Nigel Farage has described a record-breaking £72 million double donation to Reform UK as an “investment in democratic renewal”, promising to transform the often error-prone party into an organisation capable of governing Britain.

The unprecedented funding package came after billionaire financiers Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo each gave £36 million, together setting a new benchmark for political donations in Britain. With Westminster increasingly speculating about the prospect of an early general election, Mr Farage said the money would help Reform recruit “the best minds in every area”.

In an article for the Mail on Sunday, Mr Farage said the cash would be directed towards professionalising Reform UK, including hiring campaign managers in key target seats and attracting leading policy specialists. Sources believe he may also create an “attack unit” focused on challenging political opponents.

Privately, Mr Farage accepts that Reform does not yet possess the experience or depth of talent needed to operate a government.

He said: “The money will be used for one purpose only: to make certain we are ready to form a government at the next election.

“Now the British people have a genuine alternative: a properly funded, professionally organised and determined party that will put this country’s interests first once more. This money is an investment in democratic renewal, pure and simple.”

Mr Farage said both crypto billionaires had paid their donations upfront, a move intended to avoid any future Labour effort to impose limits on political gifts. The funding will also accelerate his drive to build a Reform UK operation that can compete with the Conservative and Labour parties.

Reform announced on Friday evening that it had received a £36million donation from Mr Delo, the co-founder of a digital currency trading platform. 

Then, on Saturday, it said the sum had been matched by Mr Harborne, a tech investor based in Thailand who is registered as a UK resident for voting and donating purposes.

Until now, the biggest single donation to a political party had been a £10million bequest left to the Tories, while the biggest donation from a living person was the £9million Mr Harborne gave Reform last year. 

It takes the total amount raised by Reform this year close to £90million, compared with just over £10 million for the Tories and £8million for Labour.

The main parties have all moved on to an election footing since Mr Burnham succeeded Sir Keir Starmer in July, in case he tries to capitalise on the resultant ‘bounce’ in Labour’s poll ratings.

Sir John Curtice, the country’s pre-eminent election guru, warns below that while the money ‘will leave Reform better placed to fight the next election’ there was ‘no guarantee it will win’.

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Sir John, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, said: ‘On their own, local party activists – the troops on the ground – do not win elections. They need ‘air cover’ from effective nationwide campaigning. 

‘And even the best research will not persuade voters to back a party if they do not believe in its objectives.’

Mr Harborne, a former Tory donor who has previously donated a total £15million to Reform, is at the centre of an investigation by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner into whether a personal £5million gift to Mr Farage should have been declared.

It is just one of a slew of negative stories about the source of the party’s finances. Last week the Metropolitan Police launched a criminal inquiry into claims that senior figures in the party breached legal donation rules after being caught on camera in an undercover sting.

Mr Harborne stressed that he did not expect to be rewarded with an honour or influence over policy, as has been the case with donors to other parties.

He said: ‘There will be a lot of media speculation regarding this donation. So what do I expect in return for my donations? Nothing.

‘No peerage, no policy change, just a party that is ready for government. I have already accumulated enough wealth for the rest of my life. 

‘I am committed to putting that to work for Britain and humanity as a whole. I want the same as everyone else in Britain: for my children and grandchildren to have the chance to live happy and productive lives here and be rewarded for their hard work.

‘At the next general election, people will have to vote for the party they think will best get that done and I’m making a donation… to the party I believe will do so.’

Mr Delo said that he had given his £36million – in addition to £4million donated earlier this year – because he wanted to ensure a ‘fair fight’ at the next election against the ‘entrenched advantages’ of Reform’s opponents. 

The 42-year-old announced he was moving back to the UK this year after Labour announced plans to cap donations from British citizens living abroad.

He said: ‘Unlike the people who express mock concern for the health of ‘our democracy’ while doing everything they can to keep it as a cartel, I want a fair fight and a level playing field.’

Mr Harborne says his three main concerns are the ‘existential threats’ facing humanity – nuclear war, artificial intelligence and climate change – and he believes Reform is the only party which can tackle them.

Bridget Phillipson MP, chairwoman of the Labour Party, said: ‘Farage can’t buy his way out of the sleaze and scandal he and Reform UK are drowning in – or the multiple police investigations that are ongoing into Reform’s dodgy finances. 

‘The serious questions Farage and Reform need to answer aren’t going away – in fact they’re just piling up. It’s time Farage and Reform came clean with the public and prove they’re not just in it for themselves.’

Alan Ritchson and his wife, Catherine, are separating after 20 years of marriage.

The 43-year-old Reacher star and Catherine, 42, shared the news in a joint Instagram post on Saturday. The pair have known one another for 27 years.

Court records show that Ritchson had previously filed for divorce from Catherine in December 2025, before the couple reconciled in March 2026.

The legal filing, submitted on December 1, 2025, cited irreconcilable differences as the reason for the divorce request.

The couple reconciled three months later, on March 4, 2026. That date came shortly before Ritchson was involved in a physical confrontation with a neighbor in Brentwood, Tennessee, on March 18.

Ritchson and Catherine share three sons: Calem, 13; Edan, 12; and Amory Tristan, 10.

Their relationship stretches back nearly three decades, beginning when they were high school sweethearts.

They first met in a ballet class in Florida and began dating when Ritchson was 17 and Catherine was 16.

Alan and Catherine got engaged in 2005 and married a year later in 2006. 

The Instagram post read: ‘After twenty years together, Cat and I have decided to end our marriage and continue alongside one another in a different way. 

‘We grew up together. We built a life and a family together. And we are raising three incredible boys who will always be the center of our world. Nothing can diminish what these years have meant to us – or the love and respect we will always share.’ 

The estranged couple concluded by declaring their devotion to raising their children together as they asked for personal privacy.

They wrote: ‘The best gift we can give one another – and our boys – right now is friendship, grace, and a commitment to become the strongest co-parents we can be. We also want to give each other room to grow into the people we are becoming. 

‘Change is hard enough without the whole world weighing in. We hope, especially for the sake of our boys, that you will allow our family to move through this chapter with privacy and compassion.

‘Thank you for supporting us as we continue making the health and happiness of our family our priority. – Cat and Alan’ 

Catherine previously talked about meeting Alan for the first time as teenagers in that aforementioned dance class.

She said during an appearance on The Road to Wisdom podcast in 2023: ‘I’ll never forget seeing him for the first time in the [dance] studio. I turned to my friend Miriam and I said, “Who is that?”

‘He, at some point, came up to me and we just got chatting.’

Alan and Catherine’s most recent reconciliation in March came days before the action man got into a heated altercation with a neighbor.  

The clash erupted in Brentwood, Tennessee, on March 22, with disturbing footage captured by the actor’s camera appearing to show Alan pummeling Ronnie Taylor after a dispute over his roaring motorcycle. 

Taylor allegedly stepped in front of Alan’s bike to stop him from speeding through the neighborhood – sparking the brutal fight.

The Brentwood Police Department ultimately concluded that Alan acted in self-defense, closing the case without pressing charges.

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For 14 years, Jason Hurdle believed he was familiar with every corner of his rural New York property.

That changed in July, when a garage clean-out at his Waterloo home led him to an overlooked crawlspace that had apparently remained concealed for decades.

Inside the dusty area, Hurdle came across a collection of papers stamped “secret” — a discovery that quickly turned an ordinary day of clearing out clutter into an extraordinary historical find.

The cache, totaling about 300 pages, appeared to include firsthand testimony from American prisoners of war held during World War II.

Hurdle, 74, brought the records to a nearby library, which then contacted the National Archives and Records Administration. NARA officials later arrived to retrieve the documents.

Archivists subsequently verified that the World War II POW accounts were authentic and had previously been classified.

“I’m in podunk little Waterloo, New York, and this went all the way to the National Archives. We’re kind of in shock here,” Hurdle told the Washington Post.

The house has belonged to Hurdle’s wife’s family for generations, though he said the family has no explanation for how the once-secret military files came to be hidden on the property.

He added that a former neighbor had memorabilia from an ancestor, but was still unsure if this explains the find.

The documents describe in horrifying detail the events prisoners of war endured. 

The POWs were told to write down their experiences to gather intelligence when they arrived at Camp Lucky Strike in Normandy. 

Many documents from this camp were then used as evidence of war crimes in military tribunals. 

Historians had no knowledge of the lost accounts. The National Archives told the Post that they did not have the files on a list of missing documents. 

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‘The discovery of these government records is important and meaningful to ensure preservation and public access to our country’s history,’ NARA spokeswoman Grace McCaffrey told the publication.  

One account was from a man named Julian Candelaria, who was held captive in a work camp for months, recalling that he witnessed ’60 men in boxcars,’ with ‘no food no water, no sanitary facilities, crowded, exposed to bombing. Walked 3 days + nights with little food, no medical.’

The Washington Post found Candelaria’s obituary, which read: ‘After returning home he refused to discuss the events that occurred during his imprisonment at [the] hands of his captors, the Germans.’ 

Another POW named Henry Daly wrote that the conditions were ‘a very sad example of what the US soldier was like.’

‘We ran for cover, but two of my companions [whose] names I do not [recall] were killed by the bombs,’ he added. 

His great-grandson, Michael Yanes, told the Post that Daly did not talk about his time in the war with his family, but he often slept in a park because he struggled to stay in his house. 

‘Seeing these words written is quite heavy. This is all new to us. The emotions. I can’t even describe,’ Yanes said. 

The documents have been placed with similar accounts in the National Archives and will be digitized. 

NARA also confirmed over the summer that they discovered 145 US Navy records from an engineer who participated in several Apollo missions, including blueprints and sound recordings. 

A pardon signed by President Franklin Pierce and a Congressional Tally Sheet of a secret House of Representatives vote were also recovered at auction houses.

A letter to then-Secretary of War Jefferson Davis from Army 1st Lt JEB Stuart has been recovered as well and will be digitized. 

The Daily Mail reached out to NARA for comment. 

Jess Michael and her husband Alan initially brushed off the unexplained bruises as a joke. A fresh mark would show up on her arm, and Alan would ask what had happened. Jess’s answer sounded harmless enough: she had bumped into a doorway.

She was not fainting or losing her footing. Instead, Jess believed she was passing through the centre of a doorway, only to misjudge the space and strike the frame. Soon, it was happening repeatedly.

“Alan, something’s not right with me,” she told her husband. “Why can’t I walk through the door normally?”

The collisions were not her only concern. Jess had already become accustomed to severe migraines that left her in bed until morning, along with visual auras, nausea and dizziness. At times, crippling vertigo made even sitting upright feel impossible, as though she might vomit.

Yet Jess was raising two young children, working in a demanding senior HR position in the mining industry and supporting a husband facing health issues of his own. Used to carrying on, she attributed much of what she was experiencing to stress.

That changed in January 2023, when persistent vertigo prompted her GP to arrange an MRI. The scan revealed a 2.2cm lesion on her brain.

Over the following six months, further scans showed the lesion was growing and changing. By August, discussions with her neurosurgeon had taken a far more serious turn. Within weeks, Jess was diagnosed with Grade 4 glioblastoma and told she could have just 12 to 18 months to live.

There was always a reason to keep going

Until the headaches, dizziness and other neurological symptoms began, Jess had regarded herself as fit and healthy. She regularly walked four or five kilometres a day and had never dealt with anything like the symptoms gradually taking over her life.

She was also someone who expected a lot of herself. Jess had worked her way into a senior HR role in the male-dominated mining industry, where 12-hour days, five or six days a week, had become normal.

‘I was a bit of a perfectionist,’ she tells Daily Mail. ‘I really wanted to excel in everything that I did.’

At home, there were two children in primary school and Alan was going through his own health problems. Jess jokes that her ‘off switch broke years ago’. Slowing down didn’t come naturally to her.

That became clear in December 2021, when she was hit by her first serious bout of vertigo just before a family cruise. Jess woke unable to sit up without feeling violently nauseous. She spent much of the week in bed, but still told work she could manage a few hours from home.

The only way she could do it was lying down with her laptop.

‘I was still trying to not let anybody down,’ she says.

So when her symptoms were put down to stress, it made sense to Jess.

‘I just put up with it’

Through 2022, Jess found ways to fit being unwell around everything else. She would feel a migraine building as she drove home from work and call Alan to warn him.

‘I know where this is leading,’ she would tell him. He would take over with the children while Jess went straight to bed with Nurofen, ice packs for her head and a heat pack for her feet.

Sleep was the only thing that seemed to help. By morning, she often felt well enough to start again. Within a day or two, the pounding headache, nausea or dizziness would return.

‘I just put up with it,’ she says.

But she was trying to find out what was wrong. She saw a chiropractor, a physiotherapist and another physio specialising in neurological symptoms. At one point, she was diagnosed with vestibular migraines and given exercises to do. Tests to see whether crystals in her inner ear could be causing the vertigo came back negative.

Nothing made the symptoms go away.

By December 2022, the vertigo returned and this time rest didn’t fix it. Jess told her boss she might need to reduce her hours or work from home. She told Alan something had to change.

She went back to her GP, who ordered an MRI to rule out anything more serious. 

‘If you’re not worried, I’m not worried’

The MRI in January 2023 found a 2.2cm lesion near the back of Jess’s brain, around the right parieto-occipital region.

Her GP described it as a cyst or tumour-like growth and explained that the area was involved in processing visual information. That finally gave some context to the problems Jess had been having with her vision and depth perception. But she was also reassured it was probably nothing to worry about.

The scans were sent to a neurosurgeon, who asked for another MRI three months later. Jess had that scan in April and met him in May. Again, she was reassured. They would continue monitoring the lesion and scan her again in July.

‘You’re a specialist. If you’re not worried, why would I be worried?’

So Jess kept working.

When she and Alan returned to the neurosurgeon after her July scan, expecting much the same conversation, everything had changed. The lesion had grown and the latest imaging had raised concern about an underlying tumour. He now wanted to take a biopsy.

Jess struggled to take in what he was saying. She remembers looking at Alan and feeling as though she was watching herself from somewhere outside the room. At one point, Alan had to explain again why she needed surgery because she couldn’t remember what she had just been told.

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Before the operation, Jess and Alan updated their wills and powers of attorney. With their children just eight and 10, they also had conversations no parents expect to be having. Jess told Alan what she wanted him to do if the surgery left her severely incapacitated, and they talked about what would happen if she didn’t come home at all.

She wrote letters to Alan and each of the children, telling them what she loved about them, the qualities she saw in them and her hopes for their futures. She was determined, she says, ‘not to leave things unsaid’.

Then she picked up her phone and recorded herself reading each of her children’s favourite bedtime stories.

‘If I don’t live, that’s something that will be special for them,’ she says. ‘If I do live, then I’m going through recovery, and it is just something to help them go to sleep each night to remind them of me.’

She still has the recordings.

‘You’re not God’

Even after the biopsy, Jess still wasn’t expecting to hear the word cancer. Nobody had really been talking to her about it.

She met with a radiation oncologist who discussed the possibility of treating the growth with a single dose of targeted radiation. Jess came away thinking she would have the treatment, recover and get back to her life.

‘Wham, bam, you’re done kind of thing,’ she says.

Her pathology results were supposed to take around two weeks. When that date passed, a nurse called to say the sample had been sent interstate for a second opinion.

‘I knew then and there,’ Jess says. ‘I can’t explain how I knew. I just knew it was cancer and I knew it wasn’t good.’

Five weeks after the biopsy, Jess and Alan were called in to see the radiation oncologist. He told them the tumour was a Grade 4 glioblastoma. Even with treatment, he said, Jess could have 12 to 18 months to live.

Her vision blurred. She remembers staring at Alan in disbelief and consciously reminding herself to breathe as the doctor explained the treatment he wanted her to begin.

Then she looked at him.

‘You’re not God,’ she said. ‘You don’t get to tell me whether I live or die.’

‘You get to tell me my diagnosis. You get to tell me my treatment options. But you don’t get to tell me when I live and die.’

‘But where’s my tumour?’

Jess began six weeks of radiation alongside the chemotherapy drug temozolomide. When a later scan showed the tumour had grown, she began researching what else she could do to support her health while continuing conventional treatment.

She changed her diet, exercised, meditated and began taking supplements and pursuing other complementary therapies. Around the same time, her medical treatment changed from temozolomide to Avastin infusions.

Jess is careful not to credit any one thing with what happened afterwards.

‘I can’t categorically say it was one or the other,’ she says. ‘I think it was the combination of both, but I can’t scientifically prove either way.’

Her scans began to improve. The tumour stopped growing, then started to shrink.

On December 11, 2025, her mum accompanied her to an appointment to receive another set of results. Jess watched as her oncologist brought the latest scan up beside an earlier one.

‘Sorry, whose MRI results are these?’ Jess asked.

Her oncologist told her they were hers.

‘But where’s my tumour?’

When the oncologist confirmed there was no evidence of disease, Jess screamed. Her mum was beside her and, for a few moments, neither of them seemed to know whether to laugh or cry, so they did both.

Jess kept looking back at the screen. The tumour that had been there on scan after scan was no longer visible.

For Jess, the news meant something much bigger than a clear scan. More than two years earlier, she had sat down to record bedtime stories for her children because she didn’t know if she would be there to read to them herself. Now she could allow herself to think about being there for all the things that came after bedtime stories, too.

She is still being treated. Jess continues to receive Avastin every three weeks and remains under medical care, and she has written about her experience in Defying the Diagnosis.

These days, the future she wants is an ordinary one. She wants to watch her children grow up, be there for their milestones and, one day, become a grandmother.

‘I have no intentions of going anywhere.’

Jess Michael’s book, ‘Defying the Diagnosis: A Survivor’s Journey Towards Healing Stage 4 Cancer’ is available now at Amazon.