Dark money and Donald Trump's British fan club

Britain is already prey to many of the opaque US conservative donors that backed Trump. Keir Starmer needs to act.

Donald Trump likes to talk up his links to Britain, his Hebridean mother and Scottish golf courses. But the appreciation has largely been one way: David Lammy’s description of the president elect as a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath” was hardly politic but it’s a sentiment that chimes with many of us. Two-thirds of Britons wanted Kamala Harris to win on Tuesday. 

Yet Trump’s unpopularity in Britain is far from universal. For some, Trump is a lodestar, the harbinger of a populist revolution that could be emulated on this side of the pond. Meanwhile, some of Trump’s biggest donors have been secretly funding a clutch of the most influential groups on the right of British politics for the last decade.

Few domestic political figures are as close to Trump as Nigel Farage. The MP for Clacton has been ubiquitous in the United States in recent months. Farage supported Trump's call for an investigation into Labour volunteers campaigning for the Democrats. And it recently emerged that a Reform donor had footed the £33,000 bill for Farage to support Trump at the Republican National Convention.

Farage is plugged into the very top of Trump’s Republican party. “Nigel is a cult figure on the right here,” Steve Bannon, the éminence grise behind Trump’s 2016 victory, told me a few years ago, when I was writing my last book, on dark money in politics. Farage even created a front organisation to try to raise money from Trump supporters after Brexit.

It’s not just Farage. The Conservatives have also been warming to Trump. Liz Truss has definitely drunk the Kool-Aid, telling the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington earlier this year that her premiership was thwarted by that most familiar of Trump foes, “the deep state”.

On Wednesday, the new Tory leader Kemi Badenoch used her first outing at prime minister’s questions to press Keir Starmer on his foreign secretary’s previous comments about Trump. Expect more of that. Badenoch’s defeated rival, Robert Jenrick, had called for a Trump win, embracing the nativist cause with all the zeal of the convert.

Jenrick, Truss and another defeated leadership candidate, Priti Patel, have all traipsed to Washington to give talks at the Heritage Foundation, the hugely influential conservative thinktank behind the Project 2025 blueprint for a state-eviscerating, radically social conservative second Trump administration.

As I told journalists at the investigative climate site DeSmog this week, the dark money that fuelled the likes of the Heritage Foundation is increasingly washing up in Britain.

Heritage and other DC-based thinktanks have long links to the Tufton Street network of anonymously-funded thinktanks clustered around Westminster. After its halcyon days during the governments of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, Tufton Street fell out of favour under New Labour. Brexit offered a chance for reinvention, with the right-wing thinktank ecosystem presenting a libertarian version of leaving the European Union, which was warmly received by many American conservatives. 

Tufton Street thinktanks refuse to name their donors, but US corporate filings do give an insight into where some of their finance comes from. Groups such as the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), the Adam Smith Institute and the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) have received millions from US donors in recent years, as this newsletter revealed earlier this year.

Many of Tufton Street’s American benefactors were also at the vanguard of Trump’s campaign. US investor Charles Schwab—who has given the IEA nearly $300,000 since 2015—donated more than $10m to the Republicans ahead of this year’s election. Another IEA donor, Metro Bank founder Vernon Hill, backed Trump with more than $2m.

The ties between Tufton Street and Republican donors are often personal and long-standing. When I was reporting our recent investigation into Tufton Street donors funding Trump, tycoon Carl Barney told me that he started donating to the Adam Smith Institute after meeting its founder Madsen Pirie and director Eamon Butler in the US a decade ago. “I’ve supported them ever since,” he said. 

Barney told me that Trump “is not perfect”, but “is the best on offer”. Other Tufton Street and Trump donors are more avowedly ideologically aligned. Thomas D. Klingenstein, who has previously donated to the climate denialist GWPF, is a leading light behind the National Conservatism movement that birthed JD Vance, and which Suella Braverman and other standard bearers of the Tory right happily endorsed at its conference in London last year.

A few short months ago, British conservatives seemed destined to be locked out of power for a decade or more. Now many on the radical right, and in the Tory party, will see reasons to be hopeful.

In Farage, Tufton Street and their fellow travellers Trumpist donors have “people we can do business with.” They will face off against a Labour opponent that shares many of the Democrats’ flaws, seen as too close to big business and removed from everyday concerns, a fondness for word salads over clarity. 

But there is something Starmer can do quickly: Get serious about reforming the UK’s ineffective electoral laws, and really look at capping political donations and closing loopholes, such as not allowing the unincorporated associations that can be used to funnel anonymous money into British politics. If he doesn’t, we shouldn’t be surprised if the pro-Trump transatlantic tide that has been washing up in the UK becomes a tsunami. 

A version of this piece appeared on Prospect magazine online.