Ben Delo’s £350,000 loan to Nina Power ties one of Reform UK’s largest backers to a high-profile libel and harassment dispute whose ruling left the writer bankrupt and prompted a judge to criticise the tone of her online activity.
The funding, revealed during bankruptcy proceedings after Power’s legal defeat, was provided on a commercial basis and secured against the London property she owns. It was made in the weeks before the 2023 trial when a conditional fee agreement with her lawyers fell apart, and it carried a repayment schedule.
Power and her co-claimant, the writer Daniel DC Miller, sued the performance artist Luke Turner alleging defamation after he described them as antisemitic. Turner counter-claimed for harassment. The court dismissed the libel claim on the basis that Turner’s online audience was not large enough to have caused reputational harm, and it also rejected the harassment claim because the conduct did not meet the legal threshold for unlawfulness.
Nonetheless, the judge concluded that some social media material posted by Power and Miller had concerning overtones, using the phrase "the whiff of threat and antisemitism" to describe elements of their exchanges, while finding that the remarks were too sporadic and diffuse to qualify as unlawful harassment or hate speech. The ruling noted other online activity directed at Turner that was more serious, but distinguished that from what Power and Miller had done.
Turner was awarded costs of £1 million, about 80% of the total, and Power was declared bankrupt after the judgment. It was in the course of those insolvency proceedings that the loan from Delo, a billionaire donor who has given large sums to Reform UK and to free-speech causes, became public.
Power is a former leftwing academic who has written on feminism and later described a shift toward conservative views in published work. Miller, who has said he is of Jewish heritage, is associated with the magazine IM-1776 and has been linked to hard-right platforms. The legal dispute traces back to long-running clashes in the London arts scene, including protests around the LD50 gallery in 2017.
The disclosure of the loan underlines the financial ties that can support litigation over the boundaries of online speech, and it places a donor associated with anti-woke and free-speech groups in the spotlight after a ruling that criticised parts of the claimants’ online conduct without finding them criminally or civilly liable.
