Nigel Farage’s Reform party has attracted a new cadre of big donors including £500,000 from Fiona Cottrell, the mother of his high-profile, unpaid aide George Cottrell. Fiona Cottrell gave the sum in two tranches shortly before the general election, making her one of the biggest donors to the party’s campaign coffers, along with Richard Tice, the party’s former leader, who gave £500,000. In the months before the election, Reform also received £200,000 from the businessman Zia Yusuf, who became the party’s new chair last year. He is the co-founder of a concierge firm, Velocity Black. Jeremy Hosking, who has bankrolled Laurence Fox’s Reclaim party, donated £125,000 to Reform in June. Fiona Cottrell, an aristocratic former girlfriend of the king in the 1970s, appears to be a first-time political donor.
George Cottrell was regularly at Farage’s side during the election campaign, including when he had a milkshake thrown at him in Clacton. A former head of fundraising for Ukip, Cottrell spent eight months in an American jail in 2016/2017 after being accused of offering money-laundering services on the dark web. He served time for a single count of wire fraud after 20 other charges were dropped as part of a plea deal. The crime was committed in 2014, before he worked for either the anti-EU party or Farage. More recently, he has been living in Montenegro and told Tatler in a profile interview this month that he had lost $53m in a single night a casino, following reports that he had lost $20m. He also told the magazine that he collects art by Canaletto, Van Gogh, and Picasso as well as owning a Banksy, saying: “It’s a picture of three monkeys, each with a sign reading, ‘Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge.’ Banksy will hate that I own it.” Cottrell, whose lawyers have previously told the Guardian that his wealth comes from a portfolio of investments and not family money, has never donated to the Reform party. However, the MPs’ register of interests shows that he paid for Farage’s £9,250 trip to the National Conservatism conference in Brussels in April. In an interview with the Times in 2017, Fiona Cottrell said reports that her son was wealthy enough to have a £250m trust fund were “ridiculous, absolute rubbish”. Reform has been contacted for comment.