Nigel Farage bought a £1.4m house in Surrey on 10 May 2024, and the purchase has become a fresh point of scrutiny as records and company accounts are checked against his account of how he paid for it.
Farage’s spokesperson said last week that he funded the Surrey property with the £1.5m fee he received for taking part in I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! in late 2023. But the home was bought in Farage’s own name, not by Thorn in the Side Ltd, and there is no mortgage on the property.
The numbers in the company filings are central to that explanation. Thorn in the Side Ltd had £300,000 in cash on 31 May 2023. By 31 May 2024, that figure had risen to £1.7m, and by 31 May 2025 it had increased again to £2m. The accounts suggest no dividend was paid out in the period, and Nimesh Shah of Blick Rothenberg reviewed the figures for the Financial Times.
Shah said the company accounts suggested the money from Farage’s reality TV appearance was not used to buy the house. A Reform spokesperson said the property was not bought with Christopher Harborne’s gift, and added: “Nigel has multiple sources of income, as you can see from his parliamentary register.”
The Surrey purchase now sits alongside another issue Farage is facing: the parliamentary standards commissioner is investigating his failure to declare a £5m gift from Harborne. Farage says that gift was made to fund his security, but he did not register it in his register of interests, even though it was made within 12 months of his election as the MP for Clacton.
That leaves the same basic question at the center of both controversies: where the money went, and what it was used for. Farage’s side says the house was paid for with his television fee and not with Harborne’s gift. The company filings point in the same direction, showing money building inside Thorn in the Side Ltd rather than flowing out as a dividend. What remains under investigation is whether his handling of the £5m gift met the standards expected of him as an MP.
