Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and party chair Lee Anderson have raked in more than £1 million from the right-wing broadcaster GB News, DeSmog can reveal. 

Farage has earned more than £700,000 from the broadcaster since he was elected to Parliament in July 2024, while Anderson has made over £300,000 during his three years as a presenter on the channel. 

GB News, launched in June 2021, has been accused of becoming “Reform TV” for hiring party figures as presenters and mirroring its talking points. Farage became a GB News presenter in July 2021 and currently hosts a show three nights a week. 

The Reform leader’s personal income has come under intense scrutiny recently after it was revealed by The Guardian that he had received a £5 million gift from major Reform donor Christopher Harborne months before he reclaimed the party leadership and stood for Parliament. 

Opposition parties have accused Farage of breaking parliamentary rules for failing to declare the gift after he was elected, and it is now the subject of an investigation by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner.

GB News has been Farage’s largest income source since he became the MP for Clacton, earning him £704,000 since July 2024. The Reform leader is the highest-earning MP, racking up more than £2 million on top of his £94,000 a year public salary in less than two years. 

Ellie Chowns, a Green Party MP, said: “Politics should be about public service, not personal profit. A majority of the public think that MPs should not have second jobs. Nigel ‘nine-jobs’ Farage – like all MPs – should focus on serving his constituents, not on filling his bank accounts.”

Anderson’s register of interests states that he has received £100,000 a year as a GB News presenter since he joined the platform in March 2023. A former Conservative Party deputy chairman, Anderson defected to Farage’s outfit in March 2024 and was appointed as Reform’s chair in May 2026. 

Reform politician Matthew Goodwin – who unsuccessfully stood for the party in the Gorton and Denton by-election in February – is also a GB News presenter. During its first five years, seven sitting MPs have been allowed to present programmes regularly on GB News, including four Conservative politicians. Jacob Rees-Mogg, who lost his seat at the 2024 election, is the only Tory politician left on its roster. 

“Just as Fox basically became the channel of Donald Trump, it’s clear they have turned GB News into the Reform channel,” former GB News lead presenter and chair Andrew Neil told The New World in March. “I think they see themselves as in the vanguard of the Reform movement, and in a way, the politics has worked to their advantage.”

The broadcaster has been accused of promoting radical right-wing narratives and conspiracy theories. It has also often appeared to breach rules established by Ofcom, although was rarely punished by the broadcast regulator under its previous chair Michael Grade, who departed the role in April. 

GB News presenters and guests have claimed on air that climate policies are designed to “remove seven and a half billion people from the world”, that the Covid vaccine is causing “turbo cancer”, and that the rollout of the jab was equivalent to “mass murder” – comparable to the actions of “doctors in pre-Nazi Germany”.

The channel has frequently broadcast climate science denial and attacks on clean energy policies. In 2022, one third of GB News presenters cast doubt on climate science on air, according to a DeSmog analysis published with The Guardian. 

Anna Sabine MP, Liberal Democrat spokesperson for culture, media and sport, said: “As if £5 million in crypto donations wasn’t enough, it now looks like Nigel Farage and Lee Anderson have pocketed over £1 million to spew their divisive rhetoric on air. We want a tougher Ofcom that will enforce the rules, not allow one party to have their own personal propaganda machine that masquerades as an ‘unbiased’ channel.”

The Labour government has banned MPs from holding paid advisory and consultancy roles as second jobs, and Parliament’s Committee on Standards is conducting an inquiry into whether further restrictions are needed.

Kamila Kingstone, senior campaign lead at Spotlight on Corruption, said: “MPs are paid to represent constituents, scrutinise legislation, and promote the public interest as a full-time job. It is very disappointing that the parliamentary process for looking at how to limit MPs’ second jobs is taking so long. Ensuring that MPs’ outside earnings do not conflict with their primary role could not be more important to restoring trust in politics.”

GB News – which has so far lost £131 million – is co-owned by Paul Marshall, a hedge fund billionaire, and the Legatum Group, a Dubai-based investment firm.

Marshall, who helped to fund the Brexit campaign, has been accused of holding radical views. The anti-racism campaign group Hope Not Hate uncovered that Marshall had liked and reposted content on his X account that expressed a wide variety of anti-Islam, anti-immigration opinions, including posts that called for “mass expulsions” of migrants from the UK. 

Responding to Hope Not Hate, a representative for Marshall said: “He posts on a wide variety of subjects and those cited represent a small and unrepresentative sample of over 5,000 posts. This sample does not represent his views.”

Marshall, who also owns The Spectator magazine, has expressed anti-climate views. During a speech at the 2025 Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, he argued that the Western world had been “infected” with a “climate derangement syndrome”, leading countries to “sacrifice our economic prosperity and our people’s livelihoods all for the sake of making some fractional changes to the level of CO2 in the atmosphere”. 

In March, the UK’s independent Climate Change Committee said the entire cost of cutting emissions to net zero by 2050 would be less than a single fossil fuel price shock – two of which have been experienced by the UK in the past five years.

Marshall’s hedge fund has billions invested in fossil fuel companies, and, in March, more than 100 Church leaders urged the GB News co-owner to declare his financial interests in fossil fuels if he decides to comment on climate subjects in future.  

Reform, Farage, Anderson, and GB News were approached for comment. 

Five Years of GB News

Since it launched in 2021, GB News has frequently given a platform to attacks on climate science and policy. 

In recent months, GB News presenters and guests have called climate change a “scam”, have called for the British countryside to be “turned into Swiss cheese” through fracking, and have repeatedly echoed Trump and Farage’s belief that we should “drill, baby, drill” for fossil fuels.

The UK’s main climate science denial group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, has been given dozens of appearances on the channel. DeSmog revealed that GB News had aired almost 1,000 anti-climate attacks during the 2024 general election period, while misleading statements about climate change frequently went unchallenged by hosts. 

This is despite Ofcom stating in its Broadcasting Code that “views and facts must not be misrepresented”, and that “alternative viewpoints must be adequately represented” on air.

The anti-climate opinions expressed on GB News align with those of Reform politicians. 

The party’s deputy leader Richard Tice, a property millionaire, has called CO2 “plant food”, while Farage has claimed it’s “nuts” for CO2 to be considered a pollutant. The world’s leading climate scientists say it’s “unequivocal” that man-made CO2 is responsible for the majority of global warming experienced since the Industrial Revolution. 

Reform campaigns to scrap the UK’s climate targets, stop all government clean energy subsidies, and dramatically expand fossil fuel production – including fracking for shale gas. 

A report by the New Economics Foundation last year concluded that Reform’s anti-renewables agenda could cost 60,000 jobs and wipe £92 billion off the economy.

As DeSmog revealed, two thirds of the party’s income, £24 million, has been donated by fossil fuel interests.

“Despite never turning a profit, Britain’s Fox News has been pouring money into the pockets of its politician-presenters from one particular party, with the channel’s billionaire owners picking up the tab,” said Richard Wilson, director of the campaign group Stop Funding Heat. “This isn’t a commercial news outlet – it’s a political influencing operation. 

“Meanwhile, Legatum – the Dubai-based investment fund that co-owns and subsidises GB News – has disclosed very little detail about the source of its income.

“Under the current rules, it’s possible for someone based thousands of miles from Britain to set up a loss-making TV channel and put UK politicians on the payroll, without any obligation to reveal where all the money comes from.  

“The risks to our democracy are obvious – and it’s high time Parliament looked into this.”