Reform UK Energy Prize Winners Had Nominated Party’s Own Branch Chair

Reform UK and Nigel Farage are no strangers to a stunt or two. In November 2025, they launched a range of Black Shirts to great fanfare, at the knock-down price of £350 … each.

What wasn’t apparent until you came to hand over your precious credit card details was that £1 of the total was for a mandatory entry into a vague lottery, in which you could win a Nigel Farage adjacent lunch at a very unspecific time in the future. There was no opt-out clause, so, in essence, it enforced gambling.

A freedom of information request to Westminster City Council, which returned a few weeks ago, stated that Reform UK never declared the winners or the good cause that is necessary in order to run a Small Societies lottery. So far, so dubious.

Moving forward to 17 March of this year, Nigel Farage announced the latest in a long line of publicity gambits with a competition called ‘Nigel Cut My Bills’ and an accompanying website that, at the time, caused a bit of a stir among the data privacy community. The competition entry form asked for some curious details once you’d given them your particulars, phone number and, most importantly, email.

Stage two of the entry form presented you with some questions about how you voted in the latest round of elections and in which box you’d place your X in the forthcoming local council contests.

At the time, a spokesperson for the Information Commissioner’s Office said:

“All political parties collecting personal information, including information for political campaigning, need to comply with data protection law. People who are concerned about how their information is being used by any political party can raise those concerns with the party, and if they remain dissatisfied, can make a complaint to the ICO. We’re in regular contact with political parties about how they use people’s data.”

As an aside, after several data validation tests on the website entry form’s boxes, it completely failed across the board. Entries were able to be submitted to the competition using completely fabricated email addresses and phone numbers, by entering addresses and contact details from countries in Europe and further afield. Despite attempts with four real email addresses, there wasn’t even a confirmation of entry, let alone a validation link to confirm the user was real.

From a web design perspective, it was a seriously lax and shonky piece of coding, but on reflection, it matters very little, if your only goal is data collection.

The competition closed in the last couple of weeks, with not much more of a mention until Thursday evening. All publicity battle stations were stood up, and Nigel Farage and Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Robert Jenrick appeared, with a giant cheque, at the door of a bewildered couple somewhere in the north – something of a cross between Ed McMahon and Jeremy Beadle.

A minor feeding frenzy occurred when the Reform UK Wigan branch posted that the competition had been won by two “staunch Wigan Branch Members”, Ray and June.

After trawling through hundreds of comments and posts, a reply from the official Facebook page of Reform Wigan led, via Google Maps, to the winner’s house in an upmarket corner of Wigan.

X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, took over at this stage with comments and posts regarding the house, revealing that the winners were a mere street or two away from Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Lisa Nandy. A photo surfaced of a couple sitting just in front of Nigel Farage at some sort of rally, and questions began to fly. Was this Ray and June? It was.

After significant amounts of online sleuthing and reverse image searching, several images of Ray and June Dibble at a rally in Fylde, Lancashire, were found. These dated back to May 2019 and showed the couple attending a rally of the then Brexit Party, alongside Farage, Ann Widdecombe and David Bull.

There is an account known as Reform Party UK Exposed that goes to great lengths to expose Reform UK’s underhand dealings, and their contribution to this effort should not go unnoticed. They began a side project once the winners’ names and location had been revealed and dropped another bombshell piece of the puzzle into this Wigan-centric story.

Raymond and June Dibble are the very same couple who nominated Lee Moffitt to become the Wigan branch chair of Reform UK.

There appears to be coincidence stacked on coincidence around this story. If you look at the video posted by Nigel Farage during the publicity shots, the camera pans around at a point, and the man in frame is … Lee Moffitt.

One more coincidence to add to the stack concerns the giant cheque presented by Jenrick; it was written up with a very specific figure – £1,758 to be precise.

In the terms and conditions of the competition – which Reform UK’s Wigan branch had taken to calling ‘Nigel Pay My Bills’, and in which Reform went to great lengths to point out that it was definitely not a lottery – the prize offered was up to £3,500, to cover energy bills for the household, or the exact amount of the previous 12 months … to be provided by the winner.

The amazement and wonder shown on the doorstep by June was very convincing, but was it genuine?

In journalistic terms, either this ranks alongside the Kennedy/Lincoln coincidences, or something is seriously awry in the setup of the story. Greater Manchester Police are now reviewing a complaint about the competition.

A request for comment has been submitted to Reform UK, but so far, nothing has been forthcoming.