A controversial Bristol businessman, who provided the funding for Nigel Farage’s Brexit campaign, organised a £150,000 party in a top Washington hotel to celebrate President Donald Trump’s inauguration this week – but has been denied entry to the US by immigration officials.
Go Skippy founder and millionaire political donor Arron Banks has organised a ‘Stars and Stripes and Union Jack Party’ to celebrate the start of the second term of President Trump this coming Friday – but his attempt to travel to the party himself have been thwarted.
Aaron Banks said the refusal to grant him an ESTA visa to enter the United States was a ‘political decision’ by the outgoing Biden administration, and was ‘revenge’ for the claims that Banks was part of a Russian-backed move to undermine the Brexit referendum back in 2016.
The party is to take place on the rooftop of Washington’s Hay-Adams hotel this Friday, and attendees are due to include former British Prime Minister Liz Truss, Reform UK’s treasurer Nick Candy and Reform leader Nigel Farage, who slammed the US authorities for denying the ESTA visa.
“Arron Banks is a good man and a friend of America,” said Mr Farage. “It is astonishing that US Citizenship and Immigration Services have denied him entry for the inauguration,” he added.
Other people invited to the party – who may or may not come – are the owner of Tesla and X Elon Musk, former Trump strategist Steve Bannon and President Trump himself.
Banks told the Sunday Times that the US authorities had refused entry to both him and Leave.EU campaigner Andy Wigmore when they applied for an ESTA visa earlier this month.
He described it as a ‘political decision’ that was ‘revenge for the failed Russia Hoax perpetrated on both sides of the Atlantic’.
“President Trump was the victim of the Russia Hoax in the US and I know better than most what that felt like,” he said. “I was accused of Russian collusion in the Brexit campaign, investigated and cleared by the National Crime Agency. I sued the journalist that made these fake claims and won damages and costs in the London High Courts … My businesses were de-banked and attacked by vicious opponents during this period – all for supporting Brexit and President Trump,” he explained.
“With my visa blocked, I guess Andy and myself will have to cross the Rio Grande from Mexico into the US, along with the hundreds of thousands of gang members and bad hombres on the border, and claim our free hotel room and mobile phone in DC when we arrive,” he added.
The US authorities have denied a political motive for the move – and said there are backlogs in the system of processing Esta applications and Mr Banks was told the process would take up to 21 days – meaning he’d miss his own party.
Arron Banks has been a controversial figure in the Bristol area as well as internationally. Last year he launched a bid to take over Gloucestershire County Cricket Club by writing an open letter to fans and members, and in 2021, he criticised Gloucestershire police for monitoring a fox hunt near where he lives on the edge of Bristol. In 2019, he courted controversy for ‘joking’ about a ‘freak yachting accident’ after hearing the climate campaigner Greta Thunberg was travelling across the Atlantic in a boat, and the same year people living next to land he started building six luxury homes on near Bathcomplained to the authorities. In 2017, he sparked a furious backlash from Bristol East MP Kerry McCarthy after he described Bristol as ‘Little Somalia’.