Nigel Farage’s personal media company made £1.25mn in profits last year bolstered by a lucrative gig participating in a reality TV show ahead of the 2024 UK general election.
The Reform UK leader’s company Thorn in The Side Ltd also reported a £1.4mn increase in its cash position for the year ended May 31 2024, according to accounts filed on Tuesday.
Farage said on Wednesday that profits registered in the last financial year were largely attributable to his appearance on the ITV reality TV show I’m a Celebrity . . . Get me Out Of Here!, for which he received a £1.5mn fee.
He was a contestant on the show in late 2023, before his return to front-line politics in the run-up to the July 2024 election, when he won a seat for the first time as one of five MPs elected for Reform.
“I loved doing it and got paid handsomely,” Farage said of the TV show.
Farage has also earned money presenting on the rightwing news channel GB News, writing newspaper articles, making speeches and recording videos on request on the Cameo app.
Thorn in The Side Ltd is Farage’s vehicle for “media, speaking, journalism and other services”, according to the parliamentary register of interests. He is the sole owner of the company.
The register shows that Farage has been paid £265,000 for his work presenting on GB News since July last year, when he became an MP, equating to roughly £38,000 a month.
The Reform leader also owns close to 500,000 shares in GB News — a lossmaking company that is majority owned by hedge fund manager Paul Marshall and investment firm Legatum — through Thorn in the Side.
GB News has drawn censure from Ofcom for its use of MPs onscreen and the media regulator has repeatedly found that the channel breached rules which prevent politicians from acting as news presenters. It has not found that any of Farage’s shows breached its rules.
Reform has climbed in opinion polls since the election and is now polling at about 26 per cent, higher than both Labour and the Tories.
The newest register of MPs’ interests, published earlier this week, also showed that businessman Christopher Harborne paid for Farage’s four-day trip to the US for President Donald Trump’s inauguration last month, which was valued at £27,616.
Harborne also paid for a private jet flight and accommodation for Farage and himself to visit Trump in the US following last July’s assassination attempt.
He donated more than £10mn to the Brexit party — the former name of Reform UK — in 2019 and 2020, but has not given money to the party since then.
Reform donor George Cottrell paid for Farage to travel to Palm Beach in the US for three days in December, the register shows.
Farage’s outside income, in addition to his £91,346 salary as an MP, includes his role as a brand ambassador for a gold bullion firm called Direct Bullion, advertising and promoting the company on podcasts and in the media. He received £280,000 for this work in December and January.
He also earned nearly £10,000 since the election from Elon Musk’s social media platform X as part of the social media site’s “creator revenue” programme which allows premium users to monetise posts that go viral.
Reform MP Rupert Lowe has also been making a significant income from X, receiving nearly £20,000 in payments from X since December, according to the MPs’ register of interests.
Musk himself has regularly reposted and amplified Lowe’s posts, and last month said that he could be a potential replacement to Farage as leader of the populist party.