ANDREW PIERCE: The billionaire with a hotline to Musk who says he’ll increase sufficient cash for Reform to make Farage Prime Minister

At a discreet lunch in the swish French restaurant Saint Jacques in London‘s St James’s, the billionaire property developer Nick Candy‘s mobile telephone buzzed repeatedly with incoming messages.

Candy was in demand as the fine Pomerol from Bordeaux flowed in a private room at the restaurant, where the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage was holding court with an assortment of potential donors to the party. 

Hours earlier it had been announced that Candy was defecting from the Tories to become treasurer of Reform.

One message on the telephone made Candy smile in particular. It was from Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a key adviser to President-elect Donald Trump. 

He had read about Candy jumping ship to Reform after 15 years in the Conservative Party and, as Candy told me later: ‘He wanted to know how and when he could give financial support to Reform. He’s an admirer of Nigel and the work he’s doing.’

Candy may not be as rich as Musk, but he isn’t short of a bob or two. He started his property empire with the purchase of a one-bedroom flat in West London, which he bought aged 22 with a £6,000 loan from his grandmother, and is now, at 51, said to be a billionaire.

His defection is a serious blow to the Conservatives and their new leader Kemi Badenoch. Not just because he’s given more than £300,000 to the Tories, but because he has an open line to some of the wealthiest businessmen in the country. 

He is telling anyone and everyone that more of them are planning to switch to Reform.

Robin Birley, the owner of the exclusive 5 Hertford Street private members’ club in Belgravia, has quietly given Reform £50,000. 

It’s another psychological hit to the Tories as his club has, for the past decade, been the after-hours epicentre of successive leaders of the Tory Party, from Boris Johnson to Liz Truss. Birley’s half-brother Lord (‘Zac’) Goldsmith is a Tory grandee.

Politicians and commentators are moving over too. Last month, former Tory MP Dame Andrea Jenkyns defected to Reform and will stand on the party’s ticket in the Greater Lincolnshire mayoral election. Suella Braverman, a former Home Secretary who ran for the Tory leadership in 2019, is rumoured to be next. Her husband Rael joined Reform this week.

Tim Montgomerie, the high-profile founder of ConservativeHome, the news and analysis website, and a former adviser to Boris Johnson, defected last month after 33 years as a Conservative Party member.

But Candy’s switch is a far more serious breakthrough for Reform in terms of its ability to boost the party’s coffers, although it has been a long time in coming.

Candy has rubbed shoulders with Farage for years. It was the Reform leader who introduced him to Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, several years ago. He was also a guest at the party in London to celebrate Farage coming third in ITV’s I’m A Celebrity . . . in December 2023.

Candy’s wife Holly Valance, an actress and singer who sprang to fame in TV soap Neighbours and with whom he has two children, is a vocal supporter of Farage. She too met Trump with Farage at Mar-a-Lago and has since become an increasingly influential figure on Britain’s hard-Right.

In the summer, she hosted a pre-US election fundraising event for Trump, whose eldest son Donald Trump Jr was the star guest, at the Candys’ mansion in Chelsea. The £1.6 million it generated was the largest sum raised outside the US for the President-elect.

As Reform’s new Treasurer, Candy has his work cut out. At the end of last year, the party was in debt to the tune of £1.1 million. Some of the money owed was in the form of loans from wealthy supporters such as the businessman Richard Tice, who is now one of the party’s five MPs. Tice was Leader of Reform until Farage’s surprise last-minute announcement that he was going to stand in the July 4 General Election and was taking over the party leadership.

The £1.1 million debt will be cleared by the end of the year, pledges Candy. Much of the money he raises after that will be used to try to ‘professionalise’ the party and create a better candidate-selection process – Farage has admitted that Reform was badly damaged at the last election by candidates who were, in his words, at best ‘loopy’ and at worst ‘extremely racist’.

To prevent a repetition of this at the next election, the party will introduce a more exhaustive vetting procedure. It has also set a target of opening a branch in all of Britain’s 650 constituencies and plans to invest in state-of-the-art IT equipment to link the new constituency branches to the party HQ as communication currently is almost non-existent.

The party is hiring regional organisers to co-ordinate campaigning. They will not come cheap. Candy will also appoint a team of deputy treasurers to beef up the fundraising effort.

‘I will raise the biggest amount that has ever been generated for a British political party,’ Candy boasted this week. When I asked him how much, he said it would be north of £40 million.

‘I’ve had millions of pounds of pledges from people who have never donated to a political party in this country. But it’s not just about billionaires and millionaires. We need the people that have got £1, £5, £10, £25 to be a member of Reform.’

With membership rising above 100,000, Reform may need a new HQ as well – an upgrade from the rented three-bedroom flat in Catherine Place, Westminster, in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament, that currently serves as its offices.

It is beginning to feel as if Reform UK could get its act together to become a highly professional outfit – and if it succeeds in doing so, it could be catastrophic for the Conservatives.

Yet the Tory treasurers don’t appear unduly worried. One told me the other night: ‘Nick Candy talks a great talk. Let’s see if he can actually deliver on what he promises.’ A Tory donor told me much the same: ‘The test of Nick is what he actually raises, not what he says he can raise. After all, he was never in the big league of Tory donors.’

The likes of Lord Bamford, the owner of JCB which has an annual turnover of more than £6.5 billion, are expected to continue supporting the Tories under its new leader Kemi Badenoch. He’s given millions in the past.

Lord Spencer, dubbed the most successful treasurer in Conservative Party history after he raised tens of millions from 2006 to 2010, has been seen at recent Tory fundraising events. A billionaire, he made his fortune from founding the financial, energy and commodities markets broker ICAP.

One senior Tory source said: ‘Most of the party’s big supporters want to give Kemi a fighting chance. It’s still very early days. She’s been the leader for only a matter of weeks and has to be given time to make her mark. Money is starting to come in.’

A critical juncture for both Reform and the Tories will be next May’s local elections. It will be the first big test for Badenoch since the General Election, in which the Tories sank to their worst ever defeat.

The five seats Reform won at the election all came from the Tories. Reform came second in 98 seats, 89 of which were won by Labour. Farage is confident that if the Tories fare badly and Reform make gains there will be more defections by Tory MPs.

‘Every 100 years or so there is a major sea-change in politics. We could now be on the cusp of it,’ said one senior Reform figure. ‘The polls show that voters don’t like Labour or the Tories.’

Even if Candy does bring in £40 million, there is one issue which he may not be able to resolve. While polls consistently show that Farage is the most popular party leader, his leadership style is not universally loved within Reform itself. A senior party source told me: ‘Nigel is not a team player. He never has been. The leadership strategy is clear. You either fit in with what Nigel is doing or you can push off. So far, it’s proving successful.’

But there are strains within the party’s group of five MPs, not least between Farage and Rupert Lowe, the Reform member for Great Yarmouth, who is a successful businessman in his own right and is often irritated that decisions are handed down from on high. ‘It’s fair to say there are tensions there,’ said the source. ‘But Rupert gets that the party is doing well in the polls because of Nigel, not him.’

The party also has to reform its constitution – it is currently registered as a private company at Companies House and Farage is the major shareholder. A team of lawyers is working with the Electoral Commission to turn it into a conventional political party, but the process is time-consuming and expensive.

Candy’s property empire stretches from the Cotswolds to Beverly Hills and he sold his penthouse at One Hyde Park in London’s Knightsbridge for £175 million in a deal that gave it the tag of the most expensive piece of real estate in the world.

Given that he is used to handling stratospheric sums of money, he sees little difficulty in dealing with existing donors.

They include financier Jeremy Hosking, who has donated £2.6 million to Reform since 2019, and the businessman Chris Harborne, who has given around £10 million to Reform and its predecessor, the Brexit Party.

Harborne, who made his fortune in aviation fuel, is a major shareholder in QinetiQ, the multinational defence technology company, with a £150 million investment.

He gave £1 million to former Tory leader Boris Johnson after he stood down as prime minister. The donation in November 2022 was made to Boris’s private office.

Candy is also a big fan of Boris and believes he was ‘badly treated’ by the Tory MPs who ousted him from Downing Street. One Reform source told me: ‘If Boris was still leader I think Nick Candy would still be in the Tory Party.’

Only time will tell us if the Conservatives will rue the day he left for Reform.