Deeply odd, deeply scary: My 48 hours with Truss, Farage and the new right

But in the confused and confusing world of the modern, globalised, far right, this was just one mad moment among many. 

CPAC certainly intended to arrive in Britain with a bang, billing itself as “a launchpad, not just a conference” – a three-day political gathering to “Save The West”.

CPAC GB has a pedigree. It is the UK spinoff of the USA’s Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual conservative gathering since the 1970s. Though CPAC had once hosted Ronald Reagan, it had by the mid-2010s become a fringe gathering, largely alienated from the mainstream Republican movement.

That put it in prime position to be the favoured platform of the new wave of the US right – first the alt right, and then the Maga movement. Now, CPAC is the Republican kingmaker, the beating heart of Maga, and a force that is exporting its brand across the world. In the UK, it boasts former UK prime minister Liz Truss as its chair.

From outside, CPAC GB looks the part. Black vehicles with darkened windows line the outside of the InterContinental Hotel that is hosting the event. Attendees, paying anything from £100 for a standard ticket up to £10,000 for the gold package, must pass through extensive security screening to get inside. 

The lineup is… diverse. Liz Truss herself is opening proceedings, but Reform leader Nigel Farage is undoubtedly the headline act.

Truss reportedly invited Kemi Badenoch to attend, but she sent shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith in her place. Former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith and cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg are speaking too. Speakers from France, Romania, Australia and elsewhere round out the international brigade.

But the stage is also filled with more radical figures from the right – Lucy Connolly, who spent a year in jail for inciting violence on social media during UK rioting, is a star speaker. Jack Posobiec, the far right US influencer who helped spread the crackpot Pizzagate conspiracy theory, is giving a keynote. 

Former journalist turned free schools and free speech promoter Toby Young opens things up. Former home secretary Suella Braverman and her fellow Reformer Matt Goodwin, the Gorton & Denton loser, all take the stage over the course of the event.

CPAC GB is, it seems, an attempt to mend fences and build a new political coalition. That grand ambition, though, is not necessarily matched by the mundane reality of arrival at the event. 

Every CPAC speech and panel takes place in one large event space inside the InterContinental, which has around 500 chairs laid out in a room that clearly has space for many more. For most of the panels, at least half of those seats are left empty. 

“Is this all there is? It’s a bit of a disaster, isn’t it?” one woman mutters to me as she looks around on the morning of day one. “I did wonder when I saw Liz Truss on GB News the other day. It was obvious she was trying to drum up sales.”

Still, the conference is living up to its free-market conservative principles in some ways. Most events like this offer free coffee and tea, and usually snacks or pastries for the attendees. Not so here, where even a lukewarm black coffee from a large urn will set you back at least £3.50. 

Suggested Reading

Mr Farage, what first attracted you to multi-millionaire fraudster Posh George?

Ros Taylor

Perhaps, though, this is a brilliant psyop of its own: after paying £18.95 for two Diet Cokes, a Twix and some crisps, I am more than ready to agree when the speakers insist something has gone deeply wrong in Britain – and that’s definitely the message speaker after speaker has for the crowd.

“I’d like to say welcome to Great Britain, but I’m afraid I have to say welcome to Broken Britain,” star speaker Nigel Farage said by way of introduction. “We’re actually engaged in a battle for the very soul of our nation.”

For most of his half-hour performance, Farage delivered his greatest hits, not least his characteristic modesty, claiming he had “done more than any individual in British history to bring power back” to the British people. 

He reminded those present how grateful they should be that he was there. “I don’t need to be in politics. There are many, many other careers I could be pursuing,” he said, as if his parliamentary declaration of interests didn’t show he was doing exactly that while also being an MP.

Mostly though, he played on everyone’s grievances. The Boriswave is “frankly making large parts of our country totally unrecognisable”. London is a city “where men no longer feel safe wearing watches… women, in the middle of the day, dare not wear jewellery”. The left, and Farage’s political opponents “literally hate our country”.

Farage, of course, felt he had been more wronged than almost anyone else. The establishment, he explained, realised the day after Reform’s successes in the local elections that “they couldn’t beat us by fair means” and so “they would try to beat us by foul means” – such as by using existing investigatory channels to look into a £5 million donation he had admitted receiving. 

This, in his view, amounted to “demonisation and frankly incitement”, which he then went on to connect to the killing of Ann Widdecombe. Going against multiple warnings from legal authorities not to speculate on the case, Farage insisted “it was an horrific, political, premeditated murder by somebody inspired by a hard left ideology,” even concluding “of that, there is no doubt whatsoever.”

By speculating so publicly on an active murder investigation, Farage risks making it harder to prosecute, as well as risking exactly the kind of political violence he had decried just minutes before. 

Suggested Reading

Britain isn’t America – and that’s why Farage had to fall

Alastair Campbell

But Farage’s speech was often confused: he insisted his by-election against a bin was him versus the establishment, said the media shouldn’t be the final judge of his guilt – it never was – and even seemed to forget his £5 million “gift” had been revealed weeks before the local elections.

Still, confusion was perhaps the running theme of CPAC GB. Its supposed goal was to unite a new right wing coalition, and senior Tory MPs spoke at the event in such a hope – only for the biggest applause lines to come whenever a different speaker declared the Conservative Party “dead”.

The villain of the day was always “globalism” and “globalists”, and yet a running theme was the need for the right to collaborate across borders – sharing tactics, ideas, playbooks and more. 

“The reason we’re coming together is not because we’re globalists, we’re kinda the opposite,” CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp assured the crowd. “It is because we must share and realise this most important fact: what they’re doing in your country to destroy it, they’re doing in my country to destroy it.” 

CPAC GB was similarly confused on immigration. Speaker after speaker denounced mass migration, asylum, small boats, and immigration of all sorts – but on the first day, the hall only managed to reach even halfway full thanks to around 50 or 60 activists who had travelled over to the event from Romania.

The peak confusion, though, must surely have been Liz Truss’s embrace of Mateea Petrescu as the chair of her new Atlantic Strategy Institute. After an event in which speakers endlessly condemned “Muslim grooming gangs”, Truss welcomed Petrescu – the Tate brothers’ longtime spokeswoman – to the stage. 

Andrew Tate claimed to have converted to Islam in 2022, which would make him the literal ringleader of an alleged “Muslim grooming gang”. It is not clear whether Truss was unaware of the association, or whether some grooming gangs are more acceptable than others.

CPAC GB may have had its element of confusion, and for many of its panels the sparse audience was battling boredom, especially during a long run of cryptocurrency and gold-hoarding panels moderated by sponsorship partners on the second day – but neither of these made it any less dangerous.

Some speakers, such as George Simion, the pro-Russian opposition leader in Romania, were happy to make their ethnonationalist agenda overt, openly embracing The Great Replacement conspiracy theory.

“We are saying that Romania belongs to Romanians, that Europe belongs to Europeans,” he said. “This is not diversity. This is replacement, and the answer is not more compromises. The answer is remigration, legal, orderly, but firm … This is not hatred. This is actually self-defence.”

Historian David Starkey denounced human rights, noting “if you believe in universal human rights, you cannot be a conservative”. 

Individual journalists and the mainstream media as a whole were denounced from the stage, while other speakers spoke with undisguised delight about prosecuting their enemies.

“I do think there are going to be trials. I really do, and I look at people who are in the elite right now, and I sort of almost pity them sometimes,” said the lawyer Steven Barrett.

Suggested Reading

If Burnham doesn’t pick Miliband as chancellor it’ll be his first big mistake

James Ball

“We don’t even need new offences. We’ve got misconduct in public office that carries life imprisonment. We’ve got contempt of parliament, which is an offence I think we will see resurrected in due time. That has an almost limitless punishment… I think we will use these things.”

Liz Truss herself was asked whether she would have Tony Blair arrested, should she become prime minister again. After an extended giggle at the very idea, she said she was “not going to reveal all my plans at this stage”, before speculating about Traitor’s Gate at the Tower of London, through which condemned prisoners arrived. “He might go through that, on a boat,” she mused.

Then, too, was the matter of the money: the ticket sales revenue from 500 or so people was not going to fund an all-singing, all-dancing multimedia operation like this one, even before speakers were flown in from across the world. Thankfully, the event had no shortage of partner organisations displaying their stands in the attached expo halls.

Some had friends in the highest of places. In the closing hour of the conference on Friday, the Guardian revealed that 878 – a US-UK think tank founded by Jacob Rees-Mogg and named for the year King Alfred the Great defeated the Great Heathen Army – and Toby Young’s Free Speech Union were both in line for $12 million in funds from the US government, thanks to Donald Trump, who has recently been complaining about foreign interference in American politics.

On the one hand, CPAC GB was a series of confused and furious rants delivered to a half-full hall of a few hundred often bored people. On another, it could be a harbinger of things to come. Just a few years ago, CPAC in the US was easily dismissed, too.

Matt Goodwin, of all people – introduced to the hall as a “veteran of the Gorton and Denton by-election” – seemed to understand the battle lines in play. “There is a war going on in this country,” he told the crowd, between those “who love Britain” and “a radicalised fringe minority… who hate this country so much they want to replace it with something else entirely.”

On that, at least, Goodwin was entirely correct – if unable to see which side of that war he and his audience were on.