The property tycoon Nick Candy, interviewed in yesterday’s Sunday Times, appears to be hoping to position himself as a UK equivalent of Elon Musk – a billionaire political kingmaker for Nigel Farage just as Musk was for Donald Trump. Newly anointed as the treasurer of Reform UK, he has pledged a ‘seven-figure’ sum to the party and hopes to raise between £25 million and £40 million before the next general election. Candy indicates that he’s angling for an invitation stateside in the hopes of picking up some tips from Musk as to how he did what Candy calls ‘an incredible job for president-elect Trump [which] sort of changed the political spectrum in America’.
Tips might not be all he’s hoping to pick up. Valuable though Elon’s insight into the ground-game in Pennsylvania might be to the struggle in Bromley and Biggin Hill, the real boost to Reform UK’s fortunes is more likely to come from Elon’s wallet than from his brain. He has let it be known that he’s considering a $100 million (£78 million) donation to Reform, and Mr Candy indicates that such a thing would be very welcome. He makes a point of saying that, of course, this should all be ‘within the rules and regulations’ – but emphasises that Musk would be ‘legally allowed to donate through his companies that are registered in the UK… whether that’s Tesla or whether that’s X’.
That’s just the game. Money talks. Shaking things up for the little people is a laugh
Now, obviously people like me are going to disapprove of this; people who detest Musk’s politics and detest Reform UK’s politics won’t want to see the latter getting the former’s money. That’s priced in. But shouldn’t any principled person who supports Reform UK’s politics also object just as strongly?
Reform UK, after all, sees itself as the proud standard-bearer for British sovereign independence. How is that to be reconciled with showing its petticoats to a foreign billionaire who openly wants to interfere in our politics?
This is the political party whose leader practically burst a gasket when, ahead of the Brexit vote, the then US president Barack Obama made some mild and wholly accurate factual remarks warning that Britain wouldn’t be at the front of the queue for a trade deal with the US. Farage squawked at the time that President Obama’s intervention was ‘shameful’ and that he’d ‘behaved disgracefully’.
How can you regard a US president talking frankly about policy at a press conference as unforgivable meddling in our affairs by a foreign power, and at the same time think it’s tickety-boo for a private citizen of the US to use a legal loophole to shower a UK party with the sort of funding that could change its place in the political landscape?
In common with Musk – a one-time Democrat who relatively recently converted to full-bore Maga – Candy is something of a political gadfly. He voted for Blair in 1997, donated to David Cameron and Boris Johnson, and is now throwing his lot in with Reform. His social life is all over the place. As well as being ‘close’ to Nigel Farage – the kids call him ‘Uncle Nigel’, apparently – he considers Tony Blair ‘a personal friend’ and he’s ‘close’ (that word again) to Peter Mandelson. He also boasts of a ‘close friendship’ with Boris and Carrie Johnson.
What are the qualities Mr Candy has that attract intimate affection from so diverse a cast of characters? Is it his charm, wit and political acumen, his loyalty, his gift for empathy and ability to lend a sympathetic ear to others in their times of crisis? Or is it, rather, his honking great piles of cash and ability to throw nice parties and invite the people to whom he is ‘close’ on megayacht holidays? We can only speculate. In any case, these close friendships seem to be quite immune to Mr Candy’s political changes of direction. Indeed, he says he phoned his two former prime minister pals – one Labour, one Tory – just before announcing that his loyalties now lay with Mr Farage.
Those loyalties. To go by the flannel he offered the Sunday Times, Candy is now fired up with a patriotic desire to make Britain great again. He says – and you may find a tear welling in your eye – ‘I want to be able to give something back.’ Not give something back by putting his shoulder to the wheel of democratic politics: ‘I don’t want to be in the House of Lords. I don’t want to be in government.’ Why would he? By the next election, he says, ‘I might not be here. There’s a 50/50 chance I won’t be.’
Where will he be if he’s not here? He talks about his ‘big four places’ as being Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. He says of them that ‘I cherish the values we grew up with here in the West. But today you are more likely to find the values we grew up with in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.’
Dubai and Abu Dhabi are in a Muslim-majority state with Sharia law effectively incorporated into their legal systems. Given that Reform UK’s main selling point seems to be the idea that they are the only people standing between us and the UK becoming a place just like that, it’s quite the circle to square. And perhaps there are elements of Reform who’d like to see homosexuality outlawed, women treated as second-class citizens and migrant workers in a state of semi-slavery, but none of those ‘values’ were obtained in the UK when Mr Candy was growing up here. As for Saudi Arabia, that’s a place where the ‘free speech’ Mr Farage is always whanging on about is defended by chopping up journalists with bonesaws.
But it doesn’t really matter that this is incoherent and hypocritical, that here’s a member of the global elite soliciting another member of the global elite for cash to fund the proud British insurgency against global elites. That’s just the game. Money talks. Shaking things up for the little people is a laugh. Why bother, this interview seems to suggest, pretending otherwise?
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