Climate change denial funder pumps another £30,000 into Tory leadership race

Candidates for the leadership of the Conservative Party have received tens of thousands in donations from a donor to Britain's largest climate change denial group.

The latest Register of MPs' Interests shows that James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat each received £10,000 in August from Lord Michael Hintze, a Tory peer who is one of the few known donors to the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

Hintze, who has donated more than £4 million to the Conservatives since 2002, also donated £10,000 in August to party leadership candidate Priti Patel, who was voted out of the race by Tory MPs this week. Tugendhat also received £3,000 from Hintze in December.

The GWPF actively campaigns against government climate policy and rejects the established science on temperature rise, calling carbon dioxide a “benefit for the planet”.

Lord Hintze said he believed there was climate change, partly due to human activities over the last century, but said all sides needed to be heard on the issue of climate change in order to “reach the right conclusion for society as a whole”.

Authors working for the world's most important climate research body, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have stated: “It is a statement of fact, we cannot be more certain; it is clear and indisputable that humans are warming the planet.”

The IPCC has stated that we are in the midst of a “widespread and rapid [changes] … unprecedented over many centuries and even millennia.”

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

Cleverly, Tugendhat and Patel are not the only Tory leadership candidates to have received donations from figures linked to the GWPF. DeSmog revealed in August that Kemi Badenoch had received £10,000 for her campaign from Neil Record, a millionaire Tory donor and chair of Net Zero Watch (NZW), the campaign arm of the GWPF.

Record is also a lifetime vice president of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) think tank, which he chaired until July 2023. The IEA, which supports the production of new fossil fuels, received funding from oil giant BP every year from 1967 until at least 2018.

Record has donated money to both the IEA and the GWPF, both part of the Tufton Street network of Westminster-based think tanks and lobby groups that campaign for less government regulation, including on climate change.

The latest register of interests also shows that Record donated £2,000 to Tory MP Jesse Norman, who publicly supports Badenoch's campaign.

As DeSmog reported, Tugendhat also received donations and gifts worth £7,000 during the election campaign from Tory donor and former party treasurer Lord Michael Spencer, who invests in fossil fuels.

Spencer is the largest shareholder in Deltic Energy, which this year was granted licenses to explore for oil and gas in the North Sea. He also owns shares in Pantheon Resources, a British company exploring for oil in Alaska.

Spencer, who has donated £6 million to the Conservatives since 2005, previously told DeSmog that investments in oil and gas made up less than two percent of his portfolio.

Views on Net Zero

Tugendhat, Badenoch and Patel have been vocal critics of British climate policy.

In an interview with GB News in July, Tugendhat said the UK's target of net zero emissions by 2050 was “not realistic”. Badenoch said in 2022 it was “arbitrary” and suggested last year she would support a delay that would run counter to the UK's legally binding climate commitments. Patel shares that position, telling GB News last year that net zero targets should be “paused” because the “public is not ready”.

Polls by More in Common and E3G during the general election found that a majority of people in every UK constituency are concerned about climate change. Some 61 percent of Conservative voters in 2024 said they were concerned about climate change, 76 percent of Labour voters and 65 percent of voters nationwide shared this figure.

In his interview with GB News, Tugendhat also defended the previous government's support for new oil and gas exploration, saying: “Producing our own oil in the North Sea is more carbon efficient than importing it from elsewhere.”

The claim that British oil and gas has a lower carbon footprint than imported products is “misleading” and can only be achieved “by comparing British gas production with the dirtiest gas imports”, according to research and campaign group Uplift.

Cleverly supports the 2050 target but said he would prefer a “competition-based approach” rather than using the power and funding of the state. But the private sector has often helped delay climate action. According to nonprofits NewClimate Institute and Carbon Market Watch, which surveyed 51 large companies, their median target is to cut emissions by 30 percent by 2030 – significantly less than the 43 percent reduction found by the IPCC.

Cleverly's campaign team told DeSmog: “We thank all our donors for their support of James Cleverly as the best candidate to unite the Conservative Party and win the next general election.”

Tugendhat, Patel and Hintze were asked for comment.