Nigel Farage and his party treasurer have met with Elon Musk at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort for the first time since rumours surfaced of a multi-million donation from the tech tycoon.

The Reform UK leader and Nick Candy, the billionaire husband of singer Holly Valance who will take up the fundraising role for Mr Farage’s party in the new year, met on Monday 16 December, the party said.

The meeting comes following reports that Mr Musk was considering donating £78m to Mr Farage – an ally of Mr Trump – as a “f*** you Starmer payment”.

The Times reported that if Mr Musk does decide to make the donation, he would do so through the British arm of his social media firm X, formerly Twitter, to circumvent UK rules that prevent foreign donations to a political party.

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Soon after his election victory, president-elect Trump confirmed that Mr Musk, the Tesla and X owner who is also the world’s richest man, will co-lead the new department of government efficiency, known as DOGE for short.

Both Mr Farage and Mr Candy have dismissed the reports of a potential donation, with the Reform leader telling Sky News’ political editor Beth Rigby that it was a “story without any basis in fact”.

“Elon Musk is very supportive of what Reform is trying to do, supportive of me personally. And we’ve got the connections with him, and Nick’s got good connections with him as well.

“He’s giving us political support. We have, at this stage, neither solicited or been offered donations.”

However, the pair have both said they would not turn down a donation from Mr Musk if it was offered.

Following the meeting, Mr Farage and Mr Candy said: “We had a great meeting with Elon Musk for an hour yesterday.

“We learned a great deal about the Trump ground game and will have ongoing discussions on other areas.

“We only have one more chance left to save the West and we can do great things together.

“Our thanks also to President Trump for allowing us to use Mar-a-Lago for this historic meeting. The special relationship is alive and well.”

The news that Reform has met with Mr Musk could spark concerns about foreign influence in domestic politics.

Earlier this month Sky News heard a recording of a video call between the Conservative Party co-chair, Lord Johnson, and Tory activists in which he accused Mr Musk of attempting to “buy” Reform UK.

Lord Johnson of Lainston said it was “extraordinary” that Mr Musk, the owner of X and Tesla and the world’s richest man, was “basically buying one of the political parties here”.

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And he said Mr Farage should “be frankly embarrassed about that”, saying he risked becoming a “puppet of a foreign politician” if he accepted any donations from Mr Musk.

In a sign of the tension between the Conservatives and their Reform rivals, Lord Johnson said he believed the reports about a potential donation from Mr Musk to Reform were “frustrating because it takes a lot of oxygen and I’m very aware of the fact that people are talking about Reform today and they’re not talking about Kemi Badenoch and the new Conservative agenda”.

“We have to make sure that we get the attention and we dominate people’s sort of attention span in order to make sure that they start looking back at us again rather than a frankly unrealistic alternative,” he said.

Listening to the sentencing in the Sara Sharif trial, it’s hard not to be gripped with anger and disbelief. 

Every detail evokes more horror than the last – the description of her small broken body, the note left by her father, her killer, that said “I lost it”, the lengths her abusers went to cover up their crimes.

What follows is the need to blame, to get answers and to feel that something urgent must be done to ensure this never happens again.

It is this public sentiment that has led, as it always does in these cases, to accusations levelled at the institutions that could have done more – her school, social services, the council, the police.

Their inaction at crucial moments is condemned and the government responds with reassurances that something is being done, that the gaps in the safety net are being closed.

In this case the vehicle is the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, presented to parliament today, which includes measures ministers say apply specifically to this case.

Sara Sharif sentencing as it happened

There will be a new register and a unique identification number to better track absent children and councils will be able to refuse applications for home-schooling made for at-risk pupils.

But it wasn’t the ease of home-schooling or the lack of data sharing that caused Sara’s death, it was the troubling misogyny that runs through this case like a deadly thread.

During the sentencing the judge described how she was forced to take on childcare and cleaning duties, was relentlessly beaten for being spirited instead of submissive, and how her older brother was spared the same fate.

It is also notable that her father’s pattern of aggression against women was all too evident to authorities, with numerous domestic violence allegations made against him, culminating only in him being asked to do a course.

When campaigners call violence against women and girls an epidemic, these are the circumstances they have in mind – women ignored, girls treated like second-class citizens in their own homes, a society watching on but not speaking up and a sense of depressing inevitability about how it all ended.

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This is why the government’s long-term violence against women strategy, which aims to change culture over time and is driven by committed ministers like Jess Phillips, has a better chance than the latest legislation.

The sad reality is that there are so many more Sara Sharifs living in fear of the men in their lives, and many more women being abused and ignored.

A few new powers for councils won’t change that, but dedication to the cause that goes right to the top just might – and that is cause for some hope amid the horror.