Nigel Farage met senior UAE officials to discuss Muslim Brotherhood on funded trip

The United Arab Emirates paid for British politician Nigel Farage to travel to Abu Dhabi to meet senior officials over a shared opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood, it has emerged.

Farage, the leader of Reform UK - a populist right-wing party that is topping national opinion polls - visited Abu Dhabi in early December.

On Wednesday the Financial Times reported that Abu Dhabi gave Farage accomodation and passes to attend a Formula 1 race, valued at around £1,000 - according to the register of MPs' interests. 

Farage had meetings with senior Emirati officials during the two-day trip, the register said.

According to the FT, sources said the Emirati leadership wanted to speak to Reform "owing to a shared opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood".

At Reform's annual conference in September Farage announced that his party will ban the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation if it is elected.

Dr Andreas Krieg, an associate professor at the Defence Studies Department of King's College London, said it was "sad that Farage has become a useful idiot for the UAE's political subversion campaign in Europe amid Abu Dhabi becoming [the] Club Med of Europe's far-right."

UAE interest in British Muslims

Farage told the Reform conference in September that "we will stop dangerous organisations with links to terrorism operating in our country, quite why we have been so gutless about this, both Conservative and Labour, I do not know.

"All across the Middle East, countries have banned and proscribed the Muslim Brotherhood as a dangerous organisation. We will do the very same."

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Cairo in 1928 and is one of the world's largest and best-known political Islam groups.

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It has long maintained that it is a peaceful organisation that wishes to participate in politics democratically.

It is considered a major threat by many autocratic governments in the Middle East and North Africa because in rare instances in which free elections are held in the region, parties affiliated with the organisation either win outright or form the largest opposition party.

The group is banned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE.

In January 2025, the UAE labelled eight British organisations terror groups over alleged links to the Muslim Brotherhood, although none of these organisations are considered to have broken any British laws.

In response Reform MP Richard Tice urged the Labour government to "act on" the organisations named by the UAE, a state where political opposition to the government of any kind is banned and risks heavy prison sentences.

In 2023 it was revealed that the UAE had paid a private intelligence firm based in Geneva, Alp Services, to smear Britain’s largest Muslim charity, Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW), by seeking to link its officials with the Muslim Brotherhood and violent extremists.

In 2017 Britain's parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, following an inquiry into the government's policy towards "political Islam", concluded that political Islamists were a “firewall” against violent extremism and should be engaged with, either when in power or in opposition.

But the inquiry itself, commissioned by the coalition government, reportedly followed lobbying by UAE officials.

Racism accusations against Farage

Farage's senior advisor, appointed in October, is Cambridge academic James Orr - who was in 2023 widely accused of racism after saying "Import the Arab World, become the Arab World" about pro-Palestine protests in London.

In November Reform was accused of "embracing racism" after appointing former academic Matthew Goodwin as head of its new student organisation.

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Goodwin has argued that being born and raised in Britain does not mean people from immigrant backgrounds are always British. The party stood by Goodwin.

That same month Reform appointed Alan Mendoza, the executive director of the Henry Jackson Society, a neoconservative think tank described as a "monstrous animal" and "racist organisation" by one of its own founders, as the party's chief advisor on global affairs.

In May last year, Farage came under fire after he said on Sky News: "We have a growing number of young people in this country who do not subscribe to British values, [who] in fact loathe much of what we stand for."

The interviewer asked if they were talking about Muslims, to which Farage replied: "We are."

Chris Doyle, the director of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding, told Middle East Eye: "For those engaging with Nigel Farage, one has to be crystal clear. His record shows an entrenched aversion to Muslims generally, like when he argued British Muslims do not share British values."