Nigel Farage’s Reform UK paid almost £1.3 million to conservative publications during the 2024 general election campaign.

The right-wing populist party, which frequently claims to be a victim of media bias, spent roughly 25 percent of its £5.5 million budget on adverts in the Daily Mail, The Sun, and the Daily Express.

These adverts were “clearly a conflict of interest”, said Mic Wright, author of Breaking: How the Media Works, When it Doesn’t and Why it Matters.

“All of those organisations will claim to have a strict separation between their editorial and commercial sides but it’s obvious that having Reform as such a significant advertising client is a distorting influence,” he told DeSmog.

“It is absolutely indicative of how broken the British media is as a system”.

Electoral Commission records show that Reform shelled out £906,000 – comfortably its biggest single item of spending – on adverts in the Daily Mail via A&N Media Financial Services, a division of the Mail’s parent company.

According to the receipt, this covered “online takeovers” and full page ads in The Mail, Mail on Sunday, and MailOnline from 28 June to 4 July – the day of the election.

Reform spent £308,723 on adverts in The Sun via its owner, Rupert Murdoch’s News UK. A further £74,400 was spent on adverts in the Daily Express and other outlets owned by Reach, its parent company.

The adverts included attacks on climate policies, with one in The Mail vowing to “end the bonkers net zero rules”. Farage’s party won five seats at the election and is now leading the polls ahead of the governing Labour Party.

Reform has also faced criticism for having spent thousands on luxury lunches and hotels during the campaign.

Based on Labour’s Electoral Commission declarations, the party spent over £100,000 on News UK adverts, and nearly £230,000 on Daily Mail adverts during the election campaign.

With the decline of print sales, newspapers are increasingly relying on scant advertising revenue. News Group Newspapers, the News UK subsidiary which publishes The Sun, reported a pre-tax loss of £18 million in the year to June 2024. News UK’s broadcasting arm, which aired TalkTV until it went online-only in spring 2024, made a £50 million loss.

Nathan Sparkes, CEO of the media reform campaign group Hacked Off, said: “Given the power of the press, which collectively reaches three-quarters of the public every month, it is no surprise that political parties want to advertise in their pages and on their websites.

“But publishers have a responsibility to hold politicians to account, and accepting millions of pounds from parties during an election period calls into question their ability to properly scrutinise those seeking office.”

Climate Attacks

The right-wing press has given a platform to Reform’s anti-climate narratives over the past year, both through adverts and editorial content.

Reform campaigns to scrap the UK’s climate targets, block renewable energy projects, increase fossil fuel extraction, and re-open coal mines.

Earlier this month, Reform’s Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire Andrea Jenkyns, said, “Do I believe climate change exists? No,” and called net zero a “money-making racket”. In February, Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice said man-made climate change is “garbage”.

Right-wing newspapers have consistently criticised and spread falsehoods about climate action, increasingly focused on the Labour government’s green agenda. According to Carbon Brief, of the 368 editorials published in UK newspapers last year about climate change and energy, “unprecedented numbers… opposed climate action in general, as well as renewable energy, specifically”.

“This is yet another clear indication that the Daily Mail and the Express will be among Farage and Reform’s biggest cheerleaders in the lead up to the next general election,” said the Good Law Project campaign group.

“It might not come as a shock to anyone, but the cosy financial relationships between UK political parties and some sections of the media really do need to come under closer scrutiny.

“In many cases, we’re seeing the lines between news reporting and party political propaganda beginning to blur. And as election spending hits record highs without regulation to match, we’re in real danger of seeing things getting a whole lot worse”.

Senior Reform figures held a series of meetings with conservative newspaper editors at the turn of the year, according to The Guardian, while Farage attended The Times and Spectator’s summer parties and had a private dinner with The Sun’s editor Victoria Newton.

Anti-climate figures have an increasingly large media platform in the UK. In the past year The Telegraph and Spectator have been bought by owners with investments in fossil fuels.

Farage and his fellow Reform MPs Richard Tice and Lee Anderson are presenters on GB News, which attacked climate policies nearly 1,000 times during the general election period. As DeSmog reported last week, Farage received £394,900 in the last 12 months for his work as a GB News presenter.

Farage is also a columnist for the Daily Telegraph, receiving £4,000 per month, and has this year been paid more than £25,000 as a commentator on Murdoch-owned News Corp Australia.

Reform itself received £2.3 million from fossil fuel interests, major polluters, and climate science deniers between 2019 and 2024, while the party is actively raising money from oil executives.

Richard Wilson, director of the Stop Funding Heat campaign group, said that DeSmog’s story “will only add to the impression that these newspapers have become, in effect, the media wing of the fossil fuel industry.”

He added: “Pushing climate denial may serve the interests of Reform’s billionaire backers, but the vast majority of Brits want to see effective action to ensure that we all have a liveable future.”

A spokesperson for The Express said: “We categorically reject the suggestion that our editorial independence has been compromised by political ad spending. If this were the case, you might expect that we would have been less critical of the Labour government, who spent more with us in 2024 than Reform. And across our parent company Labour spent five times as much as Reform. Advertising spend from any particular party does not impact our coverage in any way.

“We also continue to report on the impact of climate change, covering not only the political debate around the cost of net zero but also proponents of the policy. We frequently quote scientists and academics from the Climate Change Committee, the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit and work with the Science Media Centre to ensure the views of experts are reflected. We also make a clear distinction for our audiences between our news reporting and our opinion pieces.

“While The Express has changed in many ways over the past few years, we will continue to report rigorously on issues that matter to our audience. According to YouGov, people in the UK believe that immigration is the top issue in this country right now and we will therefore continue to report on it thoroughly, while decrying the gangs who organise these crossings and put innocent lives at danger.”

The Sun declined to comment. Reform UK and the Mail did not respond to DeSmog’s requests for comment.