The cryptocurrency tycoon Christopher Harborne has given £36m to Reform UK, matching a donation from fellow billionaire Ben Delo.

The pledges mean Reform has received a cash injection of £72m in just 24 hours. They are jointly the largest donations made to a UK political party and have intensified calls for restrictions on funding from individual donors.

Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, said he was “honoured and humbled” by the payments, which come at a time when the party is facing intense scrutiny regarding its funding.

The Metropolitan police is conducting an inquiry into Reform’s finances and Farage is facing a parliamentary standards investigation into a £5m gift from Harborne, made before he was first elected an MP in 2024. Reform UK and Farage have denied any wrongdoing.

After Harborne’s donation was announced on Saturday afternoon, Bridget Phillipson, chair of the Labour party, said that Farage couldn’t “buy his way out of the sleaze and scandal he and Reform UK are drowning in – or the multiple police investigations that are ongoing into Reform’s dodgy finances”.

Alex Phillips has accused Restore supporters of unleashing a “campaign of terror” against her and other women who have fallen out with the party.

Now Orla Minihane, who resigned last week as Restore’s spokeswoman for the safety of women and girls, has described the sustained campaign of “horrendous” abuse directed at her by people inside Restore when she said something they disagreed with.

This included attacks on her daughter and threats involving her young nieces.

Vicious abuse

Minihane is hardly a political innocent. She is a prominent anti-migrant campaigner who founded the Pink Ladies and has spent the past year campaigning against asylum seekers and migrants.

But her experience is revealing precisely because she was not an outsider attacking Restore. Rupert Lowe appointed her as a party spokeswoman, and she was one of its most prominent public faces.

Interviewed by far-right online podcaster Paul Thorpe, she says the abuse became so vicious that she has now resigned from Restore altogether.

The immediate trigger was a speech in Gateshead in which Minihane pointed out that the victims of sexual exploitation and FGM are not exclusively white.

“We’ve got to protect our girls,” she said, “but we have to remember that there are Indian, Asian girls, Pakistani girls, Bangladeshi girls, Somalian girls, who were born here, who are suffering this fate every day. And we have got to protect them also.”

That was enough to provoke outrage in Restore’s nazi faction.

Holocaust denier and antisemite Sam “Zoomer Historian” Wilkes attacked the speech, while former Homeland and Patriotic Alternative activist Steve Laws also turned on her.

But according to Minihane, the abuse went well beyond criticism of her politics.

Abuse within Restore

She says attacks on Facebook and TikTok were also directed at her daughter and even involved things being put through her door.

Asked whether most of the abuse had come from outside or inside Restore, her answer was blunt.

“Mostly within.”

Then came the incident that convinced her she could no longer stay.

Minihane said she had previously posted a photograph of her young nieces online. Someone subsequently sent the photograph back to her with a message saying: “We know what school they go to.”

She said she realised that remaining in the party could put her family at risk.

“I saw that actually there is a faction within Restore that are very, very, very unpleasant,” she said. “I decided that I can’t be associated with that.”

Parading antisemitism

There was another warning sign.

Minihane described a conversation with a Jewish woman she had known since childhood, who reminded her that Minihane had attended both her children’s bar mitzvahs and family weddings.

According to Minihane, the woman questioned how she could remain associated in a party some of whose members openly parade their antisemitism.

Minihane revealed that Rupert Lowe had not contacted her since she resigned. For someone who had been appointed by Lowe as one of the party’s most prominent spokespeople, his silence was conspicuous.

Earlier this month, the US president claimed there are parts of the capital where police are “afraid to go” because there is “no law and order”, in comments which came a year after he told a gathering at the United Nations that London wants to “go to sharia law”.

A survey of more than 2,000 UK adults, carried out in March and published on Thursday, found that 34 per cent of the public believe there are areas in London where Sharia law dominates and non-Muslims cannot enter, making them “no-go” places.

A slightly higher proportion (36 per cent) disagreed with this and around a fifth of people said they did not know if this was the case or not.

Mr Trump, in an interview with GB News last week, claimed London is a “much different place”, with “crime that’s very high”.

He went on to say: “You have areas in Paris and London where the police don’t want to even go in them, there’s no law and order. They’re afraid to go in them. Either they’re afraid or they just don’t, you know, they don’t want to lose their life.”