The fee, which will rise by £50,000 each day, will be gifted to an immigrant support charity.
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An anti-Brexit campaign group has bought the website “thebrexitparty.com” and is offering to sell it to Nigel Farage for over a million pounds.
Led By Donkeys said the entire fee, which will increase by £50,000 each day, would be donated to the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants.
The move comes after Brexit Party lawyers contacted Led By Donkeys asking them to remove their logo from the site. The party said the campaign group is refusing to transfer the domain name, which is similar to their official site “thebrexitparty.org”.
The website features a rising total of the cost, along with an “election advent calendar” – which offers examples of the “lies, lunacy and hypocrisy” of the Conservatives and Brexit Party every day until December 12.
“When Farage and his millionaire backers set up the Brexit Party they didn’t have the foresight to buy up all of the websites with their own name – and we did,” Led By Donkeys co-founder Oliver Knowles told the PA news agency.
“With the advent calendar, we are telling the story of the Brexit Party and the Tory Party who are now election partners – and the threat they represent to the country.”
Asked why they chose the immigrant support charity, Mr Knowles said: “Nigel Farage peddles an ideology of hatred and division and it felt like this would be a good and just cause.”
Led By Donkeys bought the domain name earlier this year to challenge Mr Farage’s party during the European Parliament elections in May.
The anti-Brexit group ridiculed the recent approach from Brexit Party lawyers, saying the eight-page legal letter cites European Union law five times as justification of its claim.
“Who knew Nigel Farage was such a fan of European law?” Led By Donkeys tweeted.
All versions of the Brexit Party logo have been removed from the current version of the website.
Behind the first door of the advent calendar features a video of Mr Farage saying “we’re going to have to move to an insurance-based system of healthcare”.
“There will be a series of other pieces of information about their collaboration and highlighting the lunacy and hypocrisy of their Brexit position over the past few months,” said Mr Knowles.
“Some are describing it as the most important election in a generation and we’re inclined to agree.”
In a statement, the Brexit Party said: “The Brexit Party have issued a legal letter, via lawyers, Wedlake Bell to Led by Donkeys requesting they cease and desist from using the Brexit Party logo and Brexit Party materials on posters, document download site and via their website at thebrexitparty.com.
“They have offered to comply with these requests, but so far they are refusing to transfer the domain name.”
Led By Donkeys has made its name protesting against Brexit with various large-scale projects in public spaces, first going viral in early 2019 by sharing politicians’ past comments on billboards.
CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — Prince Harry's surprising resignation from an African charity he co-founded in memory of his mother, Princess Diana, came this week amid allegations of bullying, harassment, sexism and racism made by the organization's chairperson against unnamed board members.
Harry announced his resignation in a joint statement with Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, who he co-founded the Sentebale youth-focused charity with in 2006. The princes were patrons of Sentebale and weren't on the board of trustees.
They said they were quitting in support of the trustees, who left after a dispute with chairperson Sophie Chandauka.
Sentebale works in the southern African nations of Lesotho and Botswana and was started to help young people affected by AIDS after Harry spent part of a gap year in 2004 working at an orphanage in Lesotho for children whose parents died of the disease.
Sentebale means “don't forget me” in the Sesotho language, and Harry and Seeiso set it up in memory of their mothers.
Princess Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997. Seeiso's mother, the former queen of Lesotho, died in 2003.
In their statement, Harry and Seeiso said they were in shock at the developments at the charity, where the trustees had asked Chandauka to step down. She refused and filed papers at a British court to prevent her from being removed.
The princes said the trustees were acting in the best interests of Sentebale and had now resigned, and the breakdown in relationships was “devastating.”
“What’s transpired is unthinkable," the princes said.
Chandauka, a Zimbabwean corporate lawyer, said in her own statement that she had “dared to blow the whistle" about poor governance, abuse of power, bullying, harassment, sexism and racism at the charity, and said there had been a cover-up. Her allegations appeared to be directed at the trustees, but she didn't name anyone or give any details.
The trustees who resigned included Mark Dyer, a longtime mentor of Harry's. One of the other trustees, Kelello Lerotholi, told British television channel Sky News that Chandauka's allegations were surprising and “there was never even a hint” of misconduct by trustees.
Chandauka said that she had reported some of the board members to the U.K.'s Charity Commission, where Sentebale is registered. A spokesperson at Sentebale didn't respond to a request for more information on who Chandauka's allegations were specifically directed at or what they involved.
Sentebale has a special place for Harry and continued some of the work Princess Diana did by supporting AIDS charities and trying to remove stigmas around the disease. Diana visited South Africa to promote AIDS awareness in March 1997, five months before she died.
Sentebale was initially set up to help vulnerable children and young people affected by AIDS with health care services, education and vocational training. Lesotho, a poor mountainous kingdom surrounded by South Africa, is one of the worst-affected countries in the world by HIV.
Harry's charity had recently evolved to also address issues of youth health, wealth and climate resilience in southern Africa under Chandauka, and the future direction of the charity was a point of disagreement among its leadership, according to British media reports.
Harry visited Sentebale in Lesotho as recently as October, when he spent an evening around a campfire speaking with young people and said the charity was building a force of young advocates. On the same trip, Lesotho Prime Minister Sam Matekane said the country would always be Harry's “second home.”
FILE - Britain's Prince Harry speaks during a high level event sponsored by Lesotho at U.N. headquarters, Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II, file)
FILE - Britain's Prince Harry speaks during the Clinton Global Initiative, on Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki, file)
FILE - This Dec. 4, 2024 file photo shows Sentebale Chair Sophie Chandauka during the Royal Salute Polo Challenge, to benefit Sentebale, at the USPA National Polo Center in Wellington, Fla. (Yaroslav Sabitov/PA via AP)
FILE - Britain's Prince Harry, left, accompanied by Prince Seeiso of Lesetho, meets pupils in a class during his visit to the Kananelo Centre for the Deaf outside Maseru, Lesotho, Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe, File)
FILE - Britain's Prince Harry speaks on stage during a concert hosted by his charity Sentebale to raise funds and awareness to support children and young people affected by HIV and AIDS in Lesotho, Botswana and Malawi, at Hampton Court Palace, in London, Tuesday June 11, 2019. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, Pool, File)
