Nigel Farage resigns as MP to force by-election he will stand in
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Oscar Rickett
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Tue, 07/07/2026 - 14:11
Reform UK leader says he's done nothing wrong, after longstanding relationship with aristocrat and convicted felon George Cottrell revealed
Nigel Farage announces his resignation as an MP on Tuesday 7 July 2026 (Screengrab)
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Blaming the British establishment and media for revelations about his connections to crypto billionaires and convicted aristocrats, Nigel Farage resigned as an MP on Tuesday before announcing his intention to compete in the resulting by-election.
Over the weekend, the Sunday Times revealed that George Cottrell, a 32-year-old aristocrat and convicted felon who previously faced 20 years in US prison for 21 counts related to money laundering, fraud, blackmail and extortion, paid for security and social media staff for Farage in the year before he became an MP.
The paper described “Posh George” as Farage’s “closest adviser for more than a decade”, reporting that the crypto gambler travels with the Reform UK leader in Westminster and around the country.
These revelations follow those relating to Christopher Harborne, a billionaire who gave Farage £5m in early 2024, months before he was elected MP for Clacton, Essex, in the east of England.
Cottrell is connected to Harborne through Tether.bet, an online bookmaker and casino that also has its own digital currency, which is part-owned by Harborne, who is based in Thailand.
The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards is currently investigating whether Farage broke the rules over that gift.
Farage said on Tuesday that he was facing a new investigation because of the Sunday Times investigation into Cottrell.
Under the Commons standards committee’s code of conduct procedural protocol, it is clear that if an MP stands down while an inquiry is under way, and is then re-elected, the inquiry can be reactivated.
'Making money is not a crime'
The Reform UK leader, who has been one of the most prominent right-wing figures in British politics for at least two decades, announced his resignation as MP in a televised press conference recorded live in London on Tuesday afternoon.
He hit out at the media and political establishment over the recent revelations into his various relationships and sources of wealth. “The establishment has decided they can’t beat us fairly. They’ve chosen to use foul means,” he said.
“I’ve done nothing wrong. I’ve not broken the law in any way. I’ve not misused public money. My personal MP expenses are zero.”
The former commodities trader said that Britain’s political and media class “seem to fundamentally object to any MP who has outside income”.
“Making money is not a crime,” he said, before going on to say that he had given up his former job in finance “at a huge cost”.
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Farage credited this decision as leading him to become a member of the European parliament and a campaigner for Britain to leave the EU whcih resulted, eventually, in Brexit.
He said that having come out of his decades-long fight for Brexit with “very little money”, he then went on to make money in various ways, including as an influencer and broadcaster.
Farage described Harborne’s £5m gift as “a lottery win”, and a “large personal gift”. “Do we want leaders that know how to make money?” he asked.
Responding to Farage's announcement, Rupert Lowe, the former Reform MP who now leads rival party Restore, said: "He should have declared that five million pounds. He knows it. We all know it. Now he is going to weaponise a by-election to distract from that...
"Will Farage fund it out of his own pocket? Because he bloody well should."
Farage has been credited with inspiring violent far-right protests across the UK and Northern Ireland in which care workers have been burned out of their homes and migrants violently attacked.
He said that he is regularly threatened and described an incident in which he had to leave his local pub because of a “local mob”, who he then said “wrote off” his car.
Farage said the “final straw” for him came when “the editor of the Times” published what the Reform UK leader described as a picture of his daughter’s home.
Last week the Times published an article on Farage’s multi-million pound property portfolio, which includes a house his daughter lives in. “I’ve never been angrier in my life,” Farage said, referring to reporting from Sky News, the Times and the Sunday Times.
Both the Times and Sunday Times are owned by the Murdoch family’s News Corp. Farage has previously described Rupert Murdoch, the family’s 95-year-old leader, as a “remarkable bloke” and “very good man”.
The two men were filmed together at a garden party shortly after Britain voted to leave the EU, with their mood at the time described as “ecstatic”.
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