Police Investigate £37,500 Donation to Jenrick’s Leadership Bid
The Metropolitan Police has opened an investigation into a donation of nearly £40,000 to Robert Jenrick’s 2024 Conservative leadership campaign, after the Electoral Commission referred allegations the money came from a foreign source — which electoral law prohibits. Jenrick, who has since defected to Reform UK, called the allegations “entirely false”. The inquiry opens a second front of financial scrutiny around Reform, alongside the standards affair that prompted Nigel Farage’s resignation.
Two of Reform’s most prominent figures now face live investigations into their funding within a fortnight of each other — Farage over undeclared benefits and a £5m gift flagged to the crime agency, Jenrick over a foreign-source allegation the police are now examining. For a party whose pitch rests on being cleaner than the establishment it attacks, the timing is corrosive, and it lands just as it prepares to fight a by-election framed around exactly that claim. The foreign-donation question also feeds the government’s new curbs on overseas political money. Watch whether the probes dent Reform’s polling, and the Electoral Commission’s next steps.