With Orbán gone, has the British far right lost its magic money tree?

Hungary “has been robbed, destroyed, made the poorest, most corrupt country in the EU", the incoming Hungarian prime minister, Péter Magyar, said yesterday at his first press conference since his landslide election win against Viktor Orbán on Sunday.

He announced the state would no longer finance institutions such as Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), a private college which serves a propaganda outfit for Orbán’s views on everything from race to gender, promoting far-right ideology and and funding universities, thinktanks and rightwing figureheads across Europe and in the US. Magyar added that he believed it was a criminal offence for Orbán to have funded MCC using the public purse, which he said he intends to investigate along with the EU. 

"If, as Hungary's new prime minister is suggesting, this funding is criminal, the likes of Matt Goodwin are going to be combing through our proceeds of crime legislation,” said Jolyon Maugham, executive director of Good Law Project.

Earlier this year, my investigation for Good Law Project found that Matt Goodwin (also known, following claims he relied on AI to write his latest book, as MattGPT) had received a salary of up to €10,000 a month as a “visiting fellow” at MCC. 

This week he was in Budapest for a speaking engagement at the college about “how mass migration is reshaping the UK and implications for Europe”. According to the event page on MCC’s website, Goodwin remains a fellow – and a new report by Desmog says that, when questioned by an audience member, he failed to deny that he was still paid by MCC. In their response to my original piece, Reform said Goodwin had only been a visiting fellow at MCC for a “brief period”.

While MattGPT is no stranger to losing elections, having the incoming prime minister calling out his benefactor in his first speech must have hit hard. It’s bad news for the who’s who of the global far right, many of whom have taken cash from MCC – the belly of Orbán’s beast of an influence operation that funds culture wars the world over. 

“Might he, and others who have taken money from Orbán's pet NGO, have to repay that money?" added Maugham.

Orbán’s anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-immigration policies have made him an “icon for the global far right”. His rollbacks on the human rights of women and LGBTQ+ people have included a pro-natalist policy (which gets a shout-out in a 2026 Heritage Foundation report, although according to the Economist that policy hasn’t actually worked), a law requiring women to listen to a foetus’s heartbeat before they can get an abortion, and a ban on the country’s Pride parade last year.

MattGPT’s event last night was at MCC Scruton, a cafe attached to the Budapest college which is named after controversial rightwing British philosopher Roger Scruton. In December 2019, Scruton was awarded the Order of Merit of Hungary by Orbán in London a month before he died, aged 75. The following year, the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation (RSLF) was born.

As I recently uncovered for Good Law Project, since 2023 the foundation has received over 90% of its funding – £512,500 – from the Russian-oil-backed MCC, which it has used to host events platforming British rightwing politicians and media, Trump-aligned US tech bros, and “anti-woke” commentators. Spectator editor and former Conservative cabinet minister Michael Gove, and Reform’s new head of policy, James Orr, are among its directors, though according to accounts they are unpaid.

The Scruton/Orbán love affair was a long one. In the late 80s, a young Orbán befriended Scruton when he was living in the UK during a brief stint at Oxford. Now, in addition to the cafe on the MCC campus, there are at least nine (yes, nine) other cafes named after the philosopher in Hungary. In 2019, the government sacked Scruton as a housing adviser when, in an interview in which he defended Orbán, he spoke of Hungarians’ “alarm” at a “sudden invasion of huge tribes of Muslims”.

When US Vice-President JD Vance spoke during his “unprecedented” pre-election visit to Hungary last week, it was in front of a backdrop adorned with the MCC logo.

Vance is no stranger to MCC. The group has hosted many Maga figures and pressure groups close to the US administration, from the Heritage Foundation to a Christian right group which was central to overturning abortion rights in the country, Alliance Defending Freedom.

And then there’s Vance’s personal friend James Orr, who has been director of MCC’s de facto operation in the UK for the past five years, RSLF. Orr is an anti-abortion Cambridge theologian, recently promoted to head of policy at Reform, and is the UK representative of the group which organises the National Conservatism Conference, a  global rightwing knees-up that will take place in Jerusalem this year.

And Orr and MattGPT are far from the only Brits connecting the Hungarian propaganda powerhouse, the Trump administration and Reform.

Mick Hume, the editor of the European Conservative (and launch editor of libertarian magazine Spiked), who has been a longtime communications consultant for Nigel Farage, is currently a visiting fellow – the ones that earn up to €10,000 a month. Last year, Hume took to the stage at an MCC festival in Hungary alongside former Boris Johnson adviser Dominic Cummings to discuss rightwing politics in the UK.

Meanwhile, Tory-turned-Reform MPs Robert Jenrick and Danny Kruger spoke at the ironically named “Now and England” RSLF conference last year, alongside recently fired Reform MP Rupert Lowe. The event’s media partner was the Spectator – and this is not the first time the paper has worked with an Orbán-aligned thinktank.

But will MCC, and its infatuation with the legacy of a deceased British philosopher – who denied date rape was a crime and said Muslim immigrants would never "produce children loyal to a secular European state” – survive Magyar’s clean-up mission?

Steve Goodrich, head of research and investigations at Transparency International UK, points out that the UK and its political system has long been a destination for the proceeds of corruption and other crimes from around the world. “Promptly investigating and recovering ill-gotten gains is crucial to disrupting and deterring criminal networks,” said Goodrich.

“The UK should cooperate with investigators in the EU and Hungary and establish whether Hungarian public funds were misused for foreign influence operations in Britain."

Unpicking a decade and a half of state capture will not be simple. Groups such as MCC and the Danube Institute, as Gabriela Greilinger, an academic focused on the European far right, told Reuters, are there in part to “ensure that these ideas kind of live on even beyond the rule of the leader”.

“Orbán remains one of the most successful statesmen of Europe’s modern history: he has the network, the ideas, and the money to play a role – if he wants to,” said Zsolt Enyedi, a politics professor at Central European University. 

“A significant portion of the Hungarian state budget was transferred into various foundations and private equity funds. Their job is to sponsor propaganda institutions like MCC,” he explained. While Magyar’s majority means that such institutions can be deplatformed, the private funding is “out of the state’s reach”, he said.

Enyedi said that MCC’s company shares, like its 10% stake in the country’s multibillion-dollar energy giant MOL Group – which refines oil, the majority of which comes from Russia – may be recoverable. But he added that, in his opinion, these were only “a small portion of the whole sum”.

Still, if RSLF does lose its Hungarian cash, it's not short of rich and powerful friends it could call instead. Palantir founder Peter Thiel spoke at its Oakeshott (formerly Scruton) lecture series at Oxford University in 2023 about his book The Diversity Myth, in which he compared equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives to the Chinese Communist party.

And recently, Orr hosted Thiel at Cambridge (where he is part of a network backed by the billionaire) for a bizarre series of closed-door events called the Antichrist Lectures, in which Thiel espouses his theory that Greta Thunberg may be the Antichrist.

Last year, far-right blogger and software developer Curtis Yarvin spoke at an RSLF event in Oxford. Yarvin advocates for replacing democracy with a CEO-monarch, and Thiel and Vance are among his fans.

Registered as a tax-exempt nonprofit in California, RSLF has increasingly been hosting events in the US. In November, X’s new geolocation tool revealed that RSLF’s Twitter account is based in the US. Its US counterpart has also received funding from the Bradley Foundation, a major conservative funder which has previously been found to contribute to dark money group DonorsTrust.

Other Brits who have spoken at RSLF events include controversial rightwing historians David Starkey and Niall Ferguson. Prominent anti-trans voices have also featured, such as  Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who was given a $50,000 cash prize by the foundation in 2022; Tufton Street thinktank Policy Exchange’s Joanna Williams; and British anti-trans figurehead Kathleen Stock.

Tim Picton, senior advocacy adviser for Spotlight on Corruption, said: “MCC has solid links to prominent political figures in the UK and is the main funder of a charity under the leadership of a member of the House of Lords. The revelations that it is now under investigation in Hungary for alleged misuse of public funds have placed the role that thinktanks play in risking foreign interference and illicit money undermining our democracy firmly back on the radar.

“The Home Office should also look carefully at whether UK groups, such as the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation, that have benefited from funding funnelled from this Hungarian state-backed thinktank should have registered with the UK’s Foreign Influence Registration Scheme.”

In Hungary, Orbán has enacted policies restricting the rights of women and other LGBTQ+ people. “It all started with denying trans people the right to ever legally change their names to match their true gender identity in 2020,” wrote Hungarian novelist Krisztián Marton in the Nerve. “Then came a propaganda law that made it illegal to even speak about non-heteronormative identities and orientations in schools. Then that got applied to books as well.”

During his time in power, Orbán implemented hardline anti-immigration laws, erected razor-wire border fences and refused to join EU migrant “sharing” schemes. He called the arrival of asylum seekers a “poison” for Hungary and once said: “Hungary does not need a single migrant for the economy to work, or the population to sustain itself, or for the country to have a future.” 

Be it ideological, a way of pleasing his international friends, or a tactic aimed at distracting his population from his disastrous economic policies – or all three – anti-gender and anti-immigration policies are what has made Orbán famous on the global stage. Whether he’s interested in continuing to fuel these battles remains to be seen. 

The RSLF, MCC, Matt Goodwin, James Orr, Michael Gove and Mick Hume were approached for comment but did not respond.