Nigel Farage has said footage that appears to show senior Reform figures discussing how to hide donations from foreign sources “looks damaging” for the party.
The Reform leader is fighting to contain fresh scandal claims after an undercover sting overshadowed his annual party conference in Birmingham.
He told BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that the comments of James Orr and Dan Jukes were “injudicious at best”.
The situation looks bad, as does the sale of peerages and government contracts for donations. We are not the first people to be involved in a row over donations,” he said.
In an earlier extract from the interview released on Saturday, he also said he “frankly wasn’t listening” during the conversation between his former chief of staff and an undercover journalist which featured in the Channel 4 broadcast and he expected “many more investigations” into Reform over the coming months.
In the footage, Mr Farage was present when it was suggested that a US donor give £500,000 to Reform through his UK-based son – a proposal that could breach electoral law. The political donation was ultimately never made.
Metropolitan Police have confirmed they are considering complaints from Labour and the Lib Dems.
Mr Farage is already facing intense scrutiny over donations that Reform has received, as well as the £5 million that a wealthy backer gave him.
The party’s Treasury spokesman Robert Jenrick also said on Sunday he had seen legal advice that the party did not break the law but that “lessons would be learnt”.
He told Sky News, “We’re going to investigate exactly what happened. It’s appropriate to have due process. But this is not the way that Reform conducts itself. Like any political party, we seek to abide by the law at all times, and we believe we have done so in this case. In fact, I’ve reviewed the legal advice from the KC who’s advised the party in the last 48 hours, and it shows that, yeah, we did.”
But do we want to be the best we can be? Yes, absolutely. And no doubt we will learn lessons from this experience. But we do have a strong compliance department and in fact we turn away donations all the time from impermissible people.”
The footage was part of an investigation by undercover group Verbatim, who posed as an American donor and his son, who had paid for polling allegedly commissioned by Reform and were seeking to channel money to the party.
Accepting donations from a foreign company, including in-kind donations such as polling, could constitute a criminal offence.
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