A firm run by Cllr Paul Mackings, who now leads the council, donated £111,000 to Reform UK on 23 February this year. Mackings appears to have been selected as a Reform candidate in early April.

Mackings’ Reform-donating company, Paul Mackings Consulting Limited (PMC), has advised on planning for the £95 million South Tyneside College relocation since 2021. The project is championed by – and has planning applications overseen by – South Tyneside Council.

The council has been run by Reform UK since May this year. At the time PMC's involvement began, the council was under Labour control.

But the main building contractor for the project is also named as a cash donor to Reform UK. Electoral Commission records show South Tyneside-based The Castle Building Services Organisation Ltd donated £36,000 to Reform UK on 30 January 2026.

However, in an unusual turn, the construction firm has denied it has ever donated to the party, when contacted by Byline Times.

The relocation project is a partnership between Tyne Coast College and South Tyneside Council, and is also funded by the North East Combined Authority and Department for Education. The council says it is a “key strategic partner” to the College and “continues to work closely with them on the development of the relocation given its significance to the regeneration of South Shields Town Centre.”

Potential Conflicts

Mackings is listed on his register of interests as PMC’s director, owner and major shareholder. He has not listed any contract between the college and PMC, though the register only required councillors to disclose contracts made directly with the council, rather than its partners or funding-recipients.

The council says PMC's “contract has ended”, though it did not give a date, and Cllr Mackings did not respond to a request for comment.

However, the revelations mean the leader of the council that co-funds the ongoing £95 million South Tyneside College relocation has a consultancy that has been advising that project since 2021, while the project’s main contractor and now-leader’s own consultancy both donated to the party that would go on to win control of the local authority just a few months later.

Asked about potential conflicts of interest over the now-council leader’s role advising a major building project involving the council, a spokesperson for the authority told Byline Times: “Cllr Mackings did declare an interest at a Cabinet Meeting of South Tyneside Council which took place on 27th May 2026, and he removed himself from the discussions and vote on an item of business which related to the College.

“That was an entirely appropriate step for him to take, given the involvement which PMC Ltd had in the College relocation project.”

Asked about the main contractor on the project, The Castle Building Services Organisation Ltd, and Cllr Mackings each making donations to Reform UK in early 2026, the council spokesperson added: “A company making a donation to a political organisation would not directly come into conflict with Cllr Mackings’ personal or municipal responsibilities as Leader of STC, either generally or with regard to the College relocation. On this occasion, the donation was made prior to Mr Mackings becoming a councillor.”

The council representative said: “There is not and has never been a contract between Cllr Mackings or PMC Limited and South Tyneside Council.”

Castle Comeback

Byline Times asked contractor Castle if they were aware, at the time of the donation, of Cllr Paul Mackings' connection both to Reform UK and, through his consultancy, to the college project. The firm’s response was surprising.

A spokesperson said: “We have not made any donations to any political party. We purchased some tables at a reform event that we were interested in attending in February 2026 to listen to reforms [sic] outline plans for political planning and objectives.

“The event was well attended by many local individuals and businesses alike. We have also attended other political party conferences in the past as we see this an opportunity to listen [to] political leaders’ views.”

However, the Electoral Commission record shows that the company gave £36,000 to Reform UK in February, which was not recorded as sponsorship or a commercial transaction.

A spokesperson for the Electoral Commission told this outlet: "Admission charges for conferences, meetings or other events are excluded from the definition of sponsorship but may be regarded as another type of donation.  

"The party is required to calculate the difference between the running cost of an event and the price the ticket is sold for. If this amount is £500 or over from a single source, the difference is treated as a donation.

"The same permissibility and reporting requirements apply to donations received this way as with other donations. Electoral law applies to donations of above £500, and the reporting threshold for when donations need to be declared is £11,180. Donations received from ticket purchases are reported as monetary donations."

The EC spokesperson added: "We advise parties that they should be transparent with all potential donors that the donation amount and donor information will be checked if above the £500 threshold and will be reported to the Electoral Commission if above the reporting threshold."

Donation records are provided by parties themselves to the Electoral Commission, suggesting either it was misreported by Reform UK, or Castle's account of the payment is incomplete.

Section 366 of the Companies Act 2006 required a shareholder resolution in advance for political donations over £5,000, and s.379 requires disclosure in the directors' report. A company insisting it never donated almost certainly passed no resolution, though the Companies House records which would cover this period are not due yet.

The council was asked whether it has any policy on donations by parties connected to council projects, but did not answer.

Castle Building Services added they were “not aware of Cllr Paul Mackings intentions to run as an elected council member” – or his potentially privileged position over the project – when they gave the cash to Reform.

A spokesperson for the building company said: “We have supported many local council led events such as Mayor’s charity dinners (Labour led), South Tyneside Awards dinners (Labour led) and we’ve been members of the South Tyneside Pledge for many years (Labour led). We were awarded the contract for this project under a Labour led council.”

Reform UK was contacted for comment.

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The case revolves around an incident at the Republicans Overseas gala dinner at Windsor Guildhall on 16 September 2025, during Donald Trump's state visit, after which Thames Valley Police charged co-organiser André Walker, 47, of Hatch Lane, Windsor, on 25 February with assault by beating.

Walker has presented dozens of shows on Talk since then and the channel’s owner – the Murdoch-owned News UK – has failed to respond to requests for comment.

The alleged assault was against Fossil Free London activist and medical doctor Dr Kush Naker.

Judgment has been withheld until 13 August, with Mr Walker released on unconditional bail. Byline Times was the first to cover the incident and the trial.

Addressing the court, Ms Chung for the prosecution noted Mr Walker has published YouTube videos commenting on the case and suggesting he would bring a private prosecution against the police officer involved: "The defendant has published various forms of media content. Specifically videos on his YouTube channel, discussing the case, discussing the officer of the case, the investigations". Mr Walker interrupted to claim: "That's not true".

In one video shown in court, Mr Walker says: "Thames Valley Police did not like the fact that I defended the state visit of President Donald Trump against a terrorist attack and are doing me for assault.”

Mr Walker has claimed in videos that one of Trump's lawyers flew over to help pick his legal team, selecting Daniel Burke – apparently "paid by Elon Musk" – to work for Tommy Robinson's cases – and Sir Robert Buckland KBE KC, the former Lord Chancellor and Conservative Justice Secretary, funded by donations to his "Patriot Fund": "We've spent it hiring...the right honourable Sir Robert Buckland KBE KC".

Mr Walker's defence noted the incident was initially treated as a public order case – the suggestion being police were called to deal with the protestors. That characterisation was disputed by the prosecution, Dr Naker and a Guildhall witness. The assault allegation followed a fresh complaint on 20 September 2025.

Dr Naker's Evidence

Dr Naker, a climate campaigner and NHS doctor, gave evidence first. Tickets to the dinner, which Mr Walker helped organise, were sold publicly. He and Fossil Free London's Robin Wells bought tickets, and during the dinner, walked to the front of the room, where Ms Wells gave a speech on the climate crisis. Dr Naker joined her, holding a banner reading "Oily Money Kills" and chanting. Asked whether there was any intention of escalating into violence, he said "No".

Dr Naker, who did not know who Mr Walker was at the time, told the court: "[André] Walker came up and grabbed me by the arm, and I fell to the ground...They dragged me out of the room, through the lobby area, and across into a second room, then closed the door behind them".

In that room, he said, "I was on the ground...André Walker ended up being on top of me, essentially kneeling over me...He started trying to punch me and strangle me". He grabbed Mr Walker's wrists: "He was trying to apply force...trying to strangle as well as punch...I was trying to resist him". Mr Walker also tried to "knee me in the groin", he said. Mr Walker denies all of it.

The struggle lasted a minute to a minute and a half, according to Dr Naker; a witness put it closer to five. Mr Walker then told him: "I'm almost 50, what are you doing?" Dr Naker left via an external staircase with minor injuries: "The left side of my jaw was sore...I had some blood on my shirt." Mr Walker contacted Fossil Free London straight afterwards asking for someone to come on his Talk show, and was rebuffed.

Prosecuting lawyer Ms Chung played footage of Mr Walker dragging Dr Naker out of the dining hall. In video recorded afterwards, Dr Naker tells Mr Walker "You tried your f*cking best to kick me in the balls", with Mr Walker responding "I'm nearly 50...I'm exhausted...I'm nearly 50 for goodness sake". Dr Naker said he expected security to ask him to leave, not to be "dragged out and assaulted".

Sir Robert Buckland KC disputed that his client had targeted Dr Naker because of his race (Dr Naker is Asian), as had been suggested shortly after the incident. Mr Walker has claimed in videos the protest was a "terrorist attack".

Sir Robert suggested Dr Naker fell to the ground and made himself heavy to be harder to remove, which Dr Naker rejected. He said Dr Naker had used "subterfuge" and "deception" to get in, and accused him of being a "professional protestor". Dr Naker replied: "It's not my job."

Related reading: News UK Keeps André Walker on Air Despite Talk Presenter’s Assault Trial Over Trump Dinner Clash

The former justice secretary claimed Mr Walker was trying to stop Dr Naker returning to the dining hall. Dr Naker responded: "He got on top of me...I wasn't at that point getting up", adding: "If he was trying to get me out of the venue, he could have led me to the exit...He dragged me into another room."

On the struggle, Dr Naker said: "Every time that he tried to punch me or kick me, after a few seconds I relaxed...He then tried to punch and kick me again." Sir Robert replied: "That's wrong, isn't it?". Dr Naker said: "I was there." Put to him directly – "You are saying that Mr Walker dragged you into another room to assault you?" – Dr Naker said yes. Sir Robert: "That's not true is it."

Sir Robert suggested Mr Walker was pinning him down to stop him damaging artwork, and that protestors disrupt such events because they value human lives above art. Dr Naker replied: "Yes I do believe that human lives are more important than artwork."

Sir Robert said Dr Naker had taken a long time to report the incident as assault – the doctor replied that it was "four days" – and had done so because he enjoyed the coverage. He also suggested Dr Naker was pursuing the case because "You see [Mr Walker's] media appearances...and he's someone you actively don't like". Dr Naker disagreed.

Wells and the Guildhall Witness

Ms Wells said she stood up and began a speech. Attendees initially thought she was pro-Trump, before she began saying the US President's climate policies would kill millions. Of Dr Naker being dragged along the ground: "I felt concerned for him as he was clearly being held in a position which hurt him". She was escorted out standing, to a nearer exit.

Footage exists because press were present to interview Republicans during the state visit. A journalist later sent Ms Wells some video, now used as evidence. The court also saw Mr Walker's posts afterwards, including a pinned one: "My speech at the #Trump dinner last night in #Windsor. I did this after I threw the terrorists out!"

In a direct message on X to Fossil Free London after the incident, he wrote: "I dragged your guy out of the Windsor Dinner. I really think you ought to come on my show and make his point properly. Can you contact me about this."

Mr Walker also called the Fossil Free London press number the next day, Ms Wells said. The climate activist replied: "I think assaulting us is not a great invitation to your show – we're not interested." On getting in: "They didn't even ask us for our tickets". The phone call was short, Ms Wells said, as Mr Walker was shouting, something his defence disputed.

A witness working at the Guildhall described the dragging as "violent": "I saw Kush on the floor and André on top of him...André had his knees on [Naker's] body...He had his fist held in the air...He was shouting…[Mr Walker] said 'I f*cking hate you, why are you doing this to me now?'"

Related reading: TalkTV Presenter Accused of Assault After Dragging Climate Protester From UK Trump Dinner

She said she "went into shock", and that Mr Walker was "moving his fist" towards Naker's face: "André managed to pin him down again, [his arm] was getting really close to his neck."

"It was frightening...I said let him out of the fire escape and out of the building...[Mr Walker] just kept shouting." She fetched four nearby officers, Windsor being full of police during the state visit. Afterwards, she claimed, Mr Walker "joked about it [and] said it would be good for publicity."

Sir Robert suggested she had called police over the protest rather than over Mr Walker. But she said she called them over the "altercation", and had not even heard the protest. Told she had asked Dr Naker to leave or she would call police, she replied: "No, all my comments were directed at Walker".

In one video shown to the court, Mr Walker tells his audience: "I had to have a fight with some of the protestors". Another shows him re-enacting the removal into a separate room, adding, smiling: "There was no cameras at one point". Elsewhere: "When the cameras came in, I had to throw him out through this door", and "These lefties...are bad people".

Walker's Evidence and Closing Arguments

Asked whether he had any previous convictions or "anything reported against you", Mr Walker said "No". Sir Robert noted "There wasn't much security if any". Mr Walker said: "It never crossed my mind we'd have to bring in security", and that he had "two glasses of champagne…but it was a work night". The protestors "looked like the kind of mob" who protested inside News UK, he said, citing Just Stop Oil paint attacks.

Mr Walker claimed Dr Naker "flopped himself on the floor" rather than being pulled down. Sir Robert put to him: "It took two of you to drag Dr Naker out...you dragged him into the Mayor's Parlour" – the room in which, in a video, Mr Walker gave a thumbs-up while noting there was no CCTV. The second man was "a man called Jack...from an organisation called Turning Point UK".

Mr Walker denied trying to punch Dr Naker in the face, putting his hands "on or near" the activist's neck, or trying to knee him in the groin. He claimed Guildhall staff asked Dr Naker if he would leave or if they needed to call police, which the witness denied.

Related reading: Tommy Robinson’s Temple: The Christian Conference Uniting Preachers from the Far-Right Fringe

Raising his voice, he said: "I was extremely concerned they were about to start attacking valuable artwork", adding "I wasn't able to analyse precisely how dangerous they would be." The prosecution noted the room he dragged Dr Naker into was itself full of artwork. On pinning him down: "I was frustrated...he was still shouting in my face", and "It was very clear my motivation was to protect the artwork in the building". The prosecution pointed to a video in which he admitted he was "angry".

At one point Judge DJ Pankhania told Mr Walker to answer the questions, asking: "Do you want some water? Do you need a moment?"

Of his social media output under question, Mr Walker claimed he engages in "bravado" and "crass jokes", and: "I just say whatever comes into my head at the time." He denied dragging Dr Naker to a side room in order to assault him. Three character references were submitted, one from someone in Ukraine whom Mr Walker apparently helped: "He is not a horrendous thug...Walker has a great sense of duty and is a hero to us."

Prosecutor Ms Chung said Mr Walker's use of force was "unreasonable and therefore unlawful", noting he dragged Dr Naker past an exit into a room with no cameras, closed the door, and there "kneeled on Dr Naker" and "attempted to punch him and knee him".

If his motivation was protecting artwork, she asked, why drag him into another room full of artwork? She pointed to his description of protestors as "bad people" and his admission that he was "angry", and noted the Guildhall witness was "frightened" of Mr Walker and called police because of him.

For the defence, Sir Robert said the lack of security was "naïve", but that "The defendant genuinely believed the use of force...was reasonable", asking: "Was the force used in proportion to the threat?...It can be mistaken as long as it was genuinely held."

He accepted some of Mr Walker's monologues were "crass" and "make him appear foolish", but argued they were irrelevant. The judge questioned why dragging Dr Naker out of the dining room could not legally be construed as assault.

On the absence of CCTV in the side-room, the Mayor's Parlour, Sir Robert said it did not undermine Mr Walker's account, and that "The absence of physical injury is support for the case he did not use disproportionate force". His client "admits having very close physical contact with this man...Yes, it's suggested he was angry", but Mr Walker's defence claimed it did not meet the threshold for assault.

He described Mr Walker as "He's an unfit, late-40s man, suddenly faced with a situation he feared would be out of control", who "did what he thought was necessary...for a legitimate purpose". Mr Walker "swears a bit, he huffs and puffs...and gets emotional", but this "doesn't amount to someone who's capable of disproportionate use of force". There was, he concluded, more than enough evidence for reasonable doubt.

The judge said he had not decided on Mr Walker's guilt or otherwise, and would not give judgment that day. Judgment is scheduled for a hearing on 13 August.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

Cottrell is a convicted fraudster, who has personally funded Nigel Farage’s travel, security and staff costs. His mother’s donations to Reform UK are now under criminal investigation. It has also been confirmed that he transferred £2 million to Fiona Cottrell days before her donations to Reform UK.

Artemon is the corporate service provider that administers Cottrell’s Montenegro company, registered as Private Family Office. But it simultaneously administers companies owned by Mileta Ojdanić, who appears to have used bank accounts being scrutined for links to Russian money.

Montenegro’s High Court confirmed an indictment against Ojdanić in 2024: prosecutors accuse him of organising a criminal network that trafficked some 4.3 tonnes of cocaine from South America into Europe and laundered around €7 million. A bank used by his company, Adriatic Bank, has separately been swept up in Montenegrin police and regulatory scrutiny over Russian-linked money.

Private Family Office’s own accounts show an accumulated deficit that grew from roughly €79,000 in 2020 to €465,638 in 2025, on near-zero revenue and a single employee, kept afloat by more than €400,000 in loans from unidentifiable sources, first reported by Byline Times. Cottrell’s lawyers have said only that the loans and the company’s lack of revenue are unsurprising, since it was established for “administrative functions.”

Byline Times previously revealed that Cottrell entered the corporate finance world under a false Swiss identity, hired by the same City network that later produced Reform UK’s own treasurer, Mehrtash A’zami. Byline Times has since confirmed that this identity was stolen from a real person - Cottrell’s old school friend - and that the senior accountant who had hired Cottrell years later under that false identity had no way of knowing about the past friend.

The second traced how the accountancy network tied to both Cottrell and former Reform UK treasurer Mehrtash A'zami has a Moscow partner tied to sanctioned Russian oligarchs. It also revealed that Artemon, and a sister Tivat firm, Vegaplus, serve clients that include a Belgrade arms dealer marketing Russian-designed weapons, and individuals linked to Russian state enterprises.

Artemon is the registered corporate contact for two of Ojdanić’s companies, Ruža Co and his gambling firm, Džoker – pointing to the company’s corporate administration of both.

On 22 September 2021, a government filing seen by Byline Times confirms that Artemon became a joint investor in Ruža Co, whose ownership is split 51% to Mileta Ojdanić and 49% to Milica Ojdanić.

The joint-investor role was confirmed again a year later. Artemon is also the corporate service provider for Ojdanic’s gambling company Džoker, a betting venue and lounge in Kotor, Montenegro.

Related reading: ‘Posh George’, Two Passports, and a Fraudulent Identity: Convicted Fraudster and Nigel Farage Funder’s Connections to Reform UK’s Murky Financial Structures

Montenegrins call it the “police cartel” because prosecutors allege serving and former officers supplied the network with information and protection, and name Ojdanić as one of its organisers. 

Court documents and Montenegrin press reporting describe it as part of the Kavač clan, one of the country’s two largest organised-crime networks.

Messages that the Montenegrin outlet Vijesti attributes to Ojdanić, sent over the Sky ECC encrypted network – a messaging platform used by organised crime groups until European police cracked its encryption in 2021 – show him discussing million-dollar sums moved into Montenegro and unexplained “tokens”, one of which he valued at $1 million. It’s unclear whether “tokens” referred to cryptocurrency. 

In July 2026, prosecutors opened a fresh money-laundering investigation into Ojdanić over an alleged further €1 million.

The Kavač clan, named for a district near Kotor, split from a single Montenegrin cocaine-trafficking organisation in 2014 after roughly 200kg of the drug went missing from a stash house in Spain. 

The resulting war with the rival faction, the Škaljari clan, has killed more than 70 people across Europe and South America. Montenegro’s own 2021 organised-crime threat assessment names Kavač and Škaljari as the country’s two most powerful criminal groups, running cocaine from Ecuador into Europe through ports including Rotterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg. 

The network in which Ojdanić is charged - 21 people, including serving and former police officers, accused of smuggling some 4.3 tonnes of cocaine and laundering around €7 million - was built on evidence Europol supplied from intercepted Sky ECC messages.

Two of Ruža Co’s four bank accounts sit at Adriatic Bank, ultimately owned by Alex Shnaider, a Russian-Canadian businessman, through a Delaware company, Adriatic Capital LLC. In December 2024, Montenegro’s Special Police Department seized part of the bank’s documentation while examining clients with prior business ties to Russia. Montenegro’s Central Bank has also ordered Adriatic Bank to pay €3.6 million over anti-money-laundering failings – a decision the bank is contesting.

Related reading: How George Cottrell’s Reform UK Network in Montenegro Is Tied to Sanctioned Russian Oligarchs

Payments by Fiona Cottrell, George Cottrell’s mother, to Reform UK and Britain Means Business - Reform deputy leader Richard Tice’s private fundraising vehicle - are now the subject of criminal investigations by the Metropolitan Police and the National Crime Agency, which has been unable to trace the money’s ultimate source and is now seeking help from a foreign partner.

Montenegro’s small accountancy sector has repeatedly featured in the country’s largest money-laundering cases, because firms administering client companies can process transactions without independently verifying where the underlying money originated. That exposure does not require intent: an accountancy can facilitate laundering unwittingly, simply by handling a client’s transactions in good faith without ever establishing the source of the funds behind them.

Nada Babovic, Artemon’s founder, told Byline Times:

“As part of the company incorporation process, it is standard administrative practice for newly established companies to initially use Artemon’s contact details, including our email address and registered business address, in order to ensure the proper receipt of official correspondence and communication with the competent public authorities during the registration process and the initial period of operation. Thereafter, it is the responsibility of each company to update its own contact details in the relevant public registers. The fact that certain contact details may remain recorded in public registers does not constitute evidence that Artemon continues to participate in the management or business activities of that company.

Artemon does not participate in the management of its clients’ businesses, does not make their commercial or investment decisions, and is not involved in their commercial activities. Our role is strictly limited to providing professional services in accordance with the applicable laws and regulations.”

She did not clarify, however, whether Artemon continued to provide services to one the country’s largest indicted cocaine traffickers, nor why the company has joined him as a co-investor in a property development.

The G7’s Financial Action Task Force has found that accountants, lawyers and company-service providers are routinely used to create legal entities, bank accounts and ownership structures - sometimes unwittingly, sometimes knowingly. Their services can obscure beneficial ownership even without the professional’s awareness of any underlying criminality. 

A December 2023 assessment by MONEYVAL, the Council of Europe’s anti-money-laundering evaluation body, found that Montenegro allowed company formation, directorship and accounting services to operate without registration or authorisation, and classified company-service providers as high to medium-high risk for money laundering. Beneficial-ownership checks relied heavily on self-declaration, with weak verification and no effective sanctions for failures - significant given that the beneficial owner, not the company on paper, is the person who actually controls or benefits from an asset.

Montenegro has since improved on 12 of MONEYVAL’s recommendations, in a follow-up report published in January 2026. But transparency of companies and legal arrangements, and supervision of accountants, lawyers and company-service providers, remained rated “partially compliant”. The pattern reflects structural and regulatory weaknesses across the sector.

These are weakness that do not, it appears, to be of any concern to George Cottrell, whose lawyers told Byline Times:

“This is just the latest attempt to connect him, and by association apparently Reform UK, to matters that, on your own account have nothing whatsoever to do with him. There plainly can be no public interest in spuriously connecting our client with accusations apparently made against another person. There is no connection, and none of the matters cited in your email even if true ( our client has no idea if the facts are accurately stated or not) demonstrate ANY connection that would justify reporting it.

As we have said, our client understands Artemon to be one of the largest and most widely-used corporate service providers in Montenegro, and it is therefore entirely unremarkable that Private Family Office should have used Artemon. You say you do not allege wrongdoing by Artemon, so that should be the end of it.”

Analysts assessing the party earlier in November found the Homeland Party had received just £27 worth of crypto donations.

However, Byline Times can reveal it has received at least £1,300 in donations via cryptocurrencies – including to a previously unreported account. There are no allegations of lawbreaking facing the party, but the revelations shine more light on the murky political funding area.

The Homeland Party was founded in 2023 as a splinter group of the neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative. It has been described as the largest fascist organisation in the UK by anti-racism campaigners Hope not Hate. It has around 1,300 members and some parish councillors, according to Times Radio.

There is currently a “moratorium” on donations via cryptocurrencies, with plans to enshrine it in law via the Representation of the People Bill. Reform UK has famously been the recipient of millions in donations from crypto billionaires Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo, both based overseas at the time, though the donations were made using sterling, not (for example) Bitcoin.

However, until recently Reform UK solicited donations in crypto on its website, managed by the then Poland-based finance firm Radom. Donations to the party went into a collective pool managed by the company, and then converted into fiat currency before landing in Reform UK’s accounts. Once donations went into the Radom wallet, it is not clear where it ends up. Reform UK claimed it does not own any cryptocurrency wallets.

Radom has since relocated to the Cook Islands, around the time new financial regulations came into force in the European Union. About 90% of EU crypto firms have failed to get approval under the new EU “Markets in Crypto-Assets” (MiCA) rules.

Now Byline Times has learnt that the far-right Homeland Party had at least two Bitcoin donation addresses, since launching what it described as the UK’s first party crypto-donation scheme in July 2024.

Together they have received eight donations worth roughly £1,300 across their lifetimes. While the sums are small, the handling of them raises several questions for regulators.

The original online crypto wallet for the party took in roughly 40 times more than the wallet on which all previous reporting was based.

Published analysis identified a single donation of about £27. But the party’s first wallet received six donations totalling approximately £1,242.

The two largest donations each landed within a few pounds of £500 — the threshold at which donor permissibility checks are triggered under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act (PPERA), and the ceiling the party itself advertised. They arrived several weeks apart (3 November and 29 November 2024) at very different Bitcoin prices, suggesting the donation amounts were a deliberate move to stay below the threshold (as had been requested by the Homeland Party itself).

If both payments came from the same donor they total roughly £994, which would exceed the limit the party set for itself. It is not possible to work out if they did using public ledger records. The 29 November 2024 payment originated from a (likely institutional) wallet holding nearly 123 BTC, worth roughly £8.8 million at the time.

Four of the eight donations arrived through “pooled” wallet services, meaning the sending address on the blockchain – the public ledger allowing people to track crypto flows – belongs to an exchange and not the donor. For those payments, the party could not have identified the donor from public data.

We can also reveal that the newer wallet was swept clean, to a fresh party-controlled address around May 2026, shortly after the party announced it could no longer handle crypto – and after the late-March moratorium on crypto donations to parties came into effect.

That new wallet has received exactly one payment and has never spent anything, suggesting it was an internal migration between party-controlled wallets.

The original wallet has never been spent from and still holds roughly £1,000. It is possible the party has lost access to it.

There is no allegation any laws have been broken. And the sums are small: the total lifetime crypto income across both wallets is in the order of £1,300. But that is much more than the £27 previously believed to have been held by the party – indeed, any party – in crypto, and only emerged through Byline Times assessing archived webpages from the far-right group to discover an old wallet address.

The Homeland Party has been contacted for comment.

Timeline of Homeland Party's Crypto Journey

Wallet One – Previously Undiscovered

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

At recent protests and rallies, Robinson has been flanked by pastors wearing religious collars, seemingly an attempt to boost his Christian credentials. The Southampton rally over the murder of Henry Nowak saw several fringe Christian figures speak, with the Lord's Prayer increasingly a fixture of such gatherings.

Representatives from progressive Christian organisations from several denominations have spoken out against the two-day religious gathering.

Many of those speaking at the Make Great Britain Christian Again conference have become regular faces at far-right rallies, particularly aligning themselves with Tommy Robinson’s brand of anti-Islam and “anti-woke” politics. Some have amassed large social media followings off the back of it.

Organising the upcoming event is Reverend Brett Murphy, who attended Robinson’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally and runs the X page ‘Make Britain Christian Again’.

Murphy is well known for rhetoric seen as Islamophobic, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-migrant.

He has referred to Pride Month as “an abomination”, and the gay pride flag as the “sodomite flag”, has referred to abortion as “modern day child sacrifice”, spoken about “demographic replacement”, and appeared to refer to Green Party leader Zack Polanski as a “sodomite Jew” in a video falsely accusing the Gorton and Denton by-election of being won because of “vote rigging” by “family voting”.

Like Robinson, his brand of Christian nationalism appears to detest Islam.

In a recent post on X, he described how: “There is now an all out war against our Christian cultural heritage” and that: “The Left and Islam want to rip away our national Christian identity, they want to strip away any mention of Jesus from children in schools, replacing him with diverse teachings on pagan false religions, particularly Islam.”

After being contacted by Byline Times, Murphy posted our questions on Facebook prior to publication in an apparent attempt to get ahead of the story.

He told Byline Times that he hates “all false religions not just Islam, because the Bible says they lead people to the everlasting fire of hell”, adding: “I do not hate Muslims to he [sic] clear, I simply disagree strongly with Islamic theology and ideology.”

After Reform UK launched its ‘Christian Fellowship for Reform’ programme, Murphy seemingly cemented his alignment with the further-right fringe of politics, tweeting that the move was “likely in response to the very clear statements by Ben Habib, Rupert Lowe and Tommy Robinson that Britain must return to Christianity. Nonetheless it is a good thing”.

Murphy reportedly resigned from the Church of England due to its plans to introduce same-sex blessings to places of worship, and was also for a time under investigation for referring to a trans Archdeacon as “a bloke”. He later joined the ‘Free Church of England’ - affiliated with the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (GAFCON), a deeply conservative US Anglican group.

He only lasted 13 months there before being stripped of his licence and the FCE stopping all services at his church. He now frequently derides the Church of England as “heretics”, something he re-iterated in his response to Byline Times.

Despite being de-licenced by the Free Church of England, he continues to preach from his one remaining base, the Emmanuel Church in Morecambe - the home of this particular gathering.

He claimed to Byline Times that he retains a licence with the ‘Confessing Anglican Church’, apparently issued a day after the FCE revoked his licence in what he referred to as a “kangaroo court.”

Other Speakers at the Conference

Another speaker, Bishop Ceirion ‘Cei’ Dewar, like Murphy, considers the Church of England to be heretical, and was also present at Robinson’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march, though this wasn’t his first outing with the far-right agitator and convicted criminal.

At another of Robinson’s events, a year prior in Whitehall, he addressed the crowd, telling them: “This nation of ours is under attack! We are at war! We are at war not just with the Muslim, not just with wokeness!”

Dewar has rejected the idea that he himself is far-right, but did not respond to Byline Times’ request for comment.

Another of the notable speakers at the event is pastor Chris Wickland of the Living Word Church network, who has spoken at anti-migrant protests and at Tommy Robinson rallies, including ‘Unite the Kingdom’, and recently addressed the crowd in Southampton in the wake of the tragic murder of Henry Nowak.

Wickland has claimed at points that preaching the Christian gospel had been made “illegal” in Bournemouth. In Southampton, he framed Islam as a “false god”, called Britain a “Christian nation”, and said that children were “being sacrificed on the altar for political correctness and multiculturalism”.

He has previously rallied against what he refers to as “hyperliberalism” and prophesied that “the agenda of the highly liberal left will collapse and fall” and that “this nation will start to turn back to her God again”. Wickland confirmed to Byline Times that the comments made by him were accurate.

Another speaker, Aaron Edwards, was recently dismissed from his position at the theological education and training institution Cliff College, after posting on X: “Homosexuality is invading the Church.”

Confirming to Byline Times that he identifies as a Christian nationalist, Edwards said that while he did make the above statement, it was “addressed to fellow evangelicals, not to homosexuals per se”, and that he had attempted to clarify that this was not meant as an attack on the gay community.

Standing by its decision, Cliff College released a statement after Edwards’ ousting, which read that “as a Methodist institution, Cliff College is committed to being a safe and hospitable place where those with differing convictions are welcomed and encouraged to live and learn together as faithful disciples of Christ.” The Methodist Conference voted to marry same-sex couples in church in 2021.

Edwards told Byline Times: “I am speaking at the conference because I believe the Church in Britain needs to stand up more courageously to call Britain back to its Christian foundations.”

Others known to be speaking include Bob of Speakers Corner, also known as ‘Bob the Bulldozer’ - affiliated with ‘Soldier of Christ Online’ (SOCO), and Dominic Leo Muir, who on his social media page has written that: “‘Christian nationalism’ has become the weaponised scare label from the secular overlord who wants a toothless church terrified of being viewed as intolerant, bigoted or ‘unspiritual’.”

A Wider Trend on the Right

Many Christians Byline Times spoke to fear their religion is being co-opted to suit the agenda of the far-right, something which is not a new phenomenon, but one which has, they say, become much more pronounced over the last year.

That’s partly due to the rise of the far right and shifting of politics towards the right in general, allowing imported US-style Christian nationalism to find more of a foothold on British soil among the far-right.

Groups like UKIP, under the leadership of Nick Tenconi, have notably drifted in their focus from Euroscepticism to overtly embracing an aggressive form of street-level Christian nationalism, recently performing a ‘Walk with Jesus’ march branded by leading faith-based publications as “the co-option of sacred symbols by a far-right movement that seeks to provide moral cover for an anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim agenda by dressing it up in Christian heritage”.

Robinson himself has also ostensibly converted to Christianity during his most recent stint in prison, and radical right parties like Reform and Restore are increasingly using the language of Christianity in their messaging, often conflating a sense of religious heritage and national identity in an attempt to broaden their appeal.

Speaking to Byline Times, Tommy Sharpe, from Better Story - a multidenominational grassroots movement of Christians seeking to resist “exclusionary distortions of faith” - said: “Parties like Reform, Restore, UKIP, and Advance are reliant on ‘us’ versus ‘them’ politics. They take existing grief within the ‘us’ group about poverty, inequality, isolation, and crumbling public services, and turn this into grievance against ‘them’ groups, and Christian language and symbols can help create this perceived divide between communities.”

Related reading: Elon Musk Amplifies Tommy Robinson’s Call to Expel Half of All British Muslims in Speech Staged by Neo-Nazi Linked Group

He added: “Certain far-right actors use ‘Christian’ as a stand-in word for ‘White’ or ‘European’, and because it allows them to draw a firm distinction between the in-group and the out-group whilst appearing less racist… we would refer to this as church-washing.”

Symon Hill, a Baptist minister, university chaplain, and author who campaigns against the far-right, told Byline Times the trend has “really increased in the last year and a half.”

“That’s partly down to the general rise of the far right and the stretching of politics to the right — anti-migrant sentiment has become more mainstream, and people like Farage have reached for language about ‘Christian Britain’ and ‘Christian heritage.’ You’ve got a lot of groups, Reform and others, talking about defending ‘Christian Britain.’”

He believes the idea of defending a “Christian Britain” is bizarre: “When do these people think Britain was Christian? Was Britain Christian when it was engaged in the slave trade? Was England Christian when Crusaders were stealing land in the Middle East, killing civilians as they went? Was it Christian when it was conducting pogroms against Jews? Christianity inspired many people to resist these things.”

As Sharpe puts it: “As Christians, we don’t believe there is such a thing as a Christian country. The Christian faith is universal by definition because no people group has privileged access to God. Jesus says ‘go and make disciples of all nations’, not ‘go and build a Christian nation’.”

In statements, high-ranking members of the church such as the Bishop of Kirkstall have already spoken out about the co-opting of Christianity, stating that the Church must “reclaim both the flag and the faith” from the far-right.

Coalitions of church leaders have also appealed to the Government to protect people against a rise in far-right nationalism, saying that “seeing the rise of the far right preach a message of Christian nationalism that is steeped in white supremacy at the behest of influential social and political leaders in the UK and the US is deeply concerning.”

Related reading: Revealed: The Russian Neo-Nazi Network Pushing ‘White Lives Matter’ Division in Britain – Promoted by Tommy Robinson

Christians Push Back

Baptist Minister Symon Hill tells Byline Times: “There’s still a tendency in some places to think, ‘we’d better not mention the Christian far right, because we’re just giving them extra publicity.’ I think that ship has sailed — I think they’ve gained plenty of publicity themselves, and we need to be tackling them now. It’s now a question of what we actually do about it.”

There is an irony, Hill says, in that while many of these speakers cite certain passages from the Bible, the ones which conveniently fit their narratives, “very rarely do they actually mention the teachings of Jesus, the life of Jesus, what Jesus said or how he taught people to behave towards each other.

“People who want to worship Jesus without following Jesus tend to end up in a place where they talk about a God of power rather than a God of love.”

Also highlighted by those who spoke to this publication was the important point that, while it could be said of many members of the far-right that they are exploiting Christianity for their own ends, there are also many people of actual faith who could be easily susceptible to being drawn into this dark and isolationist brand of faith-infused radical politics, while genuinely believing in an interpretation of the Bible.

As Sharpe puts it: “There are many complicated reasons that individuals become involved in far-right political movements. This is also true of Christians. For parts of the church, the ethical priority is the prevention of assisted dying and abortion and the promotion of conservative interpretations of marriage and sexuality.

“Care for the foreigner and the vulnerable, peacemaking, and anti-poverty work are seen as secondary. Because far-right parties and movements are increasingly speaking into these ethical concerns, they have become an attractive political option for a minority of Christians,” he added. He believes some Christians perceive renewed interest in Christianity as a recruiting ground, giving them “new opportunities to evangelise”, as well as a fear of Islam in general.

Hill argues it is “dangerous to just dismiss the ‘Christian far right’, and assume it’s purely performative.”

But he also notes, in contrast to what perhaps is the dominant current understanding of this melding of ideologies, that “the narrative that conservative Christianity is growing while liberal Christianity is declining is very simplistic.”

Related reading: Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage and the ‘Pure Cold Rage’ Used to Trigger a Racist Pogrom in Belfast

“Beyond the legal or institutional picture, there’s a more lively, radical, inclusive Christianity at the grassroots, reaching people who’ve traditionally been alienated by Christianity.”

However, he argues there’s also an upsurge of interest in “genuinely radical, progressive Christianity”, and that through his work as a chaplain, he sees many “younger, LGBTQ+ people… who are so used to homophobic, transphobic Christianity, that they’re enthusiastic when they encounter Christians supportive of LGBTQ+ inclusion.”

Hill says that he personally has seen “a revival of interest among younger LGBTQ+ people in the progressive wing” of Christianity as well - citing examples of Metropolitan Community Church in Brighton, Renew Inclusive Church in Cambridge, and St Claire’s in Coventry.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Hill says: “Jesus demonstrates that the category of ‘neighbour’ is not limited to people like us and explicitly calls his followers to love those who are different to them.”

“If we’re going to defeat the far right — if we’re going to help those taken in by far-right myths think differently — I think we need to challenge our own prejudices, learn from each other, and build an alliance of people of different faiths and of none. That means, in resisting Christian nationalism, reaching out to people of other faiths as well as Christians… so we can build better things in society and resist injustice together.”

He added: “Churches that work with people in poverty, that run food banks, have many people in poverty attending them — they’re in a position to bring together people in poverty who are white and people in poverty who are migrants, people of colour who are British and people who aren’t.”

Additional reporting by Josiah Mortimer.

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Campaign group Defend Our Juries (DOJ) is staging a protest outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court from 12pm on Thursday, in an action dubbed 'Graduation Day', which could see hundreds more arrested for defying the ban on the outlawed pro-Palestine organisation.

The demonstration is deliberately timed to coincide with a date that was set aside for dealing with Section 13 Terrorism Act prosecutions affecting around 1,500 arrested Defend Our Juries supporters, who are accused of holding signs bearing the words: “I Oppose Genocide. I Support Palestine Action.”

Those hearings now look likely to be postponed, but around 200 people are still expected to gather in Westminster where they will be invited to escalate from Section 13 offences (displaying a ‘supportive’ item backing the banned group, such as a placard) to Sections 11 and 12 (promoting membership and inviting support) – which carry potential jail terms of up to 14 years.

Participants will queue to take the stage individually and recite a fixed script declaring support for Palestine Action and encouraging others to do the same, with an optional additional clause professing membership of the direct action group.

A parallel strand to the protest, dubbed 'The Escalation', asks people to post videos online declaring support and/or membership of Palestine Action.

More than 2,100 people were arrested for holding placards within months of the July 2025 ban, with the early tranche of charges relating to a low-level terrorism offence carrying a sentence of up to six months in prison. The group says the figure has now risen to more than 3,500 arrests.

This latest wave is more likely to jam up the justice system as it relates to more severe offences, at a time when the Government has just paused plans for early prisoner releases that were meant to deal with over-flowing prisons.

Defend Our Juries wants to highlight what it believes is the absurdity of the ban, saying backers will be professing membership of a group that no longer exists. DOJ asserts Palestine Action disbanded the night before proscription took effect and never had a membership structure, so declaring membership is factually meaningless.

However, the Court of Appeal treated the organisation as a live proscribed entity.

DOJ also argues that the stricter Section 12 offence – against promoting the organisation – was designed to catch recruitment and material support to terror groups, not symbolic declarations.

Charging under s11 or s12 of the Terrorism Act requires the consent of the new Attorney General, Ellie Reeves KC MP. That means conversations around the arrests could reach Cabinet.

The Legal Battle

After a High Court ruling in February, Senior District Judge Paul Goldspring put Section 13 cases on hold, saying there was no merit in hearing them until the situation regarding the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s appeal position was clear.

Following the Court of Appeal ruling in the Home Secretary’s favour in June, Judge Goldspring was due to hold a review hearing on 30 June to consider whether prosecutions would proceed, though that has now been delayed.

The Court of Appeal allowed the Home Secretary’s appeal, with the Lady Chief Justice saying the proscription decision against Palestine Action struck a fair balance. The Government and its lawyers have argued that supporters of Palestine are free to support any other pro-Palestine organisation that is not banned.

Backing the Government, the court’s reasoning in June argued Palestine Action had caused serious damage to property, using weapons including sledgehammers against weapons firms, and presented a real risk of injury to the public.

Founder Huda Ammori has said she will now pursue an appeal to the Supreme Court and, if necessary, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Pressure on Burnham

A spokesperson for Defend Our Juries told Byline Times: “The consequences for the criminal justice system if Burnham doesn’t follow through on his apology [over Gaza] are pretty significant. It’s a real test.”

“Words are not enough. You’re going to have to show where you really stand.”

The spokesperson added: “I think he knows that the arrest of thousands of people on Labour’s watch under the Terrorism Act is not a good look.”

“Far from being intimidated by the terrorism charges, people are just not going to be silenced.”

Andy Burnham apologised for Labour’s early response to the war on Gaza before becoming PM, saying the party “didn’t get it right”.

However, he has stopped short of calling it genocide, saying a formal determination should be left to international courts. He has kept Shabana Mahmood at the Home Office, the minister who defended the proscription through both courts.

Eighty MPs and peers wrote to Burnham this month urging more sanctions against Israel and for human rights to be secured for Palestinians.

The Government said when banning the group last July that the move was due to the “orchestration and enaction of aggressive and intimidatory attacks against businesses, institutions and the public, which has crossed the thresholds established in the Terrorism Act 2000…Such acts do not represent legitimate acts of protest.”

A Home Office spokesperson added at the time: “The government has carefully considered the nature and scale of Palestine Action’s activities to ensure legitimate protest is not affected.” Opponents of the ban claim it has had a chilling effect on wider pro-Palestine campaigning.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

André Walker faces a charge of assault by beating, and the trial is scheduled to take place on 30 July at Reading Magistrates’ Court.

It follows Fossil Free London activists interrupting the Windsor Guildhall event with a banner, chanting against the US President’s policies on the climate crisis. Byline Times exclusively reported on the incident, which was not covered elsewhere.

NHS doctor and activist Kush Naker alleged that Walker dragged him from the front to a side room, closed the door, and got on his knees on top of him, reaching for his neck.

He further alleged that Walker tried to swing several punches at him whilst he was on the ground, which he claims he prevented by grabbing Walker’s wrists. Naker claimed the Talk host then moved his knee towards Naker’s groin, in what Naker took to be an attempt to knee him in the genitals. Naker says he responded by trapping Walker’s leg between his own. At the time, Walker and his spokesman denied the claims as “nonsense”.

Still Presenting on Talk

Thames Valley Police confirmed at the time they had received a report of assault with injury at around 8.30pm on 16 September at Windsor Guildhall, at the Republicans Overseas gala dinner during Trump’s state visit.

A spokesperson for Thames Valley Police told Byline Times on Wednesday (28 July): "Following a Thames Valley Police investigation, Andre Walker, aged 47, of Hatch Lane, Windsor, was charged with assault by beating by postal requisition on 25 February...

"He is due to appear at Reading Magistrates’ Court on Thursday 30 July. Now that a charge has been made, the force will not be in a position to provide any further details as proceedings are now active."

Another Fossil Free London activist alleged she was slapped repeatedly by a female attendee, in an incident caught on video, while being removed by security, though no charges appear to have been brought.

Walker has continued hosting weekly shows on Talk despite his assault charge, which he is understood to deny. The right-winger has presented at least eight shows for the Murdoch-owned online and radio station in July alone, along with co-host Ash Gould.

Assault by beating (common assault, contrary to s.39 Criminal Justice Act 1988) is a summary-only offence, meaning it can only be tried in the Magistrates’ Court, unless it is ‘sent up’ to a Crown Court alongside a more serious charge.

Walker has attempted to portray the case as politically motivated. In recent YouTube videos he has claimed Thames Valley Police and supposed “terrorists” have “aligned” to bring him down.

He has also sought to present the Fossil Free London demonstration as a “terrorist attack” he personally foiled during Donald Trump’s state visit. He has been soliciting donations for a “phenomenal legal team” he claims was recommended via Elon Musk’s and Trump’s lawyers.

When Byline Times reported on the incident last year, Walker said: “There are no criminal allegations. They haven’t made any. The only people they’ve phoned are you. Always remember something – if you start printing a load of allegations against me in the absence of any evidence, you’ll just look like a dickhead. And also, how would you feel if it happened to you?”

The ‘Patriot Fund’

Walker claims he has sold his car and is behind on rent, while promoting a “Patriot Club” or “Patriot Fund” for his costs, including a claim he paid three grooming-gang victims £150 each after they gave evidence in “the Rupert Lowe thing” (the far-right Restore Britain leader’s own report into grooming).

After a failed attempt to bring a private prosecution for aggravated trespass (which he says the Crown Prosecution Service blocked at Reading Magistrates’ Court), Walker says he is serving a “notice before action” and heading for judicial review at the High Court, framed as suing the Government.

He has also set out a wider ambition to privately prosecute political opponents (“lefties…we’ll start putting them in court” he says in one video).

In a monologue on his YouTube channel, he confirmed the so-called Patriot Fund is “very definitely not a charity”, and is a discretionary pot he alone directs, adding that PayPal shut him down over suspicions he was falsely presenting it as a charity.

News UK was contacted for comment.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

His comments came in an in-depth interview with Byline Times’ Editor in Chief Hardeep Matharu at the 2026 Womad festival which took place in Wiltshire this weekend.

Polanski, who leads the Green Party in England and Wales, claimed credit for the departure of Starmer, calling it "my biggest achievement” in the job.

Polanski told the packed audience from the 'World of Words’ stage hosted by Byline Times: “I think my biggest achievement in [my] first year may turn out to be playing a role in seeing Keir Starmer replaced as Labour leader by someone to his left — and I choose those words carefully, because I do think Andy Burnham is to Starmer’s left.”

He added: “If anyone from Labour is listening, this is what I want them to hear most — the toxicity between me, the Green Party and Labour over the past year has been deeply unhelpful for British politics. I’d go further: it’s been dangerous.”

He said the killing of politicians – including most recently Reform UK’s Ann Widdecombe – is “connected to the same culture”.

“I hope there can be a reset — I’m not going to stop criticising the Labour Government, and I don’t expect them to stop criticising us, but it doesn’t need to be personal," Polanski said. "It should be about policy, about improving people’s lives, about facts and evidence — not personal attacks on character.”

He raised the example of Labour accusing the Green Party of wanting to turn playgrounds into "crack dens". Labour has also repeatedly claimed that Polanski uses “his platform to sow division and grievance” and has focused on past revelations about him.

Labour accused him of “chickening out” of the Gorton and Denton by-election, which the Greens then went on to win, and issued press releases claiming that he has a “blueprint for a drug-ridden Britain [that] would turn children’s playgrounds into crack dens”.

The leader – who describes his political philosophy as "eco-populism" – drew a contrast between Keir Starmer crossing the House of Commons chamber to shake Reform Leader Nigel Farage’s hand on his election as an MP with Labour’s “full-on onslaught” tweet within an hour of his own election as Green Party Leader – pointing to a Sun sting in which Polanksi once offered hypnosis sessions to a journalist and suggested that he could enlarge her breasts (Polanski has repeatedly apologised and claims that he was misrepresented).

In the interview, the Green Party Leader issued a demand for proportional representation before the next election, claiming that Andy Burnham already “has the mandate to implement PR”.

Burnham, a supporter of electoral reform, has said that he wants it to be in the party’s next manifesto. Labour’s 2024 manifesto did not mention proportional representation, but instead stated that “Labour is committed to strengthening our democracy and upholding the integrity of elections”.

“It is time for PR, and we need PR at the next general election,” Polanski told Matharu.

Despite signalling that he would be open to working with Burnham's Government on such issues, Polanski raised concerns about Shabana Mahmood remaining as Burnham's Home Secretary, who he said has “pursued some of the most regressive migration policies imaginable: cruel deportation videos, extending indefinite leave to remain from five to 10 years for asylum seekers, people often fleeing war”.

Media Attacks and Controversies

Zack Polanski also hit back at media attacks on him and his personal life.

Recent stories have leapt on his prior claims to have been a Red Cross “spokesperson”.

He said: “I used to volunteer my time hosting Red Cross fundraisers — they’d give me a script to read to an audience about their work on the climate crisis and humanitarian emergencies. I called myself a ‘spokesperson’ rather than an MC, and there was a week of headlines about it. Most people, hearing that story, just laugh.”

He dismissed the story and others like it as “nothing burgers”.

On the ongoing row over potentially unpaid council tax while living on a house boat, Polanski says he still cannot pay back any council tax owed on a second property months on from The Times revelations, because “the council and the [Valuation Office]... still don’t know who I should pay it to”.

“If you go to the strict letter of the law, technically I haven’t paid — I might still end up owing it — but any reasonable person can see that when you’re trying this hard to pay and they won’t take your money, it isn’t the scandal the BBC and others tried to make it.”

Related reading: BBC Laura Kuenssberg Show Accused of Anti-Green Bias After Cancelling Zack Polanski Interview

Polanski told Matharu: “I worked as an actor, in nightclubs, doing admin – and, briefly, as a hypnotherapist. My point is this gets disparaged by the right-wing press, who mock the fact I’ve had lots of jobs.

“Ask any creative — actor or musician — living in London in the 2010s, and they were doing various jobs to pay the rent. I sometimes had to walk to work because I couldn’t afford the bus. That’s not a hardship story — I had the safety net of the bank of Mum and Dad, which not everyone has — but I wanted to make my own way, so I was walking to work, or going to universities for the free food.

"I lived a very different life to the one I live now, and I don’t think everyone needs to have done that, but it is a bonus in politics. When I meet people where they’re at, I’ve often had a similar or parallel experience to theirs.”

Personal Life and Independent Media

Polanski and his partner are currently house-sharing, and he pointed to media mockery of house-sharing in his 40s – including a tweet earlier this year by Telegraph podcast host (and GB News presenter) Camilla Tominey, in which she commented: “Is he still at uni?”

The Green Party Leader said: “I know so many people in their forties and fifties in the same position…[The] Westminster media bubble’s assumptions about how people live are deeply destructive — which is exactly why we need independent media, like Byline Times and others.”

He also praised this pubication, saying: “Even when Byline Times has scrutinised me, and I can think of examples, I’ve welcomed it, because I know it isn’t being done because I’ve been bought off by oil and gas companies, private healthcare or gambling firms.”

And he rejected recent characterisations that he has “disappeared” by “the Telegraph, LBC, even the BBC” as “deeply dishonest”.

Green Party membership has surged under Polanski's leadership, from approximately 65,000 members prior to the leadership race, to 230,000 as of June 2026. The Greens were polling at approximately 9% in August 2026, compared to approximately 14% today, according to Politico's poll tracker.

Byline Times’ 'World of Words’ stage at the 2026 Womad festival also saw in-depth contributions from Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti; crossbench peer Victor Adebowale; authors Otto English and James Bloodworth; Professor of American Literature at the University of London, Sarah Churchwell; musician and Womad founder Peter Gabriel; and Lincoln Project founder, US Republican campaigner Rick Wilson.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

Byline Times has established that the same accountancy network has a pattern of ties stretching across Europe to Russian oligarchs, state enterprises and companies which are under US, UK and EU sanctions due to the war in Ukraine. Analysis of the network’s Moscow partnerships, Tivat corporate filings and regional company records shows that: 

• The accountancy group McMillan Woods, whose directors and partners gave Cottrell his first job in the City under his false identity, was founded in Britain by a former advisor to Lukoil, Russia’s largest private oil company, now facing sanctions. The same firm maintains a live presence in Moscow through a partner who answers to a Russian executive with direct ties to two sanctioned oligarchs close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. 
• The Tivat accountancy that today administers Cottrell’s own Montenegro company, meanwhile, shares senior staff with a firm that served as the registered contact for a Serbian arms dealer marketing Russian-designed weapons – including a missile system Serbia’s own military only received from Moscow under an official agreement with Putin.
• The same Tivat cluster bridging Reform UK officials and George Cottrell serves companies owned by individuals with direct ties to Russian state and state-backed institutions, spanning technology, finance and culture.
  

These findings place a network that first gave George Cottrell his start in corporate finance inside an accountancy world with live, active ties to Russia. 

Byline Times has previously revealed that Cottrell, jailed in 2017 for wire fraud, first entered the corporate finance world under a Swiss alias, ‘Oscar’, hired in 2013 by A’zami at the McMillan Woods-linked firm Maxim. Hon Kong Yong, a fellow gambler who owns a group of businesses in Tivat with which Cottrell has shared personnel and corporate advisers, introduced Cottrell into that network around 2012 knowing all along about his false identity. 

A’zami became Reform UK’s treasurer in 2019 – around the same time archived webpages show he was publicly listed as a McMillan Woods partner for corporate finance and capital markets. He served as treasurer until February 2025, but abruptly left the party after the Electoral Commission referred donations from Fiona Cottrell to the police.

A’zami and McMillan Woods did not respond to requests for comment.

McMillan Woods’ Moscow Adventures

McMillan Woods’ managing partner in the UK, and co-founder of McMillan Woods Global in 2005, is Ronnie Silva. He remains involved in the firm. Before that, Silva was a director of international markets at KPMG, where he served as an advisor to Lukoil, helping to establish its London operations. Lukoil has been under UK and US sanctions since October 2025. 

According to a former senior partner in McMillan Woods, Silva had personally known Yong for years before that firm existed. Yong’s lawyers denied that he ever knew or met Silva.

McMillan Woods’ Moscow connection is far from historic, however. The group has a continuous presence in Russia through Vadim Vyacheslavovich Dolgopolov, its Moscow-based partner-in-charge since at least 2019. Dolgopolov’s boss is a Russian business leader with ties to two sanctioned oligarchs. A senior McMillan Woods source told Byline Times that all of the network’s national partners, including Dolgopolov, are personally vetted by its Malaysia-based founding president, Raymond Lieuw.

Dolgopolov simultaneously heads the Moscow office of Adam Global, a Dubai-based accounting network. McMillan Woods began referring cases to Adam Global in 2014, and signed a more formal global strategic partnership with the firm in 2018, at a ceremony in London.

At Adam Global, Dolgopolov works under Igor Savelyev, the network’s Moscow-based board-level Russian strategy director. 

Savelyev previously held senior roles in businesses controlled by two Russian oligarchs now under Western sanctions. 

In 2014, he chaired Aquanika, then owned through the Volga Group of billionaire Gennady Timchenko, one of Vladimir Putin’s closest confidantes. Timchenko was sanctioned by the US that year over Russia’s invasion of Crimea.

From 2013 to 2014, Savelyev also ran the oil and fats division of the agricultural conglomerate Rusagro, then controlled by billionaire Vadim Moshkovich. Moshkovich, then a Russian senator, attended Putin’s Kremlin meeting with leading businessmen immediately after the invasion of Ukraine, and was sanctioned by the UK and EU in 2022. 

Dolgopolov’s corporate network extends beyond Russia and Dubai, too: it reaches Chinese state-linked businesses operating inside the country, including Beijing Tong Ren Tang Rus, the Russian subsidiary of a pharmaceutical group ultimately controlled by the Beijing municipal state.

Dolgopolov and Adam Global did not respond to requests for comment.

A Single Tivat Network

A different but interlinked structure sits behind Cottrell’s world in Montenegro. Where McMillan Woods operates as an international accountancy network, three Tivat firms – Global Financial Solutions (GFS), Artemon and Vegaplus – form a smaller corporate-services network of their own: local agents that register companies, file their accounts, handle their operations, supply their addresses and manage routine paperwork for a client roster that includes Cottrell himself, A’zami, and three more senior Reform UK figures.

A’zami’s own Montenegro company, Maxim Enterprises, sits inside the same GFS address in Tivat as Yong’s casino group and companies belonging to Christopher Harborne, Reform UK’s largest individual donor; Gawain Towler, its former communications chief; and Samee Bhatti, its former digital strategist. Cottrell’s own company, Private Family Office, runs through a different Tivat firm, Artemon, which shares senior staff with a second firm, Vegaplus – the accountancy of record for Bhatti’s company, Zebra Solutions.

As Byline Times previously reported, Nino Pantović - who owns GFS - was also linked with Artemon. He was personally involved in the early days of Cottrell’s Montenegro company, Private Family Office (PFO), having filed the paperwork transferring PFO’s directorship from Cottrell to Sander in October 2020. 

During that period, Cottrell’s company was still being managed by Artemon, a Montenegro accountancy founded in 2009, which has run Private Family Office since its incorporation in January 2020. Its email address still appears on the company’s public record today. 

Meanwhile, Artemon’s own staff overlap with a second Tivat firm, Vegaplus. Nives Vuković, who owns Vegaplus, is listed on her own profile as Artemon’s human resources manager, and Danilo Vuković, who directs Vegaplus, appears on Artemon’s own website as its client-services coordinator. 

Artemon’s Budapest office lists him under a third title, project manager, on top of his Vegaplus directorship in Tivat. Taken together, the three roles describe a senior figure operating across Artemon’s regional network as a whole, not a single local bookkeeper attached to one office.

Zebra Solutions shares GFS’s own telephone number even as its accounting runs through Vegaplus – the same pattern of overlapping contact details visible across Hon Kong Yong’s and A’zami’s companies.

The Arms Dealer

Byline Times can confirm that a key manager at the corporate services firms running the Tivat companies that belong to both George Cottrell and Samee Bhatti, the webmaster of his political consultancy Geostrategy, simultaneously represents a Belgrade-based defence firm selling Russian weapons. 

Artemon’s sister firm, Vegaplus is the registered address, telephone number and accounting email for the Montenegro branch of Princip Spec, a Serbian defence company that markets Russian-made and Soviet-era weaponry. 

Princip Spec’s two authorised representatives are Danilo Vuković, the same senior Artemon and Vegaplus operator described above, and Nenad Obradović, the Serbian firm’s owner.

Princip Spec’s own 2019 sales catalogue, seen by Byline Times, describes a company staffed by former executives of “the largest state-owned Balkan companies”, specialising in Cold War surplus and Soviet-era hardware: tanks, machine guns, rocket launchers. 

Among the systems it marketed that year was the 9M133 Kornet, a Russian-designed anti-tank missile. However, strangely, Serbia’s own armed forces did not officially receive their first Kornets until two years later. Belgrade’s Ministry of Defence announced the delivery in December 2021, following an agreement between Presidents Aleksandar Vučić and Vladimir Putin, and called the missiles a “new capability” for the Serbian military. 

A private arms dealer had therefore been marketing a Russian missile system it should not yet have been able to source, more than two years before Serbia’s own government received its first supply directly from Moscow. Rosoboronexport, the Russian state monopoly that handles the great majority of the country’s arms exports and sits inside the state conglomerate Rostec, controls the lawful supply chain for a system like the Kornet. Princip Spec did not respond when asked how it had access to it before Serbia’s Government did.

A Pattern of Russian State-Linked Ownership

Artemon is not a small local bookkeeper. Its own website advertises global entity management, private banking and wealth management from offices across Montenegro, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and from further addresses in London, Budapest, Florida and Belize. 

A spokesperson for Artemon told Byline Times: “Artemon is an independent accounting and corporate services provider operating in accordance with applicable laws, professional standards and strict confidentiality obligations. We provide accounting and corporate services exclusively to corporate entities. The provision of such services does not constitute participation in, endorsement of, or knowledge of our clients’ business activities. Artemon has never been accused of, investigated for, charged with, or found liable for sanctions evasion, money laundering, or any other unlawful activity.”

Vegaplus, the smaller firm that shares Artemon’s senior staff, was incorporated in 2022, but now sits at the centre of a client list spanning a Balkan arms dealer, a cluster of Russian state-linked technology, finance and culture ventures, and Bhatti, Reform UK’s former digital strategist who runs the digital footprint of George Cottrell’s Geostrategy consultancy.

Module Agency, registered at Vegaplus's office and using its telephone number and accounting email, is wholly owned by Pavel Chelyuskin, former head of user experience at VK Pay, the payments arm of Russia's state-controlled social media group, until January 2022. 

Since 2014, VK - Russia's version of Facebook - has been controlled by the Mail.Ru Group, an internet conglomerate heavily backed by pro-Kremlin billionaire Alisher Usmanov. In December 2021, VK came under even more direct state control, passing into the hands of the state-run insurer Sogaz, part-owned by a longtime Putin ally, leaving state-owned entities in control of the internet group alongside Gazprom Media and a Rostec-linked vehicle. 

Indapp, which uses Vegaplus's accounting email though a separate address and telephone number, is owned by Pavel Alimov, who has described himself online as a former analyst on the Praktikum programme at Moscow School of Management Skolkovo. Its own published project work names Gazprom Neft, Gazprombank, Rosatom, Rosnano and the Moscow city government among the organisations its programmes have worked with - the same state-linked landscape as the rest of this network. 

GLS, also registered at Vegaplus's office and sharing its telephone number and accounting email, is owned by Aleksandr Golovin, who also runs a Montenegro photography studio, A3Studio. Public profile pages under his name record education at Oryol State Institute of Culture, a federal institution whose own website names Russia's Ministry of Culture as its founder. A production credited to A3Studio was recognised at the 2023 Light to the World youth film festival, which operates with the support of Russia's Ministry of Culture and lists the Russian Orthodox Church’s Rybinsk Diocese among its founding organisers. 

George Cottrell's lawyers told Byline Times: "Our client understands Artemon to be one of the largest and most widely-used corporate service providers in Montenegro, and it is therefore entirely unremarkable that Private Family Office should have used Artemon in this respect. So far as our client is aware, he does not know any directors or senior staff of Artemon, or what association they may or may not have with any other company. Our client has never heard of 'Vegaplus'. He has no knowledge whatsoever of this company, its alleged clients or their alleged activities."

They added that it is not "relevant" to Cottrell if the corporate services firm administering his company shares staff serving such Russia state-linked clients, and "categorically rejected" the idea that "any company of our client’s is, or has been, part of a 'network' involved in 'money laundering' or nefarious 'foreign influence.'"

A Known Risk

Yet none of this happens in a vacuum. Montenegro and Serbia sit at the centre of what investigators repeatedly describe as one of Europe’s weakest points for illicit finance. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime has documented how Russian money moves through the Western Balkans using precisely this kind of infrastructure: professionals who open accounts, form companies and build ownership structures opaque enough to defeat identification. 

Researchers call the regional shadow economy a Russian “gateway” since 2014, worsened since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine by a fresh influx of Russian money and nationals into both countries. Hungary, where Artemon also keeps an office, runs its own investor-residency scheme, separately flagged by the European Commission for the same reasons: money laundering, tax evasion and weak screening of applicants’ wealth. Small corporate-services firms spanning exactly these jurisdictions, official and independent researchers agree, are the known conduit.

Asked about the broader pattern of shared advisors running through Cottrell’s Montenegro companies, his lawyers said it was “entirely unremarkable that individuals and organisations should use the same advisors” in a town as small as Tivat; Hon Kong Yong’s lawyers said shared providers, “without more”, establish no business relationship or wrongdoing.

Yet opaque company structures of this kind, in this part of Europe, are a recognised risk, one security services have repeatedly flagged as a channel for Russian and Chinese money laundering and influence operations. By his lawyers' account, it is a risk that is of no concern to Cottrell.

For six years, Reform UK’s treasurer, largest donor, former communications chief and former digital strategist relied on corporate infrastructure that is highly vulnerable to Russian interference, while intertwined with that of George Cottrell’s - the party’s secret criminal funder.

Meanwhile, Reform UK has repeatedly failed to answer Byline Times’ questions about these activities.

Updated 28 July 2026 to include a comment and corrections from an Artermon spokesperson.

Gardiner listed a whole range of issues on which Miliband’s views were likely to clash with those of the US administration, including his opposition to the war in Iran, his support for Net Zero policies and opposition to North Sea drilling, his role as Labour leader in 2013 in blocking British action against the brutal Assad regime in Syria, and his reported support for the Chagos Island deal transferring sovereignty over the territory to Mauritius, whilst retaining use of the Diego Garcia military base.

Gardiner also cited Miliband’s long record of personal criticism of Donald Trump – even though many of these seemed admirably on point, and reflective of views shared by many American voters. In 2016, Miliband described the President as “a racist, misogynistic, self-confessed groper.” On another occasion, he said “We must do our best at home and abroad to resist the worst of Trumpism…These are dark days for America and the world.” In 2017, he said Mr Trump had “lowered the bar for idiocy.” He has also questioned the President’s “incredibly peculiar relationship with Russia” and accused him of lowering standards in politics.

It's worth noting that many of Trump’s current associates have had unflattering things to say about him before, noticeably JD Vance, who is now Trump’s Vice President, despite fiercely criticizing him in the past.  Zohran Mamdani, the new Mayor of New York, has been an outspoken critic of Trump, yet seemed to strike up a good rapport with the President when they met in person.

Related reading: Elections Watchdog Assesses Reform UK’s £30,000 Private Flights Donation

Nevertheless, Gardiner concluded that for all these reasons, Miliband’s appointment was both unwise and a big mistake.  

Many British newspapers have echoed this message. For example, according to the Independent, citing associates of the President, Miliband’s appointment has gone down “like a lead balloon” in Washington, and he will have some “serious diplomatic repair to undertake.” In another example, the Telegraph ran a piece headlined “Foreign Brief for Miliband risks Trump’s Wrath” and quoted an administration official claiming that the appointment could become a “point of friction” in the UK-US relationship.

Legitimate questions can certainly be asked about Miliband’s record on foreign policy – particularly his opposition to action in Syria in response to Assad’s atrocities against his own people. The failure of the West to enforce its own redline in Syria arguably was a decisive turning point in Western credibility, and was a factor in emboldening Putin to believe he could move on Ukraine with impunity. I certainly remember the shock I felt at that moment, when it seemed that the West no longer had the mojo to stand up for its core beliefs.

However, what all the critics of Miliband’s appointment are overlooking is that it is not actually the purpose of the Foreign Secretary to appease Donald Trump. The job of Foreign Secretary is to stand up for British interests – as Miliband indeed set out in his first official statement following his appointment: “I will be a Foreign Secretary who fights for Britain’s interests and our values of democracy, freedom and the rule of law on the world stage.”

In previous times, one might have argued there was no contradiction between defending British interests and preserving good relations with the US President – because, in previous times, British and US interests and values were so closely aligned as to be almost inseparable.

It is harder to make the same case today – given the current US administration’s disdain for international norms and standards, cavalier treatment of its traditional democratic friends and allies, and its more tolerant attitude towards strongmen leaders.

It’s not the UK which is walking away from the democratic values and shared security perspectives which once underpinned the so-called “Special Relationship”, but the current US administration, which is busy dismantling democratic checks and balances at home, and seems  increasingly unable to distinguish between democratic friend and authoritarian foe overseas, judging by its inconsistent support for Ukraine, tolerant approach towards Putin, and willingness to work with Israel on Iran, despite the latter’s repeated violations of international humanitarian law and gross record of war crimes in Gaza and Lebanon.

It’s not the UK which has weakened its commitment to the transatlantic alliance, though it certainly needs to up its game on defence, but the Trump administration, with its aggressive claims on Greenland and Canada, its weaponization of tariffs to try to bully partners in NATO and the EU, its erratic pronouncements on NATO, and its blatant meddling in European domestic politics, to try to promote far right political parties.  Indeed, the hypocrisy of the administration in simultaneously decrying alleged Chinese interference in US elections, as claimed by the President in a recent prime time address, whilst actively championing favoured candidates in European elections, is breathtaking.

It’s not the UK or NATO allies which allegedly “let down” the US by failing to back its ill-advised venture in Iran whole-heartedly. It’s the US which let down all the countries now being negatively affected by the conflict, above all those in the region, by launching its war without a proper strategy or adequate consultation, and then blaming others for not coming to its help.

And it’s not the UK which is appointing manifestly ill-suited people to positions of high office, but the Trump administration – with its appointments of vaccine sceptics and medical science deniers to important health positions, climate change deniers to important energy and environment positions, blatantly partisan individuals to vital roles in the supposedly impartial Department of Justice, who are now using their position to pursue Trump’s political opponents, people with no intelligence or security background to vital national security roles, in which capacity they are busy firing anyone who dares to question current administration policies, and a mysogynistic, racist, rabble-rousing religious nut as Secretary of Defence.

Ed Miliband is not really the problem here.

The UK certainly has lost some ground in Washington in recent years. But, that’s because of its weak economy, unstable governments, never-ending churn of Prime Ministers, and poor record on defence. It’s also because of Brexit – the ill-advised decision to leave the EU, which the first Trump administration actively encouraged, and which has left the UK poorer, weaker, and even more unable to get a grip on its domestic challenges, as well as less influential or respected overseas.

Given the widening gap between British and American perspectives, whoever the new British Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, had appointed as Foreign Secretary would have a challenge on their hands to preserve good relations with the US. After all, former Prime Minister Keir Starmer bent over backwards to try to keep in Trump’s good graces, to little avail.   

Of course, Ed Miliband should not go out of his way to offend the US. Of course, it remains a good idea to try to preserve as a good relationship as you possibly can with the administration. But this should not be at the cost of selling the UK’s own values and interests short. Perhaps a little more distance, a little more focus on problems closer to home, including rebuilding better relations with the EU, and a little more cool, might earn the new British government a bit more respect from the current US administration, than endlessly trying to suck up to it.

In June, Byline Times reported on a donation of £30,000 recorded by the Electoral Commission to Reform UK from Volare Aviation Ltd, recorded in February this year.

The firm's legally-required accounts were months overdue at the time, and are now more than 230 days overdue.

In its initial response to questions about the donation, a spokesperson for Volare Aviation told Byline Times it provided aviation services to Reform Party UK Limited, requested through Reform personnel, to carry Reform figures and “associated attendees” around the country, and invoiced Reform at normal commercial rates.

But the firm added a detail not recorded by the elections watchdog: that Reform's account with the company included a £30,000 "credit associated with support from Mr Dustin Dryden," the company's owner.

A company is only a legitimate donor when it gives from its own resources. It cannot lawfully act as a mere conduit for an individual's money.

There is no allegation of wrongdoing of Dryden. However, the revelation throws into question whether the true source of the donation was hidden by Nigel Farage's party.

If the £30,000 in value actually came from Dryden personally, and the company was simply the vehicle it passed through, then the true donor is Dryden and Reform UK recording 'Volare Aviation Ltd' as the donor with the Electoral Commission was inaccurate.

Companies House records describe the South African-raised businessman as British and resident in England. If he is on a UK electoral register he would himself be a permissible donor. The question is whether Reform UK hid the true source of its funding for private flights.

Party treasurers are legally responsible for delivering accurate donation reports and for verifying permissibility within 30 days of receipt. If Reform knew or ought to have known the true source differed from what was filed, it is potentially legally exposed.

Byline Times has been investigating a number of companies with late corporate filings, insolvency issues and strike-off action which have nonetheless donated large sums to Reform UK in the past two years.

The £30,000 un-reported 'credit' from a private flight company's owner is just the latest in a long list of unanswered questions over Reform UK's finances, including the true nature of the £5 million 'gift' to Nigel Farage from Thai-based crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne before the 2024 General Election, unreported funding from convicted fraudster George Cottrell, and the source of funds for his mother's £750,000 in donations to Reform in recent years.

Enforcement Proceedings

The Electoral Commission told Byline Times on 6 July that it was "aware of this matter and [is] considering it under our regulatory remit.” On being pressed, the political finance regulator confirmed the matter "is not the subject of an investigation by the Commission."

However, on 13 July, the Electoral Commission told an investigator at Reform-tracker The Verified Receipts "our review remains ongoing", suggesting something had changed.

On 22 July, The Verified Receipts received further correspondence from the watchdog saying the case had been referred from their Information of Concern team to the Enforcement Team and allocated to a Senior Investigator on 14 July.

The donation is now undergoing a formal "assessment", the stage where they weigh the evidence to decide whether to launch a full investigation formally under electoral law (potentially resulting in a fine or further action), or resolve it another way, such as through guidance.

In a letter, the senior investigator said: "I am writing in relation to a non-cash donation of £30,000 recorded as being received by Reform UK from Volare Aviation Ltd on 13 February 2026. Thank you for raising this matter with us. The purpose of this letter is to notify you that we are carrying out an assessment of these matters as part of our enforcement process....The matter was referred to the Enforcement Team."

Related reading: Reform UK’s £30,000 Donation in Private Flights was Secretly Funded by Owner’s ‘Credit’

The Electoral Commission official added: "The first stage of the enforcement process is to conduct an assessment. Assessments are a consideration of the issues and evidence to determine whether to investigate, or whether an issue can be dealt with another way, such as through the provision of guidance.

"We may investigate where we have reasonable grounds to suspect that a person has
committed an offence or contravened a restriction or requirement under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act (PPERA)1, and where we are satisfied it is in the public interest to take such action."

Dr Sue Hawley, executive director of Spotlight on Corruption, told Byline Times before the latest development: “These new revelations, piling on top of other recent stories, expose the ongoing loopholes in our political finance rules which still need to be tackled.

“We urgently need more robust requirements on donors (whether individuals or companies) to declare whether they are actually the true donor, so as to make the criminal deterrent against individuals acting as intermediaries far stronger."

Dr Hawley called for "strong enforcement" - including through a properly resourced Electoral Commission, working with a specialised police force, to police the rules.

"Without proper enforcement, money that comes from impermissible sources will continue to seep into our politics,” she said.

Tom Brake, director of campaign group Unlock Democracy, also previously called for "complete clarity over who paid for these Reform UK flights, and certainty that the donation has been recorded accurately."

Brake, a former Lib Dem MP, argues the public are "increasingly wary" about the impact and source of large political donations.

"The long term solution is to reduce the maximum personal or company donation to £5,000 and close down all loopholes that allow foreign money into UK politics," he said.

In a joint response for Volare Aviation and Dryden on 13 July, the company stated that nothing in its earlier correspondence was “intended to express a legal characterisation of those arrangements for the purposes of electoral legislation or Electoral Commission reporting” and that it had described the arrangements solely as reflected in its own records.

It declined to comment on the Electoral Commission filing for the £30,000 in flights, the legal characterisation of the donation, third-party reporting obligations, or the application of electoral law, saying these were matters for Reform UK and the Electoral Commission.

The firm also failed to deny that Dryden personally funded the £30,000, and did not answer questions on that point. The spokesperson said they would not engage in further correspondence.

Reform UK did not respond to previous requests for comment.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

Cottrell – known as 'Posh George' – has lurked at the heart of Farage’s political operations for a decade.

In 2016, he was Farage's chief of staff and UKIP’s treasurer and chief fundraiser.

By 2019 – despite his criminal conviction for fraud in the United States – Cottrell became a fundraiser for Farage's successor political outfit, the Brexit Party.

More recently, Cottrell has funded both Farage and Reform, with many of his gifts and donations going undeclared and now the subject of police and parliamentary investigations.

Byline Times' findings can now establish further details about George Cottrell's dealings in the world of corporate finance and Farage's politics.

Based on analysis of hundreds of company records, official documents, archived webpages, and sources familiar with his school days and his work in the City, this investigation reveals:

● George Cottrell carried a fraudulent Swiss passport under which he was hired into a City corporate finance network by the future Reform UK treasurer, Mehrtash A’zami. A’zami would go on to vet Cottrell's mother Fiona's political donations to Nigel Farage's party. The passport was validated by the Swiss Embassy.

● A fellow gambler, Hon Kong Yong, introduced Cottrell into this network under the false identity after meeting him at a casino – landing him his first job in the City. Yong was aware that Cottrell's 'Oscar' identity was false.

● Yong was declared bankrupt in 2015 owing to difficulties with his mortgage lender and was barred from working as an accountant. However, within a few years, he owned a Montenegro casino, a luxury flat, and a group of companies – a change in fortunes that cannot be explained by his financial history.

● When asked to explain his relationship to Hon Kong Yong, George Cottrell's lawyers told this publication only that the two men live in the same small expatriate community in Tivat, a town in the coastal region of Montenegro. They did not mention what Byline Times has now uncovered: a professional connection between the two men stretching back more than a decade, through the same City accountancy group.

● George Cottrell persuaded his own City boss, Reform's future treasurer, Mehrtash A’zami, to hand over approximately £60,000 borrowed from friends and family for an investment that never materialised.

● By 2019, when Mehrtash A’zami became Reform's treasurer, he was already aware of Cottrell's fraudulent past identity as 'Oscar'.

● Mehrtash A’zami's own Montenegro company is administered from the same small Tivat office as Yong's casino group, Reform's largest donor Christopher Harborne, and two other former party officials. This was the case while he was vetting donations as Reform's treasurer.

● The director of George Cottrell’s Tivat firm and his executive assistant held simultaneous roles at the neighbouring casino he says he has nothing to do with.

Related reading:

Donations and Restructures

The donations made by George Cottrell and his mother Fiona Cottrell have attracted significant scrutiny in recent weeks.

Reform accepted two donations of £250,000 from Fiona Cottrell, George Cottrell’s mother, in May 2024. In June, she sent a further £1 million to Britain Means Business – Reform Deputy Leader Richard Tice’s private fundraising vehicle, which donated half of it to Reform.

These are now the subject of criminal investigations by the Metropolitan Police and the National Crime Agency, which has been unable to trace the money’s ultimate source. The law makes it an offence to evade political donation restrictions by concealing or disguising the true source of a donation or by giving false information about a donation.

Responsibility for screening these donations lay with Mehrtash A’zami. As Reform’s treasurer for six years, he was legally responsible for ensuring that every donation above £500 was recorded; checking within 30 days whether it came from a permissible source; returning anything impermissible or unidentifiable; and filing the party’s statutory donation reports.

That responsibility ended abruptly on 19 February 2025, during a wholesale restructuring of the party in the same month that the Electoral Commission referred Fiona Cottrell’s donations to the police.

Until then, Reform had operated through a private company owned by three named shareholders: Nigel Farage held nine of its 15 voting shares, Richard Tice held five and A’zami held one. On 19 February, all 15 shares were transferred to a newly created company limited by guarantee—the non-share structure commonly used by non-profit organisations. The old company was renamed Reform 2025 Ltd and retained as the new company’s wholly owned subsidiary.

The change removed Farage, Tice and A’zami as named owners but in reality no control was passed to Reform’s wider membership: those who now hold voting rights in the new parent company are not publicly identified. It also left the party operating through two companies able to hold and transfer money between them, making its finances harder to trace.

So how did Mehrtash A’zami become Reform's treasurer in the first place? And why did he leave the position?

The answer requires a trip to a Reform corporate cluster in Tivat, Montenegro – and to an obscure global accountancy network headquartered in London.

Network Connections

According to George Cottrell, he obtained his first job in the City thanks to a London accountant.

Byline Times has established that this man was Mehrtash A’zami, who had hired him as a consultant more than a decade ago – under a false identity known as 'Oscar D*******'.

This fraudulent relationship allowed Cottrell hidden influence over the corporate structure of Reform UK Party Ltd before its sudden reorganisation in February 2025: the man Reform UK entrusted with vetting the party's donations, including from Cottrell himself and his own mother, had known Cottrell since he was a teenager and had once hired him. The safeguard the law relies on, that a donation's permissibility is checked by someone independent of the donor, did not exist.

Hon Kong Yong, a British Malaysian accountant and fellow gambler Cottrell met at a casino, introduced Cottrell to the McMillan Woods corporate services network, under the alias.

A’zami was an early partner of this network. The recommendation helped Cottrell secure a consulting role under A’zami within that network.

For years, Cottrell was not known by his real name but as 'Oscar' – matching a Swiss passport found in his possession in 2014, two years before his arrest in the United States for money laundering and wire fraud.

Yong was himself already a fixture of the network and was personally known to its senior figures for a number of years. Today, he owns the Montenegro casino George Cottrell frequents, and the flat Cottrell lives in there – wealth that nothing in Yong’s own financial history can explain.

Though responsible for financial governance of Reform, including vetting donations, when he became the party's treasurer in 2019, A’zami would also become in that period a director of a Montenegrin company, which operated inside the same corporate infrastructure as the casino and crypto-gambling network surrounding George Cottrell and owned by Hon Kong Yong.

Throughout this tenure at Reform, A’zami was also a partner in the McMillan Woods accounting group, the directors of which had worked with A’zami, Cottrell, and Yong a decade earlier.

Reform UK, Mehrtash A’zami, and McMillan Woods did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

'Private Family Office'

George Cottrell moved to Montenegro in late 2019, shortly after Mehrtash A’zami joined Reform.

Cottrell established a company, Private Family Office, and lived in a penthouse in the Regent complex above Tivat harbour, owned by Global Trust Ltd – the same company that owns the Salon Privé casino, where he gambles regularly in the VIP room, and which is controlled by Hon Kong Yong.

Registered in January 2020 with Cottrell as its sole owner, Private Family Office has seen its accumulated deficit grow from approximately €79,000 in 2020 to €465,638 by 2025 – on near-zero revenue and a single employee, and sustained by more than €400,000 in loans from unidentifiable sources.

Cottrell’s lawyers refused to explain to Byline Times the loans’ origins or the source of his wealth, saying only that it is “entirely unsurprising” that his company fails to “generate any revenue” as it is “established for administrative functions”.

They also describe him merely as a tenant of Yong’s penthouse. But two people who worked for Cottrell held official roles at Yong’s company at the same time.

Gustaf Sander ran Private Family Office between November 2020 and October 2022, while simultaneously serving as organisational director of Salon Privé – a role in which he signed a sponsorship deal with local football club FK Arsenal Tivat in June 2022.

Cottrell’s lawyers have provided shifting accounts of Sander’s position: first denying that he held any role at Salon Privé; then telling the Financial Times that the two roles were not held at the same time; before reverting to denial and claiming that the football club's sponsorship record was “incorrect”. The sponsorship deal was, however, confirmed by the administrative body governing Tivat, which published a photo of it.

Katarina Đurović served on Private Family Office’s board from February 2024 to April 2025, while simultaneously working on her own account as Global Trust’s “treasury and payments associate” handling its crypto payment processing.

Cottrell’s lawyers described her only as “an authorised representative appointed by the professional advisors” to his company.

The Shared Tivat Accounting Network

Around the same period, a number of Reform figures began setting up shop in Tivat – using the same Tivat accountancy office, Global Financial Solutions, which also runs Yong’s entire corporate group: Global Trust and everything it owns, including Salon Privé; the Sidra 501 company that holds George Cottrell’s flat; a bar; a security company; and a restaurant company.

One of these figures was Reform's treasurer, Mehrtash A’zami, who set up his Montenegrin company, Maxim Enterprise d.o.o.

The same address it is based at also houses companies belonging to Christopher Harborne, Reform’s largest individual donor who gave Farage a £5 million gift; Gawain Towler, its former communications chief; and Samee Bhatti, its former digital strategist, who also set up the website for George Cottrell’s unlimited company, Geostrategy.

Global Financial Solutions is owned by Nino Pantović, who also owns a separate legal-services company, MNE Law, based at the same address. His late father, Ratko Pantović, who died in December 2024, was the lawyer for both George Cottrell and Hon Kong Yong.

Nino Pantović has travelled on Cottrell’s private jet. Montenegrin company records show that he personally filed the paperwork transferring ownership of Cottrell's firm, Private Family Office, to Gustaf Sander in October 2020 – submitting both men’s passports and Cottrell’s Montenegrin personal identification number to the state registry.

Cottrell’s lawyers told Byline Times: “Tivat is a small coastal town with a small community. It is therefore entirely unremarkable that individuals and organisations should use the same advisors.”

Hon Kong Yong’s lawyers said they “do not accept that the use of the same accounting or corporate services provider, without more, establishes any business relationship, common ownership, common control, coordination, or wrongdoing”.

One thing these companies share is losses.

Yong’s Global Trust shows a rapidly expanding asset portfolio, including the flat where George Cottrell resides, funded by nowhere near enough revenue of its own. It has accumulated €7.46 million in short-term liabilities.

Yet, Reform UK’s treasurer Mehrtash A’zami had crossed paths with George Cottrell long before A’zami established Maxim Enterprise in Montenegro – years before either had met Nigel Farage.

Gold and Oil

Contrary to the commonly cited account that George Cottrell was schooled on the private island of Mustique, he in fact attended The Elms School in Colwall, Herefordshire, before moving to Malvern College for his 'A' Levels.

As a student, Cottrell ran a clandestine poker ring after school and smuggled alcohol onto the premises. He had ambitions of grandeur even then, a school friend who knew him for 10 years told Byline Times.

Those around him expected “he would do something big, that it would probably be illegal, and that he would somehow talk his way into power,” the source said. Through his lawyers, Cottrell denied smuggling alcohol into the school.

From the age of 14, according to the source, Cottrell was already setting up companies in Luxembourg – inactive shells with no real business behind them. At one point, Cottrell was importing gold from China. The source recalled once seeing him at a train station with a gold bar in his pocket stamped with Chinese markings.

The former school friend also told Byline Times that, after he was expelled from Malvern College over gambling and drug use, Cottrell became friends with Arkadiy Abramovich – son of the now-sanctioned Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich – and was open about the friendship at the time. This corroborates separate reporting by The Nerve’s Carole Cadwalladr that a relative of Cottrell’s confirmed that he was a teenage friend of Arkadiy Abramovich.

This investigation has established that George Cottrell’s relationship with Arkadiy Abramovich blossomed in the period after Cottrell had left school and was trying to find work, some time between 2010 and 2012. It was during this time that Cottrell posted a photograph of the pair together on Facebook.

"To Mr Cottrell’s knowledge, he has never even met Arkadiy Abramovich," Cottrell's lawyers told Byline Times. "Our client does not have (nor has he ever had) any relationship with any member of the Abramovich family."

Arkadiy Abramovich was, by then, starting to build his own investment empire.

As early as August 2011, aged 17, he was pursuing oil and gas acquisitions across Russia and the former Soviet Union through his investment company ARA Capital and the London-listed shell company Zoltav Resources.

Cottrell, then, already had a personal connection to a family at the centre of Russian oil money by the time Mehrtash A’zami hired him.

'A Childhood Friend'

In 2007, Mehrtash A’zami was a partner in the McMillan Woods accounting group – a global network of accountancy firms founded in Malaysia and headquartered in London.

That year, he set up Maxim Management Consulting LLP to provide mergers and acquisitions consulting to the McMillan Woods group.

Hon Kong Yong had been known to the McMillan Woods inner circle for many years. According to a former partner of the firm, who spoke to Byline Times on the condition of anonymity and who works as a senior statutory auditor, Yong first met Cottrell at a London casino. Yong then introduced Cottrell into the network as a young businessman by the name of 'Oscar D******'.

Cottrell was known to McMillan Woods senior partners as “Yong’s friend ‘Oscar’”, due to the regularity with which they were seen together at City events.

And it was Yong’s recommendation which helped Cottrell secure his first job – with Mehrtash A’zami.

Around 2012, A’zami hired Cottrell as a consultant at his firm Maxim.

Cottrell’s other boss at Maxim was the firm’s chair, who was simultaneously a senior director of McMillan Woods and one of the latter’s original co-founders.

But what they did not know at the time was that they were hiring George Cottrell. They believed they were hiring Oscar D******.

At Maxim, Cottrell began to cut his teeth on how to manage and move large sums of money for Mayfair clients, developing expertise in cross-border banking and discreet asset transfer. A’zami had lofty ambitions for his company and wanted to compete with major firms. Cottrell’s promises of contacts with big investors were highly attractive.

Under his pseudonym of 'Oscar', George Cottrell offered to bring in seed investment for third-party projects in exchange for a 10% fee. At one point, he persuaded A’zami to personally put up approximately £60,000, borrowed from friends and family. No investment materialised and A’zami never recovered the money. Cottrell denied that he ever took money from A’zami.

Maxim sat within the wider McMillan Woods accountancy network, and its directors set up a run of interlocking firms from shared offices, including by 2012 the offshoot firm Archer Wise Accountants and Auditors Limited, which offered auditing services for McMillan Woods clients.

Byline Times’ senior McMillan Woods source had known and worked with both George Cottrell and Hon Kong Yong. He confirmed that, during Cottrell’s consultancy at Maxim, he simultaneously joined Archer Wise as a consultant known as 'Oscar'. Yong also joined the firm at around the same time.

Cottrell’s lawyers told Byline Times that “Cottrell knows Hon Kong Yong personally and they both live in the town of Tivat in Montenegro, which has a small expatriate community (the members of which are generally known to each other)”.

They did not mention that the two men had been connected for more than a decade earlier through the McMillan Woods network.

Yong’s lawyers told Byline Times that he “was not employed by McMillan Woods or by any entity within the McMillan Woods network” and that he “has no recollection of introducing Mr Cottrell to anyone in the McMillan Woods network, let alone doing so in circumstances where Mr Cottrell is alleged to have assumed a false identity”.

But company records confirm that, between December 2013 and March 2014, Hon Kong Yong was a director and shareholder at Archer Wise. Byline Times’ source confirmed that Yong was a consultant there for much longer, and knew him as a frequent, heavy gambler who smoked cannabis obsessively except during office hours.

According to the source, one day in 2014, staff including Hon Kong Yong had returned to the Archer Wise office to find the door damaged. It was unclear how or why, but it looked like a possible attempted break-in. Staff noticed that 'Oscar' had forgotten his bag inside and suspected that he had come back to retrieve it – raising suspicions of what may have been inside. So they decided to open the bag.

Inside Cottrell's bag, they discovered two passports: a British passport in George Cottrell’s real name, and a Swiss passport under Oscar D******. According to the source, Yong told those present at the discovery that he already knew of the two identities – and confirmed that George Cottrell was Cottrell’s real name.

It is already known that Cottrell has operated under at least three assumed identities.

Under the alias 'Bill', he advertised money-laundering services on a dark web marketplace – leading to his US conviction for wire fraud.

After his release, he registered his Montenegro company, Private Family Office, under the shortened name 'George Co', which has been linked to passports and bank transfers in that name.

He has also legally shortened his own surname to “Cotrel”, a change one judge has called deceptive. 

Archer Wise conducted money-laundering checks on the two passport identities found in the bag, and both were cleared by the UK Home Office and Swiss Embassy as genuine.

“As both authorities verified the passports were genuine, there were no other actions to be taken as we did not know the circumstances of him obtaining either passport,” said the former McMillan Woods partner. Yong was aware the checks had been carried out. “Being Yong’s friend [George Cottrell], it was just left at that,” the source added.

Cottrell’s lawyers denied to Byline Times that he had ever used a Swiss passport. They claimed instead that he “has a childhood friend called Oscar D*****” whose name or passport he “has never used”.*

The Swiss Embassy in London was contacted for comment.

Reform's Treasurer and Its Structural Change

After the discovery of his Swiss passport, George Cottrell lost his consulting role at Archer Wise. But he continued to work at Maxim under Mehrtash A’zami while Hon Kong Yong continued at Archer Wise. At this time, it appears that Cottrell was still using his false identity.

That year, 2014, George Cottrell joined Nigel Farage’s UKIP as a fundraiser.

Then, in 2015 – approximately a year after his time at Archer Wise ended – his associate and gambling partner Hon Kong Yong filed for bankruptcy. Yong had been facing increasing financial difficulties. Eventually, the combination of gambling, subsidence damage to his home, and mortgage arrears meant that he could no longer pay off his debt. The bankruptcy ended his ability to work as an accountant, and he also had to leave Archer Wise.

“No one knew what happened to Hon after that,” the senior accountant who had worked with him at the time told this publication. “We lost touch with him. Some of us thought he might have died.”

But in 2018, Yong was discharged from his bankruptcy. Three years later, he surfaced in Tivat as the owner of the Salon Privé casino, a luxury apartment, and a group of companies.

The former McMillan Woods partner was shocked to learn of Yong’s current position in Tivat: “I knew Yong, and I knew of his family and background. There was no way in which Yong would have been able to generate the income by himself to purchase a luxury casino or penthouse apartment in Montenegro.”

In 2015, George Cottrell had been promoted to UKIP’s head of fundraising and deputy treasurer. In 2016, he became Nigel Farage’s chief of staff.

But Cottrell was arrested by the FBI in July at a US airport as he travelled back from a Donald Trump campaign rally with Farage. Charged with multiple counts of money laundering, he pleaded guilty to wire fraud, was jailed, and released in March 2017.

Two years later, in 2019, Farage’s Brexit Party needed a new treasurer. Cottrell had already returned to the scene as a fundraiser for the party by May. His fraud conviction, however, ruled him out from taking the formal senior position. His former boss, Mehrtash A’zami, was put forward – providing Cottrell with a foothold inside the party’s corporate structure. 

It is likely that Cottrell would have had to admit his real identity to A’zami. Byline Times cannot verify when or how this happened. But it is clear that Reform’s treasurer knew of Cottrell’s previous false identity.

Asked why A’zami would have accepted an invitation from Cottrell to become treasurer of Reform, the former McMillan Woods partner speculated that “Cottrell had lost all A’zami’s money. He owed him. Perhaps this was his way of paying him back”.

On 27 June 2019, Mehrtash A’zami joined Reform UK Party Ltd – then still trading as the Brexit Party – as a director, shareholder, and treasurer.

Archived webpages seen by Byline Times show that, two weeks later, he was publicly listed as a partner for corporate finance and capital markets at McMillan Woods – the group that had kickstarted Cottrell’s career as 'Oscar'.

Alongside A’zami were two other McMillan Woods partners – both of whom had also known Cottrell in around 2012 because they had worked with him at A’zami’s firm, Maxim.

For the next six years, Reform UK Party Ltd’s corporate governance would be managed by a man who would become embedded in a Montenegrin company infrastructure shared by a nexus of Reform figures and George Cottrell himself.

Everything changed when the Electoral Commission referred George Cottrell’s mother, Fiona Cottrell's donations, to the police. That month, Nigel Farage announced the change in Reform's structure.

Mehrtash A’zami disappeared from politics.

Farage and Tice remained directors of the old party private company, now renamed Reform 2025 Ltd - but it was placed beneath a new company limited by guarantee, Reform UK Party Limited.

Tice has no registered role in the new parent, whose directors are Farage, Peter Durnell (a climate science denier and anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist) and Harvey Griffiths (Reform's new registered treasurer, a property investment mogul who champions private commercial solutions for the public sector across housing, the NHS and local authorities). But that does not reveal where ultimate corporate control can be found: the legal members who hold voting rights in the new company are not publicly identified.

Farage relinquished his personal majority shareholding, but emerged as the only director serving on both the parent and its subsidiary.

'A Blizzard of Bluster and Obfuscation'

Phil Brickell, the Labour MP who is Chair of the APPG on Anti-Corruption and Responsible Tax, told Byline Times that while the leader of Reform UK "may have called this sham by-election [in his Clacton-on-Sea seat] to dodge scrutiny... the questions are still mounting for Nigel Farage."

Brickell, who recently reported Farage to the Standards Commissioner over claims he allegedly lobbied Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey to drop plans for a state-led ‘Britcoin’ cryptocurrency, told Byline Times that the allegations made in our investigation "are incredibly serious".

"What on earth is Nigel Farage doing associating with George Cottrell, who, in his own words, is "like a son" to him? Law enforcement must now be allowed to establish who knew what, and when," Brickell said.

"Farage talks a lot about establishment stitch-ups. But if these allegations are substantiated, then what else could he call it? Time and time again we’re faced with a blizzard of bluster and obfuscation when it comes to Reform UK’s money."

Brickell added that the suggestion that the company behind Reform UK restructured in 2025 to conceal its real ownership "doesn’t surprise me in the slightest".

"Having worked in financial services compliance myself, the timing of the restructure, so soon after the police got involved, looks like a desperate attempt to cover Reform UK’s tracks."

*Byline Times contacted the 'childhood friend' whose name appeared on the discovered passport. He subsequently confirmed that he knew Cottrell many years ago, and was shocked to discover his identity had been hijacked this way and was contacting the authorities. To protect him from any association with Cottrell and his activities, Byline Times has since redacted his name.

Additional reporting by Adam Bienkov and Josiah Mortimer

This is also the case when it comes to getting a gauge on how bullish the mood is in British defence spending right now.

For it wasn’t the hyper-testosterone-geek names of ‘Menace-T’, ‘Omen’ and ‘Thunder’ that had been slapped on the AI-enabled weapons of the Californian defence technology firm Anduril that caught this correspondent’s attention when visiting the Farnborough International Airshow, one of the world's largest aerospace and defence exhibitions, earlier this week.

Instead it was the quality of the hand-soap in the toilets, the retro surfboard stickers that were being handed out to all comers and the cans of imported iced green tea bearing the slogan "Lattice for Mission Autonomy" that stood out as markers of just how much money is being spent on AI-enabled weapons right now.  

For in this Hampshire village, the world's largest arms companies have arrived with their branded gifts, their empty marketing campaigns (‘Advancing the Future Together’ or ‘We’re all on a journey’ were highlights of blandishments) and their promises of eternal safety at the right price.

Certainly they have arrived without any sense of moral doubt. Elbit UK, the British subsidiary of the Israeli arms company, offered bowls of cashew nuts beneath promotional films of its weapons systems blowing things sky high.  They declined to answer questions about allegations surrounding its role in what the UN has described as genocide in Gaza. 

Rafael, the Israeli state-owned defense technology company, was also there, and  its taciturn minder refused this correspondent access to its pavilion. He then went behind the glass doors and took photographs of yours truly.  No doubt they will be shared with Shin Bet, the Israel Security Agency.

Organisers expect record attendance this year. The number of international pavilions have increased by a third. Across an exhibition space spanning some 78 football pitches, blue-suited white male executives, British military officers and Middle-Eastern ministers mingled beside aircraft displays and scale models of missiles and drones. 

It’s all aboard the gravy train for defence, and governments are arriving with increasingly large chequebooks. Britain is among those preparing to spend.

The Labour Government has committed itself to increasing defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027, with serious discussion already underway about raising that figure to three per cent before the end of the decade (though the new Prime Minister is currently non-committal on that).

Defence, once a difficult sell in Whitehall, has become one of the few areas of public expenditure where politicians compete to promise more.  The double resignations of Defence Ministers under Sir Keir Starmer will, no doubt, weigh heavy on Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s mind. Perhaps this is why he gave one of those rebels, John Healey, the keys to 11 Downing Street as our new Chancellor.

Related reading: Ministry of Defence Slammed For ‘Incompetence’ After Sending F35 Jets to Gulf Without Spare Parts

On Wednesday, the new Defence Minister Wes Streeting unveiled Brontanax – BAE Systems’ autonomous collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) wingman that aims to fly alongside RAF fighter jets – at the air show. Each is estimated to cost north of £30m. These are eye-watering amounts compared to how much, for instance, Ukraine spends on its drones.

To justify these spending commitments, Britain's political language has become increasingly martial. The public is told that the country must "wake up" to daily threats. Russia is described as an aggressive and expansionist power. China is increasingly framed as the defining strategic challenge of the twenty-first century. Military chiefs warn that Britain faces a more dangerous world than at any point in their living memory.

Certainly, there are reasons for concern.

Over the past year, the United Kingdom has faced a succession of increasingly assertive Russian-linked military and intelligence activities, including covert submarine operations in and around British waters, repeated harassment of HMS Prince of Wales by Russian maritime patrol aircraft, the alleged use of lasers by the intelligence vessel Yantar against RAF pilots monitoring its movements, and multiple Russian strategic bombers near UK airspace.

But acknowledging those dangers is not the same as concluding that every additional billion pounds spent on defence, every overseas deployment, or every new military commitment necessarily makes Britain safer.

Indeed, before committing ever larger sums to defence, shouldn’t Britain’s buyers at Farnborough ask a more fundamental question: what exactly are they spending their money defending?

Britain is one of the most geographically secure nations on earth: an island surrounded almost entirely by allies, protected by NATO's collective defence guarantee and armed with around 225 nuclear warheads carried aboard continuously deployed ballistic missile submarines. It possesses one of the world's most sophisticated intelligence networks and has not faced a credible threat of invasion since 1940.

Yet Britain's defence posture bears surprisingly little resemblance to that of a nation principally organised around territorial defence. Rather it’s as if the Empire never ended.

Why, for instance, does Britain maintain approximately 145 military sites across 42 countries? Why did we recently deploy personnel to around 171 nations around the world through exercises, training missions and operations? How does our overseas military estate, stretching from Oman to Kenya, Belize to Brunei, really protect this sceptr’d isle?

These questions are not asked.  Yes, Britain increasingly describes itself as a middle power operating in an era of constrained public finances, but then it continues to maintain strategic ambitions more commonly associated with a global power. 

That ambition carries costs – costs that our nation might not be able to afford.

Defence is now among the largest areas of public capital investment, second only to transport. It is broadly equivalent to the combined budgets of the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice. It comfortably exceeds annual spending on housing and local government. And the bill is rising.

And, please, be in no doubt. Britain's expanding defence budget is not simply enriching contractors; it is sustaining a system with a powerful interest in its own growth. 

The chief executives of Britain's five largest defence firms received an average of £5.2 million in 2024, some 138 times the salary of the median British worker. 

The press are – some might argue – useful idiots in this emboldened military industrial complex. Nearly 60% of retired senior military figures quoted in the British media on defence matters were, on at least one occasion, presented as independent experts without disclosure of their commercial ties to the defence and security industries.  Invest in defence, they tell the nation, without it being made clear they are also asking the nation to invest in them. 

So what really emerges here in Farnborough is that British defence has become something close to political Teflon. It shapes the national conversation on security while remaining remarkably resistant to scrutiny. Successive governments justify higher spending by invoking jobs, growth and national resilience, yet it remains very unclear how much of that prosperity extends beyond a relatively small circle of major contractors, consultants and former officials whose fortunes rise alongside the defence budget.

Polling certainly suggests the public remains unconvinced. Earlier this year, polling company Ipsos found that only 37% of Britons support increasing defence spending, while 40% believe current levels are sufficient and 15% favour reductions. At the same time, significant numbers oppose cuts to healthcare, welfare and other public services to fund military expansion.

Even people here at Farnborough remain unconvinced that any but the big defence players will benefit from the national boost in defence spending.

As Elise Littlejohn, of Bruntons Aero Products, told Byline Times, she sees promises for defence spend hikes “advertised on the news, but it’s not clear where to go to bid on these contracts. The expectation is that these big contracts won’t trickle down to companies like ours.”

In a similar vein, Andrew Mair, Chief Executive of the Midlands Aerospace Alliance, said that there is a tendency for Ministry of Defence contracts to “go back to existing suppliers, making it harder for new companies to enter.  Defence is seen to be a closed shop and (for new comers) it’s very difficult for them to see how to diversify into defence.”

Reasonable people can disagree about whether Britain should spend more on defence. Russia's aggression is real, as are cyber attacks, threats to undersea infrastructure and growing instability across Europe. Yet Britain's greatest vulnerabilities increasingly lie in its digital networks, energy systems and supply chains. It’s less clear how postings in Kenya, Oman, Belize and Brunei protect the UK.

So, perhaps, before Britain commits itself to spending £80 billion a year on defence, it owes itself an honest answer. 

Is it defending its territory, people and critical infrastructure, or is it preserving a global military posture that has been inherited from another age?

Until that question is answered, Britain risks spending more on defence than at any point since the Cold War without ever deciding what, precisely, it is trying to defend. And, judging by the expensive hand soap here at Farnborough and that sweet smell of defence profits that it imprints on your hands, few here have much interest in asking it.

The opposition centres on the Federated Data Platform (FDP), the Palantir-built centralised data tool bringing together NHS records from across England, and which is projected to cost at least £330 million. Palantir claims the national data platform is already improving care by cutting cancer diagnosis waits and patient discharge delays.

However, the firm is controversial, widely viewed as closely aligned with the Trump administration’s aggressive ICE-led mass deportation programme, providing tech underpinning ICE’s deportation system, which in 2024 signed a “strategic partnership” with the Israeli Defense Ministry to aid Israel’s military operations in Gaza.

Sheffield City Council, as first reported by The Citizens, recently became the first local authority in England to approve a cross-party motion opposing Palantir’s involvement in the NHS, backed by campaign organisation Medact Sheffield.

The motion, ‘Rejecting the NHS Palantir Contract and Protecting Patient Data’, was tabled by Green Party councillor Toby Mallinson, and passed on 24 June, receiving support from 62 councillors, with amendments from Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors, and 13 abstentions to the motion.

The initial motion, symbolically passed by Sheffield council, cited concerns about the award of the FDP contract, explaining that it would be unlikely to meet the standards set out in the Council’s own Ethical Procurement Policy.

It also noted a potential lack of public confidence in patient data confidentiality, lack of perceived ‘sovereignty’ in ceding data to the US firm rather than trusted British firms, opposition to companies deeply embedded within military and intelligence services, and a concern that patients opting out could fragment NHS datasets. It also cites a growing withdrawal from Palantir’s products across Europe as a potential precedent for the motion.

It called upon the Government to exercise the break clause in Palantir’s contract, ‘transitioning to a publicly-owned, transparent, UK-based operator’. The council motion also calls on the four Sheffield NHS Trusts and Integrated Care Board (ICB) to freeze integration with the FDP.

It also backed a review of council data-sharing agreements to ensure no local authority data “interacts with systems managed by Palantir.”

The motion requests that the Health Scrutiny Sub-Committee considers questioning Sheffield NHS Trusts and ICB on any risks of relying on Palantir.

Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has said it is not adopting the FDP at this time because it is embedding a different patient records system.

But Sheffield now isn’t the only local authority to have raised concerns over Palantir, or passed motions calling for Government action.

Other Councils Follow Suit

In nearby Rotherham, councillors and campaigners called for an end to the FDP deal, in a motion brought forward by Independent councillor Taiba Yasseen along with the Greens, and backed by Labour councillors. Again, it called upon the Government to end its NHS agreements with Palantir. This motion was approved on 15 July by a majority vote.

It follows London Mayor Sadiq Khan blocking a contract between Palantir and the Metropolitan Police in May, enraging senior Met figures and triggering a lawsuit from the US data giant.

A spokesperson for Palantir told Byline Times: “These motions are bad for patients because the FDP is helping to improve care – including 110,000 additional operations, a 15 per cent reduction in delays to discharge to long stay patients and a 6.8 per cent increase in the number of patients finding out whether or not they have cancer within 28 days. The programme is also one of 30 out of 213 major Government programmes that has a green delivery rating, forecast to deliver £5 benefit for every £1 spent.”

Speaking to Byline Times, Yasseen said: “The NHS runs on trust. We are sending a clear message that the people of Rotherham expect the highest standards when it comes to protecting our most personal information.

“Our motion calls on the Government to put patient privacy, public confidence and investment in British and NHS led solutions ahead of dependence on Palantir, an overseas corporation whose conduct has raised serious ethical and human rights concerns. We should be building the NHS’s digital future here in Britain, not outsourcing it abroad.”

Related reading: Palantir Co-Founder Peter Thiel and Reform UK’s Cambridge University Recruitment Pipeline Project Revealed

Mounting Pressure On Ministers

A third local authority, East Herts council also appears to have set its sights on Palantir, with a motion due to be discussed this Wednesday 22 July. The motion states: “Palantir is now deeply embedded in the NHS and Ministry of Defence – and the longer they are in place, the harder and more expensive it becomes to remove them.”

It cites recent reporting from Democracy for Sale which reports that the tool is ten times slower than current systems already in place and has “poor user experience”, highlights the lack of a competitive tender process, and highlights a recent Health Service Journal article suggesting the true cost of FDP implementation is likely to exceed £1 billion.

The backlash to ICB integration with Palantir’s FDP isn’t an isolated phenomenon. Last year, Greater Manchester became the first major health region in England to opt out of installing the national data platform, doubling down on its position as of May 2026, due to the reported lack of evidence over the benefits of the technology.

Manchester’s ICB has offered a UK-developed alternative to Palantir, concluding that its own homegrown alternative, built by British universities, NHS clinicians, and domestic technology firms, was a stronger option.

Two parliamentary committees of cross-party MPs have now urged the Labour Government to ditch the £330 million deal with Palantir, and to look at alternative options, citing ‘serious mistrust’ among the public and medical profession of its NHS system. Both the science and technology committee and health and social care committee have both raised concerns over Palantir’s presence in the health service.

This itself follows months of pressure from campaign organisations, and NHS CEO Sir Jim Mackey said he wants to see a full review of the effectiveness of the FDP, sparking a watchdog investigation into it, after doubts have been raised from within NHS England about its effectiveness, as first reported by the FT. For many, it now seems a matter of when, not if, the contract will be halted.

Recent reports indicate that Britain’s new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, is potentially set to ditch Palantir from the NHS, and in his first keynote speech on Monday said he wanted to see social value play a larger part in contracts awarded by the Government.

Speaking to Byline Times, Rory Gibson, Medact Sheffield co-coordinator and resident doctor, said: “It’s powerful to witness an increasing number of local authorities taking a stand in opposition of the Government and NHS’s decision to partner with Palantir. These decisions by local authorities are directly in response to grassroots organisers across the country resisting the takeover of our public services by unaccountable and unethical tech firms.”

“Hopefully, we continue to see more councils pass similar resolutions meaning that the Government eventually has to listen and realises that, similar to what recent YouGov polling suggests, the public do not want Palantir in the NHS.”

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

But these are some major changes that the now-former PM will be hoping adds to his legacy. It may not be noticed now, but it may be in a few years.

The announcements below are from the 12th July to the 19th, Keir Starmer’s last full week in office. So this is just a snapshot of his final flourishes. There’s a lot in here nonetheless.

Plug-In Solar

Byline Times spotted some legislation quietly laid just before Starmer’s departure. It is secondary legislation and doesn’t need a vote. The rules to legalise installing plug-in solar set-ups (or ‘balcony solar’ as it’s often known), without needing an electrician for sign-off, come into force at the end of August.

That means millions more people will have access to solar power, particularly those who don't own a roof. That's just in time to meet the Government’s self-imposed deadline of getting the rules in place by the end of the summer.

A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson told this outlet: “We expect plug-in solar panels to be available to buy this summer, giving millions of households the opportunity to cut their energy bills.

“Already widely used throughout Europe, these easy-to-install panels could save many households significant amounts of money while supporting our drive for clean, homegrown power."

The spokesperson said Government was working to remove barriers as quickly as possible so that "every household can have the choice to install plug-in solar in their homes.”

British Steel Nationalised

A nationalisation of this scale would usually flood the front pages.

On 16th July, Keir Starmer’s Government took British Steel into public ownership, “to protect the future of steel production in the UK.”

The move follows the recent Steel Industry (Nationalisation) Act becoming law. Ministers concluded that bringing the company into public ownership was necessary to protect the UK’s national interest.

Maintaining steel production at British Steel’s Scunthorpe site is considered essential to preserving the UK’s ability to make steel domestically. Former Chinese owner Jingye protested against the move, but the risk of production stopping altogether there was considered something the Government had to prevent. PM Starmer said British Steel is “part of the fabric of our nation and a cornerstone of Britain’s industrial strength.”

In a separate but related announcement, also enacted under Keir Starmer, all government contracts using steel will have to confirm whether they are using British steel, or explain why they are not.

There is also new guidance to all government departments to use the national security powers in the 2023 Procurement Act to directly award certain government contracts (“where appropriate and lawful”) to British companies, including steel, shipbuilding, the energy sector and AI initially.

Review of Election Spending Limits

This could be a big one for the future of free and fair elections. The Government has asked the Electoral Commission to review party spending limits for UK elections, which were massively hiked by the Conservatives, with little debate, in 2023.

Minister Dixon wrote, in a missive that received practically zero coverage: “In December 2025, in light of the Nathan Gill case, and the deeply concerning evidence of Russian state-linked actors’ attempt to influence democracy in the UK, the Government appointed Philip Rycroft to lead an independent review into foreign financial interference in UK politics. The review set out to rigorously test the financial safeguards we currently have in place and recommend areas for improving mitigations…

“Philip Rycroft argued that reducing spending limits could potentially relieve some of the fund-raising pressure, in turn diminishing the inducement to look to non-permissible sources to stay ahead.” Making a recommendation was out of his remit so the Government is asking the EC to look at it, and come back with recommendations within a year.

“Party spending limits were raised significantly for the first time in 2023, and since then we have seen many stakeholders argue for lower limits, including Transparency International and Spotlight on Corruption.

" Considering the concerns I have heard during the course of the Bill, and the wider views presented by Mr Rycroft and other stakeholders, I am of the opinion that an independent assessment is needed of the adequacy of the current spending limits in electoral law,” the Minister wrote. The Electoral Commission has agreed to conduct the review. The full letter is here.

Solar for Schools

Nearly 250 schools and colleges in England already have government-funded solar panels, slashing their bills and freeing up cash for pupils. Now 100 more will join the Great British Energy Solar Partnership, backed by “up to £40 million” from the Government. Another 150 are joining a pilot project working with private firms but with no upfront cost (presumably a ‘rental’ or repayment model).

Secondary schools who have had solar panels installed, and their lights upgraded to LED lighting, are according to Government figures saving £58,600 a year, and primaries £21,000 – cash going straight back into teaching.

Dartmoor Ponies Saved

Following a lot of consternation from animal lovers – and a fair amount of media frenzy – Dartmoor ponies will be removed from ‘stocking rate calculations’, so that farmers do not face a choice between keeping ponies and maintaining sheep or cattle.

A new dedicated pony supplement will be introduced into farming schemes to remove any financial incentive to reduce pony populations in the Devon National Park.

Related reading: Andy Burnham’s Cabinet Represents Starmerism Without Starmer

Awaab's Law Progress

All social housing tenants will get more rights to have serious problems dealt with faster, under strict new rules for landlords from 30 November 2026.

The changes are being brought in under Awaab’s Law – introduced after two-year-old Awaab Ishak died in 2020 after living with dangerous damp and mould.

Social landlords will have to fix more dangers like electrical faults, pest infestations and unsafe stairs to quicker timeframes. More hazards that pose an “immediate danger” to social housing tenants must be investigated and made safe within 24 hours, and serious issues that aren’t an immediate danger will have to be fixed ‘short term’ within around 15 days (12 weeks to start longer structural repairs).

Small Boats Inquiry

On 9 November 2023, the then Secretary of State for Transport announced an Inquiry into the tragic events of November 2021 when at least 30 people died attempting to cross the channel in a small boat. On 5 February 2026, Sir Ross Cranston published the Inquiry’s report.

The Inquiry made 18 recommendations. 15 were principally operational, and three focused on policy matters related to legislation, oversight and ownership of rescue vessels. The Government under PM Starmer published its interim report last week, accepting 15 operational recommendations in full.

IRGC Banned

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Islamic Movement of Companions of the Right (IMCR), and Russia’s GRU Volunteer Corps have formally been designated under the (very new) National Security (State Threats) Act 2026, after Parliament approved an order laid by the Home Secretary on Monday (13 July) “to protect the safety of the UK.” It is now a criminal offence to express support for these bodies.

There have long been calls to outlaw the IRGC, which officials believe are linked to a wave of attacks on Jewish groups in the UK, and hacking efforts against businesses and infrastructure.

Related reading: The Missing Part Of Keir Starmer’s Plan To Clamp Down On Foreign Election Meddling

Energy Drinks

The Government will ban the sale of high-caffeine energy drinks to under 16s in England.

The proposals, ministers said, will protect thousands of children who drink high-caffeine energy drinks daily. The ban will come into force in April 2027 and will apply in shops, vending machines and online.

Planning Overhaul…Mooted

Starmer’s Government launched a consultation on extending reforms that limit legal challenges against Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) to major housing, transport and energy developments – such as solar projects, road building or affordable homes.

A spokesperson said: “While judicial review remains a vital safeguard, the consultation will explore targeted reforms – including limiting repeated unsuccessful attempts to bring claims and introducing clearer court timetables – to prevent weak and meritless challenges from holding up nationally important projects, while protecting access to justice and the rule of law.”

Coastguard U-Turn

Plans to move to an ‘expenses-only’ volunteer model for the Coastguard Rescue Service in September 2026 have been scrapped, following a backlash. Minister Keir Mather said he had “heard the deep concerns from many in the coastguard rescue officer community about this change” and listened.

Social Care Clout

A new negotiating body is being set up as part of the first ever adult social care fair pay agreement, representing millions of care workers. Made up of trade unions and employers, the body will negotiate on pay, terms and conditions and wider employment matters, “giving care workers a voice.” It was a Labour manifesto pledge that’s now being met. The new Adult Social Care Negotiating Body will be set up by the end of the year.

Other Announcements

The outgoing PM did a lot of international work in his final weeks, perhaps a hint of his post-politics career. He cemented relations with Ukraine with a visit and a show of UK solidarity – plus €300 million to help deliver advanced Swedish Gripen fighter jets to Ukraine.

Jewish communities will see a “major boost in protection” with more than £250 million in funding across the next three years, “as ministers step up efforts to keep communities safe following a series of attacks in London and the raising of the national terror threat level from substantial to severe.” The funding will deliver over 500 additional officers across England and Wales, for security in Jewish neighbourhoods and around schools, synagogues and community centres, while strengthening national counter-terrorism capabilities.

The Government has accelerated a drive to protect 30% of England’s land for nature by 2030, with what it calls a "clear path" to the internationally-agreed target of protecting and improving 30% of land by 2030.

Consumers who want a refund for faulty goods will now have the same clear, enforceable rights as they would with any other regulated financial product. Buy-Now, Pay-Later firms must now carry out affordability checks before offering credit, “ensuring no one borrows what they cannot realistically repay.”

Related reading: The Real ‘Moral Bankruptcy’ That Brought Down Keir Starmer’s Premiership

The ‘Music Growth Package’ will receive a new cash injection of £15 million from Arts Council England – bringing it to £45 million in total. The Government says it will support more than 2,000 projects and at least 40,000 artists and music professionals over the next three years.

It includes “at least” £12.5 million of funding for a Music in Libraries initiative, which will be co-designed by the Ed Sheeran Foundation and other partners. Library services in England will be able to apply for the funding to create free studio spaces, recording booths, mixing desks and state-of-the-art equipment.

British lawyers, accountants, architects and other service providers will reportedly benefit from the UK’s “most significant trade deal for services ever” following an agreement made between the UK and Switzerland last week. Officials say the new Free Trade Agreement (FTA) will unlock around £5.2 billion a year in additional UK services exports to Switzerland “in the long run”.

The Government announced that the first set of regulations on social media restrictions for under-18s (including a ban on social media for under-16s) will be laid before Parliament by the end of this year, with measures expected to come into force in spring 2027, “alongside robust implementation and enforcement.”

Just outside our coverage window, from the 10th July, is the fact that the UK ratified the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement – a “landmark treaty” to better protect the world’s oceans.

Big new fines for fly-tippers. New legislation will increase the maximum fine for fly-tipping waste to £5,000 – a 400% uplift from the previous level of £1,000. The top fine for littering on streets will also be increased to £750 – up 50%. (The announcement itself doesn’t say, but it applies only to England as much of this is devolved in Scotland and Wales).

Under proposals published on 15th July, barristers undertaking legal aid (government-funded) work will receive an average fee increase of 11 per cent, “recognising their vital role in delivering justice and supporting efforts to tackle court delays.” Barristers handling rape and serious sexual offence cases will see fee increases of more than 13 per cent, rising to almost 50 per cent in some guilty plea cases.

The Ethics and Integrity Commission has been beefed up with some strong new appointments.

The loudest fireworks are set to be banned, following (another) consultation.

A rough timetable has been set out for leasehold reforms, to give leaseholders more transparency and protect them from unfair charges.

Related reading: All the Big Government Reforms the Media is Missing During Keir Starmer’s Leadership Crisis

A website has gone live for families to find cheaper days out and children’s meals in restaurants closer to home, via the Great British Summer Savings scheme which is currently live. Chancellor Reeves cut VAT from 20% to 5% on eligible activities including family tickets to the cinema, admission tickets for both children and adults to amusement parks, and children’s meals in restaurants from 25 June to 1 September.

The risk of democratic interference has been added to the Government’s National Risk Register. This is significant because it makes it a priority for professionals to prepare for risks and be vigilant about the risk of foreign meddling in our democracy.

Tougher rules on executive pay in academy trusts in England – exec pay must not rise at a faster rate than teachers.

The Government has laid the legislation to legalise electronic balloting for trade unions, including strike and general secretary votes. Unions have been banned from letting members vote online until it’s legalised this October.

Consultation on equal pay launched, “to root out unfairness from the equal pay system so that it works for everyone.”

Border opened up between Gibraltar and Spain, as the UK signed a Treaty with the EU which “delivers economic and trade certainty for people and businesses in Gibraltar, while safeguarding British sovereignty and protecting UK military operations.”

Fulfilling a call of families who’ve had relatives taken hostage abroad: Alistair Burt has been appointed the UK’s first ever envoy for complex consular cases. He will focus on “the most difficult and complex detention cases involving British people overseas, including those with human rights concerns.” Such as media figure Jimmy Lai, imprisoned in Hong Kong, and many more.

Finally, 26 new peerages were announced and there may be further resignation honours to come. Among those ennobled are Sir Sadiq Khan – now Lord Khan, and Christina McAnea – former General Secretary of Unison who lost out to the left-wing Andrea Eagan recently.

Keir Starmer was busy in his final weeks. He’s unlikely to be thanked for it in the short-term, but hindsight can be a surprising thing.

This piece has been amended to correct an error in Andrea Eagan's name.

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