Robert Jenrick, Priti Patel, and several other senior Conservative figures have close connections to a U.S. think tank that has authored a radical right-wing, anti-climate agenda for a future Donald Trump administration. 

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is considered so extreme that Trump has tried to distance himself from the manifesto, calling it “ridiculous and abysmal”.

However, a number of influential Tory figures have delivered high-profile speeches to the Heritage Foundation in recent years. A number of these speeches have taken place since the release of the Project 2025 agenda in April 2023.

Heritage Foundation allies include Jenrick and Patel, who are both running to be Conservative Party leader, current Tory deputy leader Oliver Dowden, Conservative peer Lord David Frost, and former prime minister Liz Truss.

This news comes as the Conservative Party is deciding on its future political direction after its historic general election defeat in July. Jenrick, who has been a vocal critic of green policies in recent months, last week said he would vote for Trump in November’s presidential election if he were an American. 

Adrian Ramsay, co-leader of the Green Party, told DeSmog: “Just a month on from suffering the worst result in its entire history, you’d hope the Conservatives would be reflecting on their 14 years of failure and why their turn to the right was so comprehensively rejected by the British public.

“If they’re taking advice from the Heritage Foundation, then it will show they’ve learnt nothing from their defeat. Whether it’s on abortion rights or the climate crisis, organisations like the Heritage Foundation are dangerous and completely out of touch with the British public.”

Project 2025

The Heritage Foundation has extensive ties to climate science deniers and fossil fuel interests. The group received over £4.9 million between 1997 and 2017 from groups linked to fossil fuel giant Koch Industries. The brothers behind the company, Charles and the late David Koch, have been the principal funders of climate denial groups in the U.S. since the 1980s. 

As revealed by DeSmog, advisory groups working on Project 2025 have received at least $9.6 million from Charles Koch since 2020, along with at least $21.5 million from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which is funded by the Mellon oil and banking fortune.

The group disputed these figures when approached for comment by DeSmog, saying: “Heritage research is independent and accurate, these numbers are not”.

Project 2025, viewed as a blueprint for a second Trump administration, proposes the centralisation of the federal government under the authority of the president, radical tax cuts, and a crackdown on reproductive rights. 

Project 2025 would also roll back the Biden administration’s progress on climate action, slashing restrictions on fossil fuel extraction, scrapping state investment in renewable energy, and gutting the Environmental Protection Agency. 

At least 140 authors of Project 2025 worked for the last Trump administration, according to CNN, while several are expected to hold positions in the next Trump White House, if he wins in November. An investigation published this week by ProPublica and Documented revealed that 29 out of 36 speakers in Project 2025 training videos are former Trump administration employees. 

Heritage president Kevin Roberts’s new book, Dawn’s Early Light, features a foreword by Trump’s vice presidential candidate, JD Vance. Roberts himself wrote the foreword to the Project 2025 document and currently leads the project. 

However, Trump has attempted to distance himself from the agenda in recent weeks following criticism of its radical proposals. Despite claiming in early July to “know nothing about Project 2025”, Trump has said that “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

The project’s former leader, Paul Dans, told Politico in June that “We talk to President Trump, and we also talk to his team”. Michael Tyler, communications director for the Democratic Kamala Harris campaign, told MSNBC in late July that the Project 2025 agenda was “extreme and dangerous”.

A Heritage Foundation spokesperson told DeSmog: “Project 2025 is a coalition of conservatives who wrote ‘Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise’ which was published in April 2023, before any candidate declared a run for office. Project 2025 does not speak for any candidate or campaign.”

Conservative Connections

Former immigration minister Robert Jenrick gave a speech to the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC in February this year entitled “Securing Sovereign Borders in an Age of Mass Migration”. There is no record of a speaking fee in his register of interests. 

After being introduced by Kevin Roberts, Jenrick praised the foundation, and described meeting with and learning from Heritage while working as an intern for Condoleeza Rice, who served as secretary of state under Republican President George W. Bush. 

Jenrick also praised the event’s co-host Nile Gardiner, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom’ whom Jenrick described as “the special relationship made flesh”. He said Gardiner, who writes a regular column for the Daily Telegraph, “creates links between conservatives here and in the UK”. 

At a 2022 Heritage Foundation event, Gardiner said: “I do think the British government needs to rethink the whole green energy agenda. It’s not a conservative agenda, in fact it’s a socialist agenda”. He added: “I think net zero has become basically a form of religion, and anyone who questions the dogma on this immediately is accused of being a heretic.”

As DeSmog has reported, Jenrick has been stepping up his attacks on net zero policies and has advocated for increased fossil fuel extraction, including the development of new coal mines. 

Priti Patel, another Tory leadership hopeful, gave a speech about national security to the Heritage Foundation, hosted by Gardiner, in November 2021. Patel was at the time serving as home secretary, and her address was published on the UK government website.

Patel also met with Gardiner and Roberts in March of this year. Posting about the meeting on Facebook, Patel said:

In February 2022, Tory deputy leader Oliver Dowden, who at the time was party chairman, gave a speech to the Heritage Foundation about “defeating cancel culture” in which he attacked what he called “woke” ideology. The event was hosted by Gardiner. 

A Liberal Democrat spokesperson said: “The more top Conservative politicians cosy up to Donald Trump and his backers in the U.S., the more out-of-touch they are with their former voters.”

In June 2023, Lord Frost – a trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s main climate science denial group – gave a speech to the Legatum Institute think tank and introduced Kevin Roberts, whom he described as “one of the U.S.’s foremost fighters for conservative ideas”. Frost also called the Heritage Foundation, “America’s premier conservative think tank”.

The Tory peer went on to list a series of policies that he thought should be adopted by the Conservative Party, including: “Postponing net zero, putting in place a domestically sourced gas to nuclear programme, and removing the subsidies on worthless forms of renewable energy production so that it becomes worthwhile to invest in energy intensive activities here again.”

Suella Braverman, another former home secretary, spoke alongside Roberts at a National Conservatism conference in May 2023. The pair were joined by Andrew Olivastro, a Heritage Foundation vice president who has said that environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing “is a direct assault on the heart and soul of the free market economy”.

In September 2022, the Heritage Foundation met with then Conservative chancellor Nadhim Zahawi in Washington DC for a “ministerial roundtable”, according to government records. 

Former prime minister Liz Truss, who lost her seat in July’s general election, has given a string of paid speeches to the Heritage Foundation since resigning from 10 Downing Street in late 2022. 

In May 2023, the Heritage Foundation paid £7,600 for Truss, her family and a member of staff to travel to Washington DC to deliver its “Margaret Thatcher freedom lecture”. In October 2023, the group paid Truss £15,834 to give a speech on cybersecurity and defence in Switzerland, plus £3,894 for flights and accommodation. 

And in March of this year, the Heritage Foundation paid £7,573 for Truss to deliver a lecture at the Future of Europe Forum in Poland.  

Truss’s new book, Ten Years to Save the West, which called for the abolition of the UK’s Climate Change Act, featured a blurb from Kevin Roberts, which said: “Like Margaret Thatcher before her, Liz is a true friend of the American people, and her spirited message in this book should be heeded on Capitol Hill and in the White House.” 

The Heritage Foundation also has ties to UK climate denial groups. In December 2022, the Heritage Foundation hosted an event on green energy with Benny Peiser, director of the GWPF. 

In March of this year, Roberts was interviewed on right-wing TV channel GB News by Reform UK’s now leader Nigel Farage. 

Farage also has ties to the Heritage Foundation. He gave a speech to the group back in 2015 about the prospects of a UK referendum on European Union membership. 

The Heritage Foundation is likewise featured regularly in The Telegraph. Alongside Gardiner’s regular column, the newspaper – which frequently attacks climate policies – has periodically published articles by Kevin Roberts. 

The right-wing publication also ran a video interview in January with Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Centre for Energy, Climate, and Environment, under the headline: “The West’s Net Zero madness is fuelling mass third world immigration”.

In 2022, Furchtgott-Roth – who served in the first Trump administration – wrote an article in Forbes arguing that the West should encourage “all countries” to use “natural gas, coal, and nuclear” to help the poor. The article also cast doubt on climate science – suggesting “some research shows little change” in extreme weather, while downplaying sea-level rises.

The Conservative politicians named have been approached for comment.