Reform UK receives record-setting donations as Labour prepares funding bill

Farage's response was included in The Guardian's Monday briefing. He said he was "humbled" by the two £36m donations. The two gifts amount to £72m. Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne are described as cryptocurrency tycoons. The donations have been called "game-changing" for Reform, a party that the report says is engulfed in financial scandals.

Labour MPs are expected to realign around the bill later today, according to the report. The bill could stop donations of the kind received by Reform. The report did not set out further details of the legislation, its timing or its chances of passing.

The same briefing also covered other developments. Former chancellor George Osborne said Britain's economy had "fallen off a cliff" since Brexit and that rejoining the European Union's customs union would be the fastest route to recovery. Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's call to "slow the pace" of AI development. Amodei had cautioned that an AI swarm could otherwise become capable of "taking over the entire internet" within a year.

In Sweden, with most votes counted, the national election remained too close to call on Sunday night, with left-wing parties holding a lead of just a single seat according to a partial tally by the election authority. In Ukraine, Ukrainian Railways said a train carrying Boris Johnson and former CIA chief David Petraeus may have been the target of a Russian drone strike that hit a train engine near the Poland-Ukraine border.

A report said the air traffic control outage that caused thousands of flights to be grounded across the UK earlier in the week was caused by a military aircraft entering "spurious" flight data into the system. On Monday, the first ministers of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland were due to meet in Cardiff to discuss moves towards self-determination across the nations. On Tuesday, the final report of the Thirwall Inquiry into events at the neonatal unit where Lucy Letby worked was due to be published. Letby was sentenced to 15 whole-life terms for murdering seven infants and attempting to murder seven others. On Thursday, Canada's prime minister, Mark Carney, was due to address the European parliament.