Liz Truss, dark money and the gen-Z Catholics: who’s behind CPAC in the UK?

Joseph Robertson and Tess Wheldon are busy people. When Robertson isn’t taking boxing lessons from Ukip leader Nick Tenconi or launching failed local election bids for Reform UK, he is holidaying in “Georgia [sic] Meloni’s culturally conservative Sicily”. Wheldon is a farming campaigner who enjoys horseriding and shooting, as well as a bit of modelling – and has a background working in the House of Commons. “Yes, minister?” she asks in one selfie. They both also like to visit Catholic churches. 

In an interview with Swedish media, Robertson, 29, spread disinformation that “there are essentially parts of the UK where Sharia Law is being enforced.” Wheldon, 27, has described abortion as murder in her Instagram stories, making a misleading claim that recent abortion reforms in the UK legalise “abortion up to birth.”

Together, they are Touchpoint Strategy, the political consulting firm which organised the first ever British edition of CPAC, the US (ultra)-Conservative Political Action Conference which serves as a gathering of Maga influencers and the global far right. Taking place in London last week and vowing to “Save Britain, save the West”, CPAC GB was spearheaded by Liz Truss and a lawyer linked to Russian oligarchs, with speakers ranging from Nigel Farage to Israel’s deputy foreign minister. Touchpoint did not respond to an approach for comment.

Despite the best efforts of a handful of young rightwing zoomer influencers from the UK and beyond – branded as "CPAC GB Youth Ambassadors" and seemingly recruited in part to flog last-minute tickets – the event last week was sparsely attended. Lucky ticket-holders found empty auditoriums and a confused-looking Truss. On social media, the consensus was that it was an embarrassing failure. But an investigation by the Nerve reveals that the gen-Z consultants behind it are backed by a far-right global network with extremist views that is using young, photogenic politicos to push the “war on woke.”

Founded just two years ago, Touchpoint’s network now stretches from Hungary to Washington DC, and their activities include working for Reform’s 2024 general election campaign. 

On social media, Robertson has shared pictures of himself attending Trump’s inauguration while Wheldon was at CPAC Maryland rubbing shoulders with her “hero”, Argentina’s far-right president, Javier Milei.

The Christian-right dream have taken numerous trips to Hungary and attended the events of key members of the influence operation of the country’s former authoritarian PM, Viktor Orbán.

When Orbán was in power, Hungary was Maga’s ally in Europe. Trump admired Orbán’s anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-immigration policies, and his famous pro-natalist policy got a shout out in a 2026 Heritage Foundation report.

Earlier this year, I uncovered an Orbán-funded, Russian-oil backed network in the UK using hundreds of thousands of pounds to platform British rightwing politicians and media (including failed Reform candidate Matt “GPT” Goodwin), Trump-aligned US tech bros and anti-trans commentators. 

In his first press conference after the election in April, Hungary’s new PM said that Orbán’s use of public money to fund both CPAC and the group I investigated – Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) – was criminal.

MCC’s dissolution will come into effect at the end of this month, while CPAC has had to scramble around for new Maga-sympathising European hosts, holding events in Poland and the UK. CPAC GB featured delegations from Poland and Romania, including the leader of Romania's far-right opposition, George Simion. Simion was joined by his adviser Mateea Petrescu, known for her former role as spokesperson for Andrew Tate. Now, curiously, she’s chair of the “Atlantic Strategy Institute”, Liz Truss’s new venture.

The Orbán-funded influence operation in the UK I investigated was particularly interested in reaching university students, pouring cash into events at prestigious universities such as Oxford and Cambridge. It came as no surprise to me, then, that CPAC GB hired Robertson and Wheldon to run the event – flanked by a gaggle of hard-right social media influencers.

Touchpoint has made inroads in Westminster, too, organising a House of Lords event last year featuring rightwing peers Lord Moylan and Lord Hannan. The Nerve had found that the latter, who was co-founder of Vote Leave, was also a recent visiting fellow at the Danube Institute, a node in the Orbán propaganda network.

Touchpoint was represented by then-employee Charlie Downes, another influencer, who left to become campaigns director of Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party, where he now calls for an “ethnically homogenous Christian Britain”. And late last year, Conservative peer Lord Balfe briefly listed Touchpoint as a remunerated employer before deleting it. It remains on the list of interests of one of his staff, another member of the UK Catholic zoomer-sphere. 

While Touchpoint’s young directors have been busy acting out their “The Only Way is Fascism” fantasy, they’re now seven months late in filing their first financial accounts. This, along with the fact that the accounts of both of CPAC’s UK companies are not yet due, obscures the money trail behind the event. But ties to international ultra-conservative networks with opaque funding structures are hiding in plain sight.

From Brits dealing in crypto and gold to US Christian missionaries, logos representing CPAC GB’s eclectic group of sponsors flashed up on TV screens dotted around the venue. Logos included a foundation run by the protagonist of an evangelical Christian film associated with QAnon screened by Donald Trump himself, and a firm directed by the tobacco-turned-vape lobbyist who worked with Boris Johnson and Vote Leave’s PR guy to secretly lobby the UAE.

But really, I only had eyes for one sponsor: the Centre for Economic and Social Reform (CESR), newly under Robertson and Wheldon’s management. While Robertson describes it as “a ‘do-tank’, not a talk shop” promoting Christian principles there is no evidence online of it doing anything at all yet. CESR’s sole director, a Catholic barrister named James Bogle (more on him later) is also founding director of EWTN GB (also known as St Clare Media EWTN), a charity that promotes the Eternal Word Television Network in Britain.

Headquartered in Alabama, Catholic broadcaster EWTN describes itself as the world’s largest religious media network, reaching over 400 million households globally. Over the last decade, it has evolved into a powerful vehicle for the populist, rightwing political messaging usually associated with evangelical Christianity. In 2019, former Trump strategist Steve Bannon used the network to argue that rightwing populist movements better reflect Catholic social teaching than the priorities of Pope Francis. And in 2021, EWTN cancelled the radio show of Black presenter Gloria Purvis after she discussed racial justice following the murder of George Floyd.

Crucially, in the US EWTN uses a loophole common in American political warfare: “donor-advised funds”. These funds allow high net worth individuals to make massive, tax-deductible donations to politically engaged nonprofits while remaining anonymous.

The Nerve can reveal that EWTN's US operations have received cash from donor-advised funds that act as dark money vehicles backing anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-migrant causes and Project 2025 – a set of proposals by the Heritage Foundation seeking to change US politics, such as expanding presidential power and stripping back environmental protection. These funds include DAFgiving360 (formerly Schwab), Fidelity, Vanguard and the National Christian Charitable Foundation, which is a primary funder of the American anti-abortion movement. Our analysis has found the four funds above have given EWTN over $8m since 2020. EWTN did not respond to an approach for comment.

According to Helen Flannery, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, these funds fundamentally “stretch the intent” of campaign disclosure rules. Her 2024 study found that donor-advised-funds give to anti-government and hate groups 3.5 times more than other types of donors. And when organisations (such as EWTN) have their own such fund, "it makes the money trail doubly opaque," Flannery warns.

James Bogle acts as the link between EWTN’s UK outpost, CESR and Touchpoint's leadership. Bogle has spent decades campaigning against reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights. In 2002, he represented the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (a UK group present at CPAC GB which has also received anonymous donations from the US) in a case against the prescription and use of the morning-after pill. Recently, he appeared on the podcast of CPAC GB speaker Peter McCormack. Speaking about the law that removed the threat of prosecution from women who end their own pregnancies, he said that “nowadays if a human being is inconvenient we kill them”. Bogle did not respond to a request for comment.

This isn’t the first time Bogle has worked with Robertson and Wheldon. They previously operated Orthodox Conservatives Group, a now-defunct youth splinter of Turning Point UK, the British arm of Charlie Kirk’s far-right youth movement. 

Under Robertson’s direction, the group collaborated with the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) – the legal group central to overturning Roe v Wade and abortion rights in the US. It has facilitated meetings between Nigel Farage and US officials – even orchestrating the Reform leader’s appearance in Congress. In the UK, it bankrolls anti-abortion buffer zone protests, and recently made headlines for threatening community running group Parkrun with legal action over its trans-inclusive policy. 

Analysis of nonprofit financial accounts in the US by the Nerve has found that ADF receives anonymous funding from the same funds as Catholic media network EWTN. This includes the National Christian Charitable Foundation, which has given the ADF nearly $42m since 2020, including $13.5m in 2022 alone – the year Roe v Wade was overturned.

Guided by the ADF, the Orthodox Conservatives Group's 2021 manifesto praised Orbán-style pro-natalist policies, warning of the UK’s “dark demographic future” – a nod to the white nationalist "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory. Robertson has echoed these sentiments on social media, denouncing "new-wave feminism" for convincing women that family is a burden. And Bogle appeared alongside Orbán government officials at the Hungarian Embassy in 2023 for a panel the group organised on “family policy.”

When reporters for the Nerve asked Robertson about his views on abortion at CPAC in London last week, he pivoted to “free speech”, arguing there should be an “openness to have the debate on issues like abortion” in the UK.

“I think a lot of people don't want to talk about God in general over here,” he added. “But the reality is without Christian values, there's no human rights.” He went on to argue that the right defends human rights more than the left, because dismantling laws like the Human Rights Act is about returning to “fundamental human rights, which is something that’s God-given as opposed to man-given”.

On a podcast earlier this month, Robertson said that, as director of CPAC in the UK, he hopes to “bring infrastructure that helped the Maga movement” to Britain.

Unfortunately for him, the event’s poor turnout and lack of grassroots participation wasn’t just picked up by those on the left. Following the conference, rightwing zoomer influencer and CPAC GB Youth Ambassador Ellie Hodges tweeted that “we need to be careful not to import American political culture wholesale,” specifically pointing to the “evangelical Christian element”, which she argued doesn’t translate naturally to Britain, where “religion tends to be a far more private matter”.

But what Hodges didn’t mention is that anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ Christian forces – both homegrown and from overseas – are already here. Paul Marshall, the billionaire media mogul who owns GB News, the Spectator and UnHerd, is an evangelical Christian. Trans healthcare in the UK has been reshaped by Christian-right lawsuits, most recently by a Catholic group linked to Spain’s far-right party. Nigel Farage has worked closely with the ADF, and hired an anti-abortion theologian as his head of policy.

“Where the American religious right tends to speak in the language of biblical prophecy, the British version more often drapes its theology in the language of civilisation and cultural decline,” wrote Byline Times in May.

Investigative journalist and author Katherine Denkinson, who specialises in online far-right networks, sees the sudden surge of religious traditionalism among this community of gen-Z rightwingers as less about faith and more about “giving young men an excuse for misogyny, Islamophobia, and homophobia”. While Robertson was brought up Catholic, many of his better-known influencer friends are more recent converts, Denkinson says, describing them as “using God and the manosphere to shoehorn in regressive ideologies”.

The videos of Robertson boxing on his Instagram come to mind. In one, he’s smoking a cigar while hitting a punching bag. “Tate, that you?” asks one friend. In another, his coach, Tenconi – who is known for protesting outside asylum-seeker accommodation and drag-queen story hours – writes in the comments: “Love it. Superb stuff mate. Next up-campaigns around charity boxing-true Conservatives vs lefties/commies. I know where I’m putting my money 👊🏼💥🥊”.

Catholicism, much like cigars, the British countryside life and trips to Meloni’s Sicily, is more than ideology. It’s part of the look. And the money isn’t too bad either.

Brenna Spain contributed to reporting