Reform donor Ben Delo loaned £350k to academic found to have engaged in online bullying

Reform UK’s new mega-donor Ben Delo gave a £350,000 loan to a conservative writer fighting a legal case in which a judge later found she had engaged in online bullying and regrettable conduct with a “whiff of threat and antisemitism”.

Nina Power and her friend, the writer Daniel DC Miller, brought the legal action for defamation against the performance artist Luke Turner, who they had accused of falsely calling them antisemitic. At the same time, Turner brought a counter-claim against the pair accusing them of harassment.

Their libel action failed on the grounds that Turner’s online reach was not big enough to have caused harm to their reputations, while the harassment case also failed on the basis that their conduct was not unlawful.

The loan from Delo to help fund Power’s case before the 2023 trial shines a light on the Reform supporter’s involvement in backing a landmark legal tussle over the boundaries of free speech.

It is understood Delo did not and does not believe Power and Miller held antisemitic views as alleged by Turner, and would never knowingly provide financial or any other support to those who did.

In the case, Miller, who is Jewish, and Power denied promoting fascist or antisemitic views, and said they did not know Turner was Jewish. The judge found there was “no overt antisemitism” displayed by the pair.

But in the counter-claim of harassment, the judge described social media posts by Miller and Power as having “the whiff of threat and antisemitism which they themselves can fairly be held to have created”, although she ruled it was “too occasional, intangible, diffuse and unconsolidated” to have been unlawful.

She said the “radio frequencies of macabre imagery and casualness around antisemitic tropes into which Mr Turner tuned do yield a discernible signal but not one strong enough to be recognised objectively as antisemitic hate speech or a resolved engagement with physical violence sufficient to render this conduct quasi-criminal”.

The judge also said: “Mr Turner evidently had been harassed to a quasi-criminal (or indeed criminal) degree by other people. But what Mr Miller and Ms Power did was not of that order.”

It has not been previously reported that Delo, a billionaire who recently contributed £36m to Nigel Farage’s party, gave funding to Power before the case went to court.

After the failure of the cases, Turner was awarded costs of £1m amounting to 80% of the total, and Power was declared bankrupt. In the course of the bankruptcy proceedings it emerged that Delo had loaned her a sum in the region of £350,000, secured against the value of a London property that she owns, to help pay her lawyers.

It is understood the loan was made by Delo weeks before the trial started when her conditional fee arrangement with her lawyers collapsed. The loan was made on a commercial basis and secured against the value of her property, with a repayment schedule.

Delo has previously been known to be a supporter of the Free Speech Union, run by the Conservative peer Toby Young, and has funded a base known for anti-woke causes.

Power is a former leftwing academic who has written in publications including the Guardian about feminism. She has since described her journey towards being “conservative in the true sense of that word” and wrote a book, What Do Men Want? Masculinity and Its Discontents, in which she argues men have been demonised.

The 2023 high court ruling describes how Miller and Turner were involved in a long-running conflict which emerged from their involvement in the London arts scene. Turner, who rose to prominence thanks to his creative collaborations with the Hollywood actor Shia LaBeouf, clashed frequently with Miller on social media.

The pair took opposing sides during the 2017 protests around the London art gallery LD50, which had staged a symposium featuring neo-reactionary speakers and a show advertised online with a quotation from Adolf Hitler, in German gothic font. While Turner described the venue as an alt-Nazi gallery, Miller joined the counter-protest, standing outside LD50 with a placard calling for “the right to openly discuss ideas”.

Miller, who told the court he was of Jewish heritage, is closely associated with the magazine IM-1776, which platforms hard-right views, having previously contributed to the title as an editor and an author. Among the articles published by IM-1776 are pieces celebrating the “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski and the proto-fascist Italian nationalist Gabriele D’Annunzio.

In the trial, Turner acknowledged he had been wrong to claim Miller was the author of a blog advocating a Hitler style disability policy.

WhatsApp chats between Miller and Power, disclosed as part of the 2023 trial, did show them dismissing anti-racism as a “psyop”. The term refers to psychological operations used by the military or governments to influence public behaviour.

Power wrote: “The social disapproval for ‘racism’ is a psyop to stop people realising that there *are* alien and fairy races,” and that “black and white were alien races and very different”.

In a later exchange Power brought up Hitler’s autobiographical political manifesto, Mein Kampf, writing “I think … at some point … we need to read Mein Kampf properly …”, adding that she wanted to “understand it”.

In an episode referenced in the judgment, Miller performed at a public event in Athens, delivering a lecture in the persona of the Italian far-right philosopher and antisemite Julius Evola. During the rise of fascism, Evola called for measures to counter “the Jewish menace”. He opposed democracy in favour of a caste-based aristocratic order and was convicted on appeal during the 1950s of trying to revive fascism.

The judge found the pair had between them labelled Turner “low IQ’, ‘sociopathic’, ‘paranoid’, ‘deranged’, ‘obsessive’, ‘paranoid schizophrenic’, ‘dangerously mentally ill’ and so on and on – sometimes accompanied by messages to ‘get help’.” She said in her ruling that Power told her from the witness box that the latter proceeded from genuine and empathetic concern. The judge was unconvinced.

During the trial,Miller and Power denied promoting antisemitic philosophies, describing their interest in the subject as a quest to “critically understand” the issues.

Power and Delo declined to comment. Miller said the story was “based on a systematic distortions of facts”, adding: “I am myself Jewish and proudly Jewish.”