Who funds you? Tory donors funnel almost £7 million into Tufton Street
Calls for “total overhaul” to “force think tanks to come clean" about their "dark money" after new information reveals Tufton Street's reliance on a handful of Tory donors
Conservative Party donors have pumped almost £7million into influential right-wing think tanks that refuse to declare their donors since 2019, Democracy for Sale can reveal.
Think tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) have explicit policies of hiding their funders’ identities — something that ‘dark money’ donors can exploit to secretly shape politics. But documents unearthed by this newsletter and analysed with colleagues at DeSmog can shed new light on the money bankrolling Tufton Street.
We found that seven Conservatives donors – including four current Tory peers – have funnelled £6.85million to Tufton Street, according to public disclosures in their charitable accounts.
Tufton Street think tanks previously received funding from tobacco, oil and gas interests.
Yesterday, we revealed how Tufton Street bosses - who “incubated” Liz Truss’s disastrous premiership - were now pouring millions into Rishi Sunak’s election campaign.
Now we can see for the first time how reliant these influential think tanks are on funding from Tory donors.
A single donor, the Eurosceptic businessman and IEA Life Vice President Nigel Vinson, gave the IEA an “investment” worth £3.74million in 2023 - more than its entire turnover the previous year. Vinson had previously donated to Truss’s leadership campaign.
Other senior Conservative have also donated millions to Tufton Street through their charities and foundations.
Labour’s Liam Byrne told this newsletter that “these extraordinary revelations bring out of the dark shadows a truth we’d long suspected. A tiny group of super-rich donors has been systematically investing millions into extreme economic ideas and right wing candidates in an attempt to hijack the Tory agenda in their own interest.
“It’s fresh evidence for why we need a total overhaul of the way we force think tanks to come clean about the role of dark money funding their operations in the interests of a wealthy few.”
‘Extraordinary revelations’
Next boss and Tory peer Lord Simon Wolfson has given almost £700,000 to Policy Exchange and £100,000 to the IEA over the past five years. The financier Sir David Harding – who has donated more than £1.5m to the Conservatives – gave £600,000 to Policy Exchange in the same period.
Many of these donors have also held directorships on Tufton Street. Tory mega-donor Lord Michael Hintze gave the IEA £150,000 while he was a trustee of the organisation in 2020.
Lord Moynihan, who was given a peerage by Liz Truss, has donated £237,000 to at least six right wing think tanks in recent years - including £20,000 to the IEA in each of the past five years and, as this newsletter revealed last week, £25,000 to the climate denialist Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Filings also show that Moynihan pumped £45,000 into Civitas, which was forced to retract a critique of the government’s net zero plans after it was found to be “full of errors that even a schoolboy would be embarrassed about.”
The former Vote Leave chairman has significant oil and gas interests: he owns shares in three oil companies – BP, Shell and TotalEnergies – each worth more than £100,000, according to his register of interests.
Other confirmed donors to both Tufton Street and the Tory party include Tory peer Lord Jamie Borwick and the hedge fund manager Andrew Law, who has given the Conservatives £4m and threw a champagne party on the day of Truss’ mini-budget.
The full value of Tory donations to Tufton Street think tanks is likely to be significantly higher than the sum calculated by Democracy for Sale. For example, CPS board members – who include Tory mega donors Lord Anthony Bamford and Lord Michael Spencer – donated £1.13 million to the think tank in the year to September 2023, according to its annual accounts, though the identities of individual donors are not known.
The Charity Commission has faced legal challenges over the status of Tufton Street outfits. Although the IEA and Policy Exchange are registered as educational charities - with a duty “to engage equally with all political parties” - their trustees and executives have given 500 times more money to the Tories than to the Lib Dems, and have never donated to Labour.
Former Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake, who runs Unlock Democracy, which is campaigning for think tank transparency, said that “the public needs to be able to understand whether there is a risk that a think tank's recommendations are being affected by their funders' priorities.”
"Influential think tanks, with incredibly high levels of access to Ministers, must be totally open about who is funding them,” he added.
Phil Chamberlain from the Tobacco Research Group at the University of Bath said there “has long been a concern about the disproportionate power wielded by opaque think-tanks publishing research which serves the interests of industry rather than the common good.
“This story highlights that such think tanks seemingly remain addicted to flows of unaccountable cash and to keeping their operations in the shadows. We need more sunlight if we are to have public policy shaped in a democratic and evidence-led way.”
The think tanks and donors named in this piece have yet to respond to Democracy for Sale’s requests for comment.
If you aren’t already, can you help you support Democracy for Sale to lift the lid on dark money and hidden influence in the general election and beyond?
Every paid subscriber lets us do more work at this crucial moment.
Thanks so much for your hard work uncovering this network of political bribery. It is already an open secret, as is so much else here, that the DUP in Northern Ireland are not so much a political party as an assortment of ‘elected’ representatives for sale to the highest local or global bidder. This political disloyalty has proven a running sore bleeding off any possible local civic or social progress here since 2009.
Just wondering why suddenly msm are taking an interest in this when it’s been above the radar for years? Because the tories are losing? The has to be a reason…..