What was the catalyst that prompted Nigel Farage’s dramatic U-turn last week, when he announced that he was in fact going to stand as an MP and lead the Reform Party?
Some have speculated that it could have been his friend Donald Trump’s criminal conviction putting him off his original plan of campaigning across the pond, or recently being accused of “bottling it” by Piers Morgan on Question Time.
But there has also been a far unlikelier influence on his political career: Holly Valance, 41, the former pop star and Neighbours actress who has become something of a regular on the right-wing political circuit alongside her husband Nick Candy, the British billionaire property tycoon and Tory donor.
The high-profile couple — who split their time between their £75 million mansion in Chelsea, their residence in Monaco, a £175 million penthouse in One Hyde Park, and a £10 million on a Grade II‑listed mansion in the Cotswolds — have become key faces among conservative circles in recent years. They attended Boris Johnson’s wedding to Carrie in 2021 and are known to have hosted everyone from Leave EU founder Arron Banks to former US ambassador Woody Johnson at their seven-bedroom Cotswolds home.
Valance’s first association with Trump came in 2022, when she was pictured standing alongside the former POTUS, Farage and her husband with the caption, “Great dinner at Mar-a-Lago.” In the years since then Valance has declared that gender identity discussions should not be allowed in schools and called climate campaigner Greta Thunberg a “demonic little gremlin high priestess of climatism”.
This weekend rumours swirled that Valance might even stand as a candidate for Reform, despite her husband recently calling Keir Starmer a "decent man with good values and good morals”. She quickly confirmed she had decided against standing (”it was very difficult logistics wise”, she told GB News), but she hasn’t shied away from her intention to vote for Farage’s party. Earlier this month, she went as far as suggesting she had played a part in Farage’s decision to stand, saying she had been “in his ear” during the early stages of the election campaign. “I have been whispering in his ear for a long time,” she said. “He is the face of Reform. Richard [Tice] has done a great job and they are a great team. Hopefully now we will be stronger and we will see what we can do at this next election. I’m a paid up member.”
Valance also said she would go on the campaign trail with Farage in Clacton, the Tory-held seat in Essex where he will this time stand, having failed in his previous seven election bids. “If he asks me [to help him campaign], then probably”, she said recently, adding that Farage’s return to frontline politics was the "right move" and "exactly what we all wanted."
She stopped short of promising to knock on doors. “Does anyone want to see me knocking on their doors anymore? Maybe 20 years ago,” she quipped in a nod to her previous life, shooting to fame at the age of 16, in 1999, with an appearance on Neighbours, before pursuing a short-lived singing career, the apex of which was her No.1 single Kiss Kiss.
Her contemporary persona — describing “leftie” ideas as “cr*p” and claiming climate change is “not a crisis” — certainly seems a far cry from how she was known in the early days of her career. So how exactly did Valance go from Australian pop princess to darling of the far-right?
Finding fame as a teen: Neighbours and Kiss Kiss
Born in Australia to a Serbian father and a British mother, Valance grew up in Melbourne and began modelling as a teenager, posing for supermarket catalogues and ad campaigns. By age 14 she is said to have been earning $200 an hour.
In 1999, age 16, Valance got her big break after being cast in the hit Australian TV soap Neighbours as Felicity “Flick” Scully. She left the show to pursue a music career after a few years, her first and still most memorable single, released in April 2002, being Kiss Kiss, an English language cover version of Turkish singer, Tarkan's Şımarık, which charted at No.1 in the UK and reached the top 10 in seventeen countries.
But music was not to be. After releasing her album Footprints later that year, which included three top ten hits, Valance then announced she was no longer interested in pursuing music, making a return to acting instead.
Her most high-profile role came in 2005 as Nika Volek in hit US drama Prison Break, which she followed up with a series of film credits including DOA: Dead or Alive (2006), Pledge This! (2006), Taken (2008), and Kambakkht Ishq (2009).
Valance relocated to the UK in 2009 and appeared on the ninth series of Strictly Come Dancing shortly after, partnered with professional Artem Chigvintsev.
She was eliminated in the semi-finals, coming fourth overall. But she never quite managed to hit the big time on screen and withdrew from the entertainment world in 2013.
Marrying into the Candy dynasty
When she left the world of showbiz, Valance had already started dating British billionaire and property tycoon Nick Candy. She met him at a dinner party in 2010 and the pair instantly fell for each other, the Daily Mail reporting that Valance “didn’t know anything about him” at the time. She said, “I just thought, “Cor, if I didn’t fancy you so much, we’d be the best of friends. Instead, I just want to make out with you all the time.’”
Candy attended the elite a year Epsom College in Surrey and later graduated from the University of Reading. Alongside his brother Christian, he made his fortune redeveloping properties. In 1995, the brothers bought their first property, a one-bedroom flat in Fulham. Using a £6,000 loan from their grandmother, the brothers renovated the £122,000 apartment while living in it, selling it 18 months later for £50,000 profit.
Their most famous project is the luxury apartment block One Hyde Park, in Knightsbridge, which also houses the famous Mandarin Oriental hotel, a favourite with the A-list when they stay in London.
The Candy brothers are estimated to share a joint net worth of £1.5 billion, and their clients reportedly range from pop stars such as Kylie Minogue to ultra-wealthy oligarchs and sheikhs. Candy has, in the past, boasted of his collection of cars and watches, admitting he owns "too many" timepieces. Speaking of his assets in This Is Money magazine in 2007, he said, "I mean it's not as if you need to have a yacht. But then again we live in Monaco so for four or five months of the year we use it non-stop, every day. And a lot of my friends use it — it's a great way of escaping real life."
It is hardly a surprise, then, that when the couple married in October 2011, their lavish Beverly Hills ceremony cost a whopping £3 million. A large portion of the cost is reportedly due to the presence of singer Katy Perry, who is said to have been paid £1.2 million to serenade the star-studded guests, including Simon Cowell, Tracy Emin and Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, as well as their mother Sarah, Duchess of York. According to the Times, Candy is also friends with comedians Jimmy Carr and David Walliams, with the paper referring to him as "an Olympic level name dropper".
The pair have two children: their first daughter, Luka Violet Toni Candy, was born in November 2013, and their second, Nova Skye Coco Candy, born in September 2017. Valance has revealed that dealing with the property developer's busy lifestyle can be “tricky”, claiming that he works seven days a week. “He worked on Christmas Day and even the day we practised our vows with [the] priest he took a call in the middle of it”, she said on the Made by Mammas podcast in 2019. “He was like, 'got to take this sorry, guys!' I was like, 'we're at the altar practicing our vows'! So that's who I married, I know that.”
The pair are reported to split their time between their £75 million mansion in Chelsea, their residence in Monaco, a £175 million penthouse in One Hyde Park, and a £10 million on a Grade II‑listed mansion in the Cotswolds, which is a short drive from private members' club Soho Farmhouse. Earlier this year, Candy came under fire for complaining about the service charge on their central London flat. “I’ve got a penthouse … and I’m there like 20 days a year, and I pay the service charge [like] the guy who uses the pool everyday,” Candy said during an event at the Savoy hotel in London.
Like his wife, Candy is also a familiar face in the right-wing political establishment. In 2020, the Guardian reported he had donated £100,000 to the Conservative Party. The following year, the Mirror released a photograph showing that he had attended a party with Shaun Bailey, the then Tory London mayoral candidate, in December 2020, violating coronavirus restrictions. The story came after the Times revealed in March 2021 that Candy was heading up the fundraising efforts for Bailey's mayoral bid.
However more recently, Candy has revealed that he isn’t averse to Keir Starmer. Speaking on the Bloomberg's In The City podcast in February, he said while he was "naturally a Tory", he believes the Labour leader is a "decent man with good values and good morals”. He added, "I think people are less worried this time because Keir Starmer is not Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer and his team seem to be engaging with business."
A decade at the heart of London’s right-wing political set
Since Valance’s departure from the entertainment world, she has, alongside her husband, been part of an affluent right-wing social set, stretching across both sides of the Atlantic.
The couple both attended Boris Johnson’s third wedding in 2021, as well as being regulars at Tory fundraising events. While Valance was sat with MPs Jacob Rees-Mogg, Lee Anderson and ex-PM Liz Truss at a Popular Conservatism group event at the start of the year and said she found [Truss] “really interesting to listen to.”Other associates include wealthy right-wingers such as Leave EU founder Arron Banks, GB News owner Paul Marshall and former US ambassador Woody Johnson, as well as other Donald Trump and Brexit supporters and bankers.
Valance and Candy are known to host the group at their Cotswolds mansion, a seven-bedroom property which has a pool, stables, tennis and squash courts and its own chapel. The set are also regulars at Mayfair’s exclusive private members’ club 5 Hertford Street, loved by A-listers such as Mick Jagger and Harry Styles.
In April of this year, Valance, Candy joined a group to celebrate Farage’s 60th birthday party at Boisdale, a steak restaurant in Canary Wharf. Valance was one of three people, along with Farage’s son and Donald Trump (via video) to give a speech in tribute to the Reform leader, describing him as “one of the bravest men I know.”
‘Wait, why’s that 90s’ singer there?’ – Valance’s public entrance into politics
The first public indication that Valance was entering the political realm came in 2022, when Farage tweeted a photo of himself standing alongside Donald Trump, Valance, and Candy, with the caption, “Great dinner at Mar-a-Lago.”
Users on X/Twitter were baffled. “Imagine telling your 2012 self that in 10 years Nigel Farage will tweet a picture of him standing between Donald Trump and Holly Valance — with a picture of Kim Jong Un in the background — and nobody will bat an eyelid,” one person wrote. “Wait, why’s that 90s’ singer there?” another asked.
However, Valance was only just getting started. In February 2024, she hit headlines once again after attending the launch of the new conservative movement Popular Conservatism, led by former PM Liz Truss. “Everyone starts off as a leftie and then wakes up at some point after you start either making money, working, trying to run a business, trying to buy a home, and then realise what cr*p ideas they all are — and then you go to the right,” she said in an interview at the event.
She also took aim at climate change, claiming that “the air is better than when I was growing up, it used to stink walking down the street when I was growing up.” In a separate interview with GB News in March, Valance slammed Greta Thunberg, saying, “I don’t understand why you have this, like, demonic little gremlin high priestess of climatism as the goddess in classrooms, Greta [Thunberg]. All the kids are all coming home with depression and anxiety. [sic]
“Why would you go to your music lesson or bother doing your homework or get out of your bed if you think we’re all going to be dead in five years anyway?” She added.
She went on to declare that education about gender identity and discussions around sexualities should not be allowed in schools. “I don’t think sexuality and children should be in the same sentence. I don’t think anyone’s sexuality is anyone’s business,” she claimed. “You don’t know about mine. I don’t know about yours. Why would we?”
Asked whether or not she would consider moving back to her native Australia, Valance said, “the Australia I grew up in was unreal. It was so fun and we didn’t seem to have all these problems… The woke stuff’s really gone big in Australia”. “My mother is from Southampton. My whole family is English. I don’t want to go anywhere. And Nick doesn’t want to go anywhere. We prefer to be in our country,” she added.
Valance has said that she did not intend to “speak out” about politics, telling the Times last month. “It was a funny sliding doors moment because I didn’t think anything I said was particularly edgy or profound or revolutionary. But maybe it was a good moment for someone in the entertainment industry to buck the trend of only contributing their latest project pitch or their pronouns”. Which Farage confirmed saying, “she kept quiet for many, many years,” adding that he always warned Valance that “once you go public there’s no way back.”
And it seems that insiders do feel Valance has had an influence with her political statements. An unnamed Australian diplomat told the Times said she was “one of the reasons we secured such a favourable free trade agreement for Australia” in 2021. “She had all of the right of the Tory party eating out of the palm of her hand.” The Times also reported that the Tory Party have repeatedly discussed making Valance their London mayoral candidate.
Not everyone was so happy about her sudden entrance to the political fray, however, least of all her half-sister Olympia, 31, who also starred on Neighbours. “It was like, ‘Oh my God,’ when she said all that stuff,” she told the Australian radio show Allan & Carly last month. “I’m like, ‘Oh God! Everyone’s going to think that that’s what I think!’ And I don’t.”
‘It’s a Holly party’ – fundraising for Donald Trump
Tonight, Valance will be the face of one of the biggest nights in the calendar for the right-wing social set: a London fundraiser for ex-president and convicted criminal Donald Trump. The glitzy event, where tickets cost $100,000 (£78,500), has been dubbed by attendee Farage as a "Holly party". “It’s a Holly party,” he said ahead of the bash, expected to include many of the same guests as his own 60th birthday bash in April. “So you can guarantee it’s going to be enormous fun.”
The former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr. and wife former Fox News anchor Kimberly Guilfoyle are also set to appear, as is Candy. “It will be the best party,” one Republican operative said in the Times last week. “It’s kind of a must-attend, if you can afford a ticket.”
Trump’s team are reportedly delighted with the support from Valance. "She's glamorous,” a representative of Trump’s campaign team said. “She doesn't fit into the pigeonhole." As election year on both sides of the Atlantic heats up, all eyes are on the next Holly party.
