When Nigel Farage took to the stage at Reform’s local election campaign launch in Birmingham last month, he was clutching the cab of a JCB Pothole Pro – an innovation of the construction equipment manufacturer whose owner, Lord Bamford, has pumped millions of pounds into the British right in recent years.
Bamford became a Conservative peer in 2013, and the vast majority of the £10m or so he has donated to political causes has gone to that party or the campaign to leave the EU. But he stepped down from the Lords last year, and his decision to lend Farage the prop, along with a recent £8,000 donation of a helicopter tour of a JCB facility, is fueling rumours that he may join a growing number of Tory donors switching their support to Reform.
In the days after the event, it was reported that Lord Bamford and JCB could “take a leading role” in a national pothole repair programme under a Reform government. These claims, attributed to “sources close to Farage”, were first published in the in-house journal of Great British PAC (GB PAC), a new political organisation that wants to unite the British right ahead of the next general election.
