lot. This scheme ran into the buffers when the Americans found out and created merry Hell, threatening to withdraw ALL Defence R & D cooperation.
Eventually, a workaround was hatched where all the work that was considered too important to be made public was kept within a new Organisation,Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, which finally ended up being based at Porton Down.
What was left, particularly the Intellectual Property for little things such as Liquid Crystals, was transferred to a new organisation, QinetiQ, based in Farnborough.
It was this that was flogged off to Carlyle Group and made the top staff extremely wealthy
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Harborne is the owner of Reform. Johnson a former ’employee’ and Farage is still an ’employee’. In terms of security, Harborne has funded almost 70% of all Reform’s income (including Farage £5 million ‘wage’). It would appear that he is paying politicians for financial return.
No one is looking at how Harborne originally made his money in the late 90’s/early 00’s, there is a theme of how it has been done, that then was carried on with the Crypto Ponzi scheme, then “washing the money” via Quinteq and IFX (literally a currency exchange). Each time a Harborne investment is pulled, the business goes bust. How this hasn’t all been uncovered is beyond crazy. -
Johnson is corrupt as fuck, it’s been hiding in clear sight for years. Also investigate his Russia connections. M
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