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One of the Conservatives’ biggest donors has stopped funding the party in a move insiders believe will result in the closure of its northern HQ, the Guardian can reveal.
Richard Harpin, the founder of the home repairs business HomeServe, has ended his donations to the Conservatives, according to two Tory sources.
The decision is a blow to Kemi Badenoch, who is presiding over a diminished and cash-strapped party that is facing intense competition for donations from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
Harpin gave the Conservatives nearly £850,000 in 2024, Electoral Commission records show, and has donated £3.8m to the party since 2008, £2m of which was in cash. Rishi Sunak used a helicopter owned by Harpin for campaign stops in the run-up to last year’s general election.
A source close to Harpin said that while he had paused his donations, he remained a strong supporter of the Conservatives.
Until recently, Harpin, who grew up in Northumberland, made a monthly £33,000 cash donation to the party, which paid for its northern HQ in Leeds. This has now ended and the Leeds HQ is likely to close as a result, two Tory sources said.
The Tories announced their plan to establish a northern HQ in October 2020, almost a year after Boris Johnson’s landslide election victory, in which dozens of “red wall” seats in the north of England flipped from Labour to Conservative. The new offices were opened by Oliver Dowden, then party chair, in the spring of 2022 on the outskirts of Leeds city centre.
Labour won back most of those red wall constituencies last summer, and there has since been speculation that the northern Tory HQ was slated for closure as the party faced financial difficulties.
A Conservative party source said Harpin had agreed to fund the Leeds office for an extra year to cover the general election period after an initial two years. The source said that although the party was reviewing its properties, there were no plans to shut down operations in the north.
Despite cash woes, the Conservatives outperformed other parties’ fundraising efforts at the end of last year – raising nearly £2m in the last three months of 2024, which was twice as much as Labour and seven times more than Reform. A Conservative party source said they were expecting a strong showing in the first quarter of 2025 too.
One Tory insider said Harpin took his decision to stop donating after a meeting with party co-chair Dominic Johnson, who has faced some internal criticism, but sources close to the HomeServe founder and the party denied this.
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The Guardian reported in February that Tory staff numbers had fallen from 200 to about 60 and that there were not enough funds to hire political advisers for some shadow cabinet ministers. There is speculation that the party will move out of its headquarters in Westminster to cut costs.
Last spring, the Conservatives were fined nearly £11,000 for under-reporting the value of non-cash donations received from Harpin for three years. On top of his cash donations, he funded the secondment of an employee to the party.
Harpin, who began his career as a brand manager for Procter & Gamble in Newcastle upon Tyne and stepped down as chair of HomeServe in January, secured a reported £300m in 2022 after he sold the company to a Canadian firm for more than £4bn. The Sunday Times rich list placed him as the Britain’s 256th richest person last year, with a worth of £670m, up £40m on the year before.
During the run-up to the election in July several Conservative donors including the Phones 4u founder, John Caudwell, and the carpet tycoon Philip Harris switched to support Labour.
In the past six months, several other Tory donors including the billionaire property developer Nick Candy have been wooed by Reform. Candy is now fundraising for Farage as party treasurer.
