Peter Geoghegan

When​ the former Conservative Party treasurer Alistair McAlpine died in 2014, he was hailed as the most successful fundraiser in modern British political history. His approach was simple: ‘I used to lurk. I lurked all over London where rich people went.’ McAlpine’s courting of prospective Tory donors typically involved ‘a long lunch during which his victim was...

There’s​ no sign over the door of Palantir’s UK headquarters, an eight-storey neoclassical building in Soho Square. The windows are lined with thick reflective glass. When we tried to take some photographs outside recently, a man with a lanyard told us to stop. He wouldn’t be drawn on his employer: ‘It’s just a tech company.’ Two independent sources who...

Reform UK​ held its first conference in October 2021. The party was polling in the low single digits. Only a few hundred people turned up. Richard Tice, who had replaced Nigel Farage as leader seven months earlier, had chosen to hold the event on the same day – and in the same city, Manchester – as the Conservative Party Conference. He hired a battle bus with a sound system to...

Sir Paul Marshall​ ’s emergence as a right-wing media tycoon has been rapid. A decade ago he was a Lib Dem donor; now he owns the house journal of the Conservative Party. Immediately after he bought the Spectator for an inflated £100 million last September, its chairman, Andrew Neil, resigned, signing off with a barbed tweet about editorial independence. ‘You can have all...

The​ 29th UN Climate Change Conference begins in Baku on 11 November. For the third year in a row, as a recent editorial in the Financial Times pointed out, COP is being hosted ‘in an authoritarian state with a dubious human rights record, and for the second year in a petrostate’ (the previous two conferences took place in Sharm El-Sheikh and Dubai). The UK has outsized...