As £72m in donations makes its way to Reform UK’s bank accounts, consider what Nigel Farage said on the eve of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union a decade ago. “This referendum is the people versus the establishment,” he declared. “It is the vested interest, it’s the rich, it’s the big business.”

Just two years ago, Farage assailed “an unholy alliance of big business, big banks and big government”. He is also the same man who, when he debated with the then Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, in 2014, claimed to “represent the mercantile, trading, entrepreneurial end of society”, while his opponent “represents big banks, big government and big business”.

To be clear, Farage’s political outfit is being bankrolled by two cryptobillionaires. One of them is Ben Delo, who once developed high-frequency trading systems for JP Morgan. That investment bank was a particular bete noire of Farage: when it backed the Remain campaign, he savaged “the unholy alliance of big banks and big politics”. The other is the Thailand-based cryptobillionaire Christopher Harborne, who gave Farage his pre-election £5m gift and provided two-thirds of Reform’s funding – until now, that is.

Neither of them is the plucky small merchant evoked by Farage’s rhetoric. The man who denounced banks buying political influence is now dependent on two wealthy figures from the world of finance. Predictably, Reform says its benefactors want “nothing” in return for their colossal donations. Yet the two businessmen who have just coughed up the biggest donations in British political history will surely be delighted with Reform’s plans to slash taxes on crypto assets and set up a “bitcoin........

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