Conservative Party leadership hopeful Kemi Badenoch received £10,000 towards her campaign from the chair of a climate science denial group, DeSmog can reveal. 

Neil Record, a millionaire Tory donor and founder of the investment firm Record Financial Group, is chair of Net Zero Watch (NZW), the campaign arm of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). 

Based in 55 Tufton Street, Westminster, the GWPF is the UK’s leading climate science denial group. The GWPF’s director Benny Peiser has suggested it would be “extraordinary anyone should think there is a climate crisis”, while the group has also expressed the view that carbon dioxide has been mis-characterised as pollution, when in fact it is a “benefit to the planet”. 

Its NZW arm has called for “rapid” new North Sea oil and gas exploration, and for wind and solar power to be “wound down completely”. 

Badenoch received £10,000 from Record in July, according to her official register of interests, which said that the donation was “in support of my campaign for the leadership of the Conservative Party”. 

The North West Essex MP has previously criticised the UK’s climate targets, calling them “arbitrary” in a 2022 interview. Badenoch has previously suggested that she would be in favour of delaying the UK’s commitment to reach net zero by 2050. 

While serving as business secretary in September 2023, Badenoch also defended the decision by then prime minister Rishi Sunak to water down and delay a number of net zero policies, and argued that new fossil fuel licences were compatible with the UK’s climate targets.

“It’s no wonder that the Conservatives don’t want to act on the climate crisis when they are receiving donations from the people running groups like Net Zero Watch,” Adrian Ramsay, co-leader of the Green Party, told DeSmog. 

“Just weeks on from the worst electoral defeat in their entire history, you’d hope they would be reflecting on why policies like U-turning on their climate commitments were so unpopular. Instead, it seems they are going to double down on their hostility to net zero and will remain both a threat to the planet and completely out of touch with the British public.”

Polling by More in Common and E3G during the 2024 general election period found that a majority of people in every UK constituency are worried about climate change. Some 61 percent of 2024 Conservative voters said they are worried about climate change, matched by 76 percent of Labour voters, and 65 percent of the country overall. 

Last month, which saw world temperatures reach their hottest levels ever measured, Record wrote in The Telegraph that it is “debatable in detail” whether burning fossil fuels increases carbon dioxide (CO2) and causes dangerous global warming.

He went on to claim that achieving net zero by 2050 “will restrict our freedom, and is likely to be eye-wateringly expensive”, and should be replaced with the “realistic promise” for the UK not to contribute more than one percent of global emissions. 

The world’s foremost climate science body, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has stated that CO2 “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, which has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heatwaves, heavy rains, and drought”.

The IPCC has also warned that climate action has been delayed by “rhetoric and misinformation that undermines climate science and disregards risk and urgency”.

Record is a “life vice president” of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) think tank, which he chaired until July 2023. The IEA has opposed state-led climate policies and has advocated for more fossil fuel extraction. The think tank received funding from the oil giant BP every year from 1967 to at least 2018. Record has given money to both the IEA and the GWPF. 

The GWPF and the IEA are part of the Tufton Street network of think tanks and lobbying groups based in Westminster, all of which campaign for less government regulation, including on climate change.

When questioned previously about his GWPF donations, Record said: “I personally regard the continuing contribution of the GWPF to the climate change debate as very positive in assisting balance and rationality in this contentious area.”

The GWPF and the Tories

A number of other Tory MPs have also recently received donations from funders of the GWPF. 

One of the early funders of the GWPF, Lord Michael Hintze, donated £18,000 to a number of Tory MPs from May to August. A hedge fund manager, Conservative peer and major party donor, Lord Hintze has said that he believes “there is climate change” caused “in part due to human activity over the past century”. However, he has said that “all sides must be heard” on the issue “to reach the right conclusion for society as a whole”.

A number of climate consensus studies conducted between 2004 and 2015 found that between 90 percent and 100 percent of experts agree that humans are responsible for climate change. A study published in 2021, which reviewed over 3,000 scientific papers, found that over 99 percent of climate science literature says that global warming is caused by human activity.

Lord Hintze’s recent donations included £2,000 to Claire Coutinho, £5,000 to Iain Duncan Smith, £2,500 to Alison Griffiths, £2,500 to Kit Malthouse, £2,000 to Andrew Murrison, £2,500 to Patrick Spencer, and £2,500 to Nick Timothy.

Former energy and net zero secretary Coutinho – who oversaw the weakening of a number of flagship climate policies – received another £2,000 from Lord Hintze in January. 

Lord Hintze is one of the Conservative Party’s most prolific donors in recent years and has given more than £4 million to the party and its candidates since 2002. 

Between the 2019 general election and the start of the 2024 campaign, the Conservatives received £8.4 million from fossil fuel interests, highly polluting industries, and climate science deniers.

GWPF donor Lord Jon Moynihan has also given £12,000 to a number of Tory MPs in recent months, including £5,000 to Peter Fortune, £2,000 to Mark Francois, and £5,000 to Thomas Bradley. He has now donated more than £600,000 to the Conservatives and its candidates since 2001.

Lord Moynihan gave £25,000 to the GWPF between 2018 and 2023, and has donated over £300,000 to other “free market” groups in the Tufton Street network in recent years, including the IEA. 

Lord Moynihan also has substantial oil and gas investments. The peer’s register of interests shows that he holds shares worth more than £100,000 in each of the oil and gas majors BP, Shell, and TotalEnergies.

The GWPF and NZW have a number of political ties. Labour MP Graham Stringer is a director of the GWFP, having joined its board of trustees in 2015. Lord David Frost, a Tory peer and the UK’s former chief Brexit negotiator, is a trustee of the organisation alongside Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson. Former Tory MP Andrea Jenkyns, who lost her seat in July’s general election, is a director of NZW.

“The government may have changed, but it’s not clear much else has when it comes to climate crisis denialism,” Jolyon Maugham, executive director of the Good Law Project, told DeSmog. “Labour MP Graham Stringer continues to sit on the board of the GWPF and Neil Record, who chairs its subsidiary, is funding the would-be Tory leader Kemi Badenoch.”

Following a review by the Charity Commission into the GWPF’s activities and structure, the group announced that it would soon be ending its formal ownership of NZW.

All the MPs and donors mentioned in this article were approached for comment.