Reform UK Competitions Conundrum

13 Apr Reform UK Competitions Conundrum

Winners are long-term Farage fans

Reform UK and Nigel Farage are no strangers to a stunt or two. In November 2025, they launched a range of Black Shirts to great fanfare, at the knock-down price of £350 … each. What wasn’t apparent until you came to hand over your precious credit card details, was that £1 of the total was for a mandatory entry into a vague lottery, in which you could win a Nigel Farage adjacent lunch at a very unspecific time in the future. There was no opt out clause so, in essence, forced gambling.

A freedom of information request to Westminster City Council, that returned a few weeks ago, informed me that Reform UK never declared the winners or the good cause that is necessary in order to run a Small Societies lottery. So far, so dubious.

Let’s jump forward to March 17th of this year; Nigel Farage announced the latest in a long line of publicity gambits with a competition called, Nigel Cut My Bills and an accompanying website that, at the time, caused a bit of a stir among the data privacy community. The competition entry form asked for some curious details once you’d given them your particulars; phone number and email most importantly.

Stage two of the entry form presented you with some questions about how you voted in the latest round of elections and in which box you’d place your X in the forthcoming local council contests.

At the time, a spokesperson for the Information Commissioner’s Office said:

“All political parties collecting personal information, including information for political campaigning, need to comply with data protection law.

People who are concerned about how their information is being used by any political party can raise those concerns with the party, and if they remain dissatisfied can make a complaint to the ICO. We’re in regular contact with political parties about how they use people’s data.”

As an aside, I tried some data validation tests on the entry form’s boxes — it failed across the board. I was able to submit entries to the competition using completely fabricated email addresses and phone numbers, by entering addresses and contact details from countries in Europe and further afield. I tried with four real email addresses of mine as well, there wasn’t even a confirmation of entry, let alone a validation link to confirm you were real.

As an ex-web designer, it was a seriously lax and shonky piece of coding, but on reflection, it doesn’t matter if your only goal is data collection.

The competition closed in the last couple of weeks with not much more of a mention until last night, Thursday. All publicity battle stations were stood up, and Nigel Farage and Robert Jenrick appeared, with a giant cheque, at the door of a bewildered couple somewhere in the north — something of a cross between Ed McMahon and Jeremy Beadle.

A minor feeding frenzy occurred when the Reform UK Wigan branch posted that the competition had been won by two ‘staunch Reform UK supporters’, Ray and June.

This led me down a mini-rabbit hole of Reform posts on Facebook this morning, but one that paid off in investigative terms. After trawling through hundreds of comments and posts, I finally found a reply from the official Facebook page of Reform Wigan that led me, via Google Maps, to the winner’s house in an upmarket corner of Wigan.

On posting to 𝕏 about the winners and revealing that they were a mere street or two away from Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, I was contacted by a friend on 𝕏, 💛Yorkshire lass💛 [@linfitlass], with a photo of a couple sitting just in front of Nigel Farage at some sort of rally. She asked me if it was the same couple that were pictured in the Farage publicity shots — it was.

This was quite a shock and another trawl ensued, this time using reverse image searching, where I came across several images of Ray and June Dibble at a rally in Fylde, Lancashire. These dated way back to May 2019 and showed the couple attending a rally of the then Brexit Party, alongside Farage, Anne Widdecombe and David Bull.

Before we go on, I am in regular contact with an 𝕏 account, Reform Party UK Exposed 🇬🇧 [@reformexposed] and we regularly post in conjunction with each other when we find interesting titbits and revelations about Reform UK. I dropped them a message about my findings and within an hour, they came back to me with another incredible coincidence regarding this Wigan-centric story.

Raymond and June Dibble are the very same couple that nominated Lee Moffitt as branch chair of Reform UK — Wigan.

So you see, there appears to be coincidence stacked on coincidence around this story. If you look at the video posted by Nigel Farage last night, the camera pans around at a point and the man in frame is … Lee Moffitt.

One more coincidence to add to the stack concerns the giant cheque presented by Reform UK’s Shadow Chancellor [sic], Robert Jenrick; it was written up with a very specific figure — £1,758 to be precise. In the Ts & Cs of the competition, in which Reform went to great lengths to point out that it was definitely not a lottery [this time], the prize offered was up to £3,500, to cover energy bills for the household, or the exact amount of the previous twelve months … to be provided by the winner. The amazement and wonder shown on the doorstep, by June, was very convincing, but was it genuine?

So there you have it, either this ranks alongside the Kennedy/Lincoln coincidences or something is awry. I’ll leave it up to you, to make up your own mind but, spoiler alert: it stinks.

I submitted a request for comment to Reform UK but, as is always the case, nothing has been forthcoming.

This article has also been published by Byline Times today. Link here.

If you have made it to this point, well done — this has been a long old slog. Thank you for reading, I sincerely appreciate it.

I don’t get paid for this stuff, so I have a couple of ways you can help out and support my work and research if you value my honesty and work. Firstly, you can subscribe to my Substack here:

Free or paid is spectacular and you’ll never miss an article. Or you can hit me up on Ko-fi for a donation or tip to help me with my research and keep me writing.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions or if you think you may have a story. I’m here on 𝕏 @donmcgowan or you can drop me an email, donmcgowan@pm.me or contact me in confidence on Signal. Thank you so much for reading.