| Notes |
Laurence Fox’s Reclaim party received almost as much money in donations as the Liberal Democrats in the first quarter of 2021, all of it coming from a Brexit-supporting investment manager.
The actor, activist and lockdown sceptic, who finished sixth in last month’s London mayoral elections, received £1,153,300 in donations, the Electoral Commission said, just below the Lib Dems’ £1,278,073.
The Electoral Commission statistics show that all of Fox’s donations came from Jeremy Hosking, making him the biggest single political donor for the quarter.
Hosking is a multimillionaire fund manager, Brexit supporter and steam train enthusiast. He was known to be a supporter of Fox, with some earlier reports claiming he had bankrolled the actor’s party with up to £5m in funding.
When he launched the party in September last year, Fox claimed he had £5m in donations. Prompted by an appearance on BBC One’s Question Time in which he railed against accusations of racism in the treatment by the media of the Duchess of Sussex, Fox reinvented himself as a critic of “woke” culture, initially via Twitter.
At one point Fox criticised the portrayal of a Sikh soldier in the first world war film 1917, but apologised after others pointed out the contribution of about 130,000 Sikhs in the British army during the war.
He described Reclaim as seeking to take back British values from politicians, who he said had “lost touch with the people”. In the London mayoral race, despite considerable media coverage, Fox took just under 48,000 first-choice votes, working out at about £25 in donations for every vote secured. |