Farage has repeatedly been criticised for spending minimal time in Clacton, Essex, where he was elected as an MP in July 2024
Nigel Farage pocketed £27,800 after flying to the US last week to address an anti-climate think tank with close ties to Donald Trump. He had also hoped to meet the president at his Mar-a-Lago complex in Florida, hoping to lobby the Trump administration in the week when the US president’s relations with Keir Starmer hit rock bottom over the Iran war.
The meeting didn’t take place, but he still picked up a monster pay day. Since his election, Farage has received almost £1.4m in payments from outside interests. The Reform UK leader spoke at Club for Growth, a conservative anti-tax lobby group based in Washington DC. that has vowed “to work closely with President Trump and his team in advance of the 2026 mid-term elections”. Farage’s latest transatlantic speaking trip, published in the register of financial interests took place a week ago. He addressed a powerful American group that helped raise £120 million for Republican candidates in the 2024 election.
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The Club for Growth’s president told Fox News in November that as the country looks toward the mid-terms, his group “is very aligned with President Trump, and we’re especially in these contested races, we’re going to help him win”.
Farage has repeatedly been criticised for spending minimal time in Clacton, Essex, where he was elected as an MP in July 2024. He mentioned his constituency in parliament four times during his first year in the role. “Farage’s world tour goes on and on,” said Charlene Pink, campaigns manager at the legal advocacy group the Good Law Project. If you really want to represent Clacton, shouldn’t you actually spend some time there?”
Welsh Lib-Dem leader Jane Dodds used her conference last week to speak out against Reform’s toxic cocktail of ‘hate and division’. “He’s over there right now, trashing our country and flattering the orange ego,” she said. “Peace is not secured by one country acting alone. The only path to lasting security is diplomacy, international law and cooperation between nations.” The former Brexit Party leader has consistently faced criticism for his lucrative trips abroad, often to give speeches to right-wing groups close to Trump. Since his election, Farage had made at least seven trips to cheerlead for Trump or attend events associated with the President, paid for by wealthy donors.
They exceed Farage’s base MP salary of £93,000. He also receives £4,000 a-month for his column with the Daily Telegraph, and more than £300,000 a year as a presenter at GB News. In January this year, Farage blamed his failure to declare £380,000 of income from TV and speeches on “severe growing pains” since becoming an MP as he admitted: “I don’t do computers”.
He breached Commons rules 17 times by failing to register payments within the required 28-day deadline. Farage told the parliamentary commissioner for standards, Daniel Greenberg, that he relied on others to register outside earnings as he was not “computer literate.” The late declared payments totalled £384,064.75 and included £17,173 from Cameo, an app through which fans can pay well-known figures for personal video messages. There were several payments from GB News, where Farage hosts a programme, and income from X. Other payments came from Google and Imperial Independent Media, a US consulting firm.
Despite the number and value of the interests, Greenberg concluded that the breaches were “inadvertent” and chose not to refer the case to the committee on standards. According to the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, Farage is the MP with the highest level of outside earnings. Since the general election, analysis of the register shows he has brought in £1.39 million in ad hoc payments on top of his MP’s salary.
He received £626,818.20 in 15 payments linked to his role as a presenter for GB News, and declared £415,500 from three payments as a brand ambassador for Direct Bullion, a gold and silver dealer. He also received £180,336.86 in 11 payments from Cameo.
He received smaller payments linked to social networks and speaking work: £18,268.16 in 24 payments from X, £18,812.22 in 14 payments from Google and £2,794.81 in three payments from Meta. Farage was followed by Rishi Sunak, Sir Geoffrey Cox, Sir Oliver Dowden and Sir Jeremy Hunt among the top earners. Farage accepted responsibility for the 17 breaches of the parliamentary rules and apologised. “I accept that I have breached this section of the code and take full responsibility, and I would first of all like to say I am sincerely sorry,” he wrote.
He said the late declarations “fall short of what you expect and indeed what I expect from public figures.” He said: “Unlike most members, I have a very complicated and complex set of interests, including my work as a TV presenter and as a successful private businessman, most of which were built long before I was elected as a member of parliament.
“Please let me reassure you, there was no malicious intent to deceive or mislead you or the public in the lateness of these declarations; it was an honest and genuine error.” Farage said he did not claim expenses as an MP and was confident his register of interests was up to date. He said he had been “very upset” to discover how late some of the registrations were, adding: “We are overwhelmed in every sense. Even my MP email gets 1,000 emails a day. And we’ve basically failed to cope with, or to be frank, not just with this, but with many other things too.” A Labour spokesman said: “Nigel Farage is so distracted with tempting failed Tory politicians into his party that he can’t even get the basics right. He boasts about making money ‘because I’m Nigel Farage’, raking in millions through various outside jobs.
“But he neglects the important work that hard-pressed taxpayers fund. Labour will tighten the rules on MPs’ second jobs to make sure the public get the attention they expect and deserve from their representatives.” Reform UK has been approached for a comment.
A spokesman for Nigel Farage said: “Nigel Farage is an active Member of Parliament for Clacton and is currently in the constituency as this article goes to print. He makes regular personal donations to charities and good causes, writes a weekly column for the local newspaper and is the only MP to have ever held a business surgery in the constituency. “As the leader of a political party leading in the last 240 national opinion polls, he has also voted more times in the House of Commons than Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch put together since July 2024. Every MRP poll since the last general election has predicted that Reform UK’s majority in Clacton will increase at the next election. Local voters will be the judge of Nigel’s record when the time comes — not Daily Mirror reporters with an axe to grind.”