For Trump, Musk and Farage, the message is the same: voters don’t want to be hijacked by billionaires | Rafael Behr

Résumé détaillé

A lesson from the US midterms is that electorates are repelled by the arrogant mega-rich buying democracy. This is a fight Labour can afford to pick For most people, $224m (£168m)…

A lesson from the US midterms is that electorates are repelled by the arrogant mega-rich buying democracy. This is a fight Labour can afford to pick

For most people, $224m (£168m) is a lot of money, especially if you spend it and get nothing in return. But Elon Musk is richer than most people. In fact, there is no one richer.

As the wealthiest of the US’s tech oligarchs Musk could afford to blow huge sums on a failed bid to prop up Republican candidates in Texas, his adoptive home state, in last week’s midterm congressional elections. He is reported to have spent a further $250m failing to engineer results in other races.

His riches plausibly swung voters the other way in Texas. James Talarico, who last week became the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in the state since 1988, made defiance of Musk’s meddling a rallying cry in his campaign.

In political campaigns, as in other forms of marketing, it isn’t always easy to know what kind of spending moves the dial or how far. But donors wouldn’t donate if they thought the result was beyond their powers of procurement. In the US, that market is out of control and the sums involved are bonkers.

British politics is cheap by comparison. According to the Electoral Commission, the total combined expenditure of all parties and campaign organisations in the year running up to the last general election was £94.5m. A shot at becoming mayor of a mid-sized US city might cost twice as much.

That is significant context for the kind of money Reform UK and its leader have taken from just two individuals, dipping into fortunes earned in the cryptocurrency trade. A verdict will soon be delivered by the parliamentary standards commissioner in the case of a £5m gift that Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based billionaire, bestowed on Nigel Farage shortly before he ran for parliament in 2024, and that he did not register once elected. Farage denies any wrongdoing.

Harborne gave Reform UK another £9m in 2025 and then £36m earlier this year.

Farage…

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