Laurence Fox’s Reclaim party received almost as much money in donations as the Liberal Democrats in the first quarter of 2021, all of it coming from a Brexit-supporting investment manager. The actor, activist and lockdown sceptic, who finished sixth in last month’s London mayoral elections, received £1,153,300 in donations, the Electoral Commission said, just below the Lib Dems’ £1,278,073. The figures also show the Conservatives received £510,000 in its biggest single donation from a businessman to whom Boris Johnson awarded a peerage after rejecting advice from the House of Lords appointments commission. The donation came from Peter Cruddas, a regular Tory donor who was made a peer in December despite the commission’s advice. Cruddas resigned as a Conservative co-treasurer in 2012 after the Sunday Times claimed he was offering access to the prime minister for donations to the party of up to £250,000. A year later Cruddas won £180,000 in damages in a libel action, although that was subsequently reduced to £50,000 after aspects of the original allegations were upheld when the paper appealed. The Electoral Commission statistics show that all of Fox’s donations came from Jeremy Hosking, making him the biggest single political donor for the quarter. Hosking is a multimillionaire fund manager, Brexit supporter and steam train enthusiast. He was known to be a supporter of Fox, with some earlier reports claiming he had bankrolled the actor’s party with up to £5m in funding. When he launched the party in September last year, Fox claimed he had £5m in donations. Prompted by an appearance on BBC One’s Question Time in which he railed against accusations of racism in the treatment by the media of the Duchess of Sussex, Fox reinvented himself as a critic of “woke” culture, initially via Twitter.
At one point Fox criticised the portrayal of a Sikh soldier in the first world war film 1917, but apologised after others pointed out the contribution of about 130,000 Sikhs in the British army during the war. He described Reclaim as seeking to take back British values from politicians, who he said had “lost touch with the people”. In the London mayoral race, despite considerable media coverage, Fox took just under 48,000 first-choice votes, working out at about £25 in donations for every vote secured. The Electoral Commission statistics show the Conservatives were by far the biggest recipients of donations, totalling just under £6.5m over the quarter. Labour secured £2.44m, with the Unison union the leading contributor. Reform UK, the renamed Brexit party, now without its former leader Nigel Farage, attracted just under £122,000 in donations. It did not stand in the London mayoral election, and in local elections across England on the same day it won only two council seats. Last month the final Electoral Commission statistics for the 2019 general election showed the Liberal Democrats spent more than Labour – £14.4m against £12m. The Lib Dems received large sums from remain-minded donors keen to boost their anti-Brexit campaigns. • This article was amended on 4 June 2021. An earlier version referred to “mayoral elections” (plural) in the context of Reform UK not fielding a candidate. It has been made singular to avoid any possible ambiguity with regard to the concurrent London Assembly elections in which the party did stand.