Reform Billionaires vs. Starmer

30 Apr Reform Billionaires vs. Starmer

A data deep dive

With the latest revelation breaking yesterday about Nigel Farage being ‘gifted’ an additional £5m by Christopher Harborne, I thought I’d run some numbers.

I’ve not dropped a Don’s Data Deep Dive in a while so I thought I’d compare Reform UK’s three top controversial billionaire donors with some of Keir Starmer’s supposed scandals.

Let’s see how they stack up.

I chose a date range from 31st August 2024 until today. Roughly the length of time Starmer has been working as PM. 608 days. 20 months.

There are three very specific billionaire donors to Reform UK with, let’s say, chequered histories: Christopher Harborne, James Delo and Sasan Ghandehari.

Harborne is a crypto wealthy, military investor that who lives in Thailand under his Thai name, Chakrit Sakunkrit. He is the largest shareholder in QinetiQ, the defence technology company that is intertwined throughout the UK armed forces. His donations to date are just under £28 million.

James Delo is another crypto billionaire that has told the Telegraph that he is returning from Hong Kong specifically to donate millions to Nigel Farage. He pleaded guilty to, and was convicted for, wilfully failing to implement money-laundering controls at his cryptocurrency exchange, but was pardoned by Donald Trump. His donations to date are £4 million.

Ghandehari is an Iranian billionaire who donated to Reform via a company called Interior Architecture Landscape Limited. Whilst his donations are modest compared with the others, he paid for Farage to attend Davos this year.

That being said, let’s take a look at the data.

You’d imagine that the UK’s largest ever political donor who lives in Thailand under a pseudonym, would attract some headlines and articles over the last 20 months or so but, in reality, he’s only been mentioned 14 times and most of that happened over the last few days with the news of his latest £5m ‘gift’ for Nigel Farage’s security.

You can see from my spreadsheet that I chose the usual media outlets and a small selection of journos that have been getting a lot of stick for their perceived anti-Starmer/Labour position. I then listed the three Reform donors, a selection of Labour/Starmer scandals, followed by some pressing issues across the country.

The main takeaway from this entire deep dive is that our media collectively lost its mind over the Peter Mandelson story, with 1,639 posts, predominantly within the last two months. I’m not sure I remember a political topic that completely overtook the news cycle as much as this; and still, it rumbles on.

Even mentions of Jeffrey Epstein himself fall way short of Mandelson in the posts I counted. He was mentioned 1,257 times in comparison. The thing to bear in mind with that number is that there is a huge overlap with the Mandelson remarks, as they were often spoken about in the same post. So that’s not a unique mentions figure, certainly over half included the Prince of Darkness as well.

You can see in the pie chart who discussed Mandelson the most in my reporting period. It interests me that only GB News and Sky News posted about him more than Dan Hodges. Perhaps there’s something in his perceived bias against Starmer and the Labour Party?

The second point of note is that Reform’s controversial billionaires are being allowed to fly under the radar. 18 mentions between them in 608 days. Like most Reform UK business, it is rarely touched by our mainstream media — Farage appears to be their Kryptonite. There’s a collective effort to underreport the bad things attached to Reform UK. Some might say a conspiracy is afoot, but I’ll let you make up your own mind.

I added the term ‘drill baby drill’ as a slightly tongue-in-cheek search term, but when it was mentioned more than twice as many times as the Reform trio, it rang some bells.

Christopher Harborne has handed Nigel Farage almost £28,000,000 in the last few years. Twenty-eight million pounds. More than any single political donor in history but Lord Alli who bought Starmer some clothes and glasses is covered 197 times to Harborne’s 14. Surely, now we can all admit that there is something sinister going on? Surely.

Stack Harborne up against Sue Gray — 366 or even Lord Hermer — 337, and the underreporting is just plain wrong.

When we look at the two most pressing issues in our country, the cost of living and online safety, they are reported about as much as Sue Gray. Private Schools are right up there though as well, although almost half of the posts about that stem from the Telegraph.

Our entire media ecosystem is tilted toward Reform UK, and it isn’t just GB News and Talk TV any longer — Sky, LBC, Daily Mail, Guido; they’re all at it. Nigel Farage is being slowly shoehorned into No. 10, riding on a crest of only positive media reporting. Almost every negative story is quashed or shoved behind the sofa within minutes.

Zia Yusuf is on Question Time again this evening [Thurs. 30th April], making him the most booked guest since Keir Starmer took office in 2024. He’s not even an MP; an unelected millionaire bureaucrat and nothing more. Tell me that isn’t media bias from the BBC.

Right, last bit, I promise.

When I do these data analysis pieces, it often occurs to me that GB News are out there alone with the sheer volume of posts on 𝕏 … so I decided to pick a random 24-hour period last week, to see how many times they posted.

I used the same dataset as above for continuity’s sake.

I was shocked to discover that GB News posted 239 times in that 24-hour period, but even more shocked to discover that the Daily Mail posted 275 times. That’s around ten an hour, every hour, at GB News and almost twelve an hour at the Mail. They must have quite the social media teams. Sky News falls in third place with a measly 115 — five an hour.

This speaks volumes to the objective of GB News’s owner, Paul Marshall. He is content to haemorrhage money in this project of his, in order to achieve his desired outcome — a Reform UK government. And while the polls don’t support that outcome yet, we still have another three years of this incessant propaganda to ingest.

Who knows where this may take us.

But for now, know that our media is very much behind the Farage machine, and I have the numbers to prove it. For what it’s worth.

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.

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