Donald Trump’s embattled ally in the U.K. announced he’s stepping down as an elected official less than 24 hours after the president posted a message of support.
Nigel Farage, the 62-year-old leader of the populist right-wing Reform UK party, says he is, bizarrely, resigning as a British member of parliament to run in a fresh race for his own seat—a move that will apparently allow him “to stick two fingers up to the entire establishment.”
Farage has faced mounting outcry over a slew of scandals concerning alleged personal donations from high-net-worth individuals and, in one case, a convicted criminal. Trump, 80, had on Monday thrown his weight behind the controversial politician.
In a Truth Social post, Trump shared a link to an article on the pro-MAGA National Pulse website with the headline: “They’re Running the 2024 Anti-Trump Playbook on Nigel Farage.”
Trump had previously called Farage to congratulate him personally after his opponent, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, announced his own resignation last month, as the Times of London reported.
The Reform UK leader, who has proven hostile to press questions about the payments, struck a defiant tone during a speech broadcast by his party on Tuesday that journalists were conspicuously barred from attending.
“Let me be absolutely clear,” he said. “I have done nothing wrong. I have not broken the law in any way at all.”
Farage’s resignation, under British electoral law, now triggers a new race or “by-election” for his seat in Clacton-on-Sea, southeast England, which he won by an 18-point margin in 2024—and which he clearly expects to now win again, given polls have for months placed his party ahead of any other in the U.K.
Trump and Farage have run in tandem for close to a decade. Farage was the first foreign politician through the door at Trump Tower after the president’s 2016 win. A photo of the pair beaming inside a gold-plated elevator immediately went viral.
He has since warmed up Trump rallies, flown stateside after the 2024 attempt on Trump’s life in Pennsylvania, and sat down with the president at his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland. Trump, meanwhile, branded Farage, a vehement opponent of the European Union, as “the man behind Brexit”—a reference to the 2016 referendum that saw the U.K. leave the European bloc, for which Farage had lobbied for years.
At home, Farage’s Reform UK party is the hard-right, anti-immigration party upending British politics. It holds just eight of the 650 seats in the House of Commons in Westminster. Its mammoth lead in national polls and surge in May’s local elections are nevertheless credited with helping to push Starmer out the door—and many commentators have tipped Farage’s party as likely victors at the next national elections.
His finances tell a darker story. Farage is already under investigation by the U.K. parliament’s standards commissioner over a $6.6 million gift from British businessman Christopher Harborne, who is based in Thailand. A heavier blow landed over the weekend after The Sunday Times revealed that Farage had also accepted financing from 32-year-old political operative George Cottrell.
Cottrell is no run-of-the-mill fixer. Federal agents arrested him in 2016 at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport as he was traveling home with Farage after a trip to the U.S. Prosecutors stacked 21 counts against him, spanning money laundering, extortion, and blackmail. He copped to a single count of wire fraud, admitting he’d posed as a launderer to fleece dark-web crooks, and served an eight-month term in U.S. prison.
He has since co-written a how-to guide, “How to Launder Money,” and, as the Sunday Times reported, is now petitioning Trump to pardon his earlier conviction. Farage has meanwhile used Cottrell’s money to pay for bodyguards, drivers, and social media staff, the newspaper found.
Cottrell has further handed Farage the run of a five-story mansion he rented close to Buckingham Palace, home to the U.K. royal family. Farage has publicly disclosed only a single benefit from Cottrell—roughly $12,000, for a conference trip to Belgium. The paper also reported that Cottrell’s mother donated just over $675,000, to Reform UK last year.
Farage, who says Cottrell is “like a son” to him, denies any breach of the law or parliamentary ethics regulations. He has dismissed the probe as an “establishment hit job.”
The Daily Beast has contacted Reform UK, and the White House, for comment on this story.
