Original article by Alan Macleod republished from MintPress News under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.
He likes to keep a low profile. But Sir Trevor Chinn is one of the most powerful men in British politics.
The retired businessman has donated millions to politicians, facilitated Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s rise to power, helped destroy the movement around Jeremy Corbyn, and, above all, has made sure that both major parties support Israel and its expansionist project in the Middle East.
MintPress News profiles perhaps the most influential man in the pro-Israel lobby and lifts the veil of anonymity he hides behind.
Israel’s Man
In November, President Isaac Herzog personally awarded Chinn the Israeli Medal of Honor for his “service to the state [of Israel] and the Jewish people.” The past year, President Herzog said in his presentation speech, was “the most difficult since the founding of the state.” However, he noted, his country was extremely fortunate to have “great friends and supporters in the world who fight alongside us against antisemitism, defend Israel’s name in the media, and have long fought for Israel’s place among the nations.”
Chinn has a decades-long history of promoting Israeli interests in the United Kingdom and beyond. In 2005, as co-chairman of the Israel-Britain Business Council, he led a delegation to Israel to participate in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Conference for Export and International Cooperation. The conference was an attempt to bring back economic growth to Israel after three years of stagnation as a result of the Second Palestinian intifada.
In 2018, he co-hosted a high-profile celebration of former Israeli President Chaim Herzog attended by some of the most powerful figures in British politics, including former Prime Minister Tony Blair. Held at the exclusive Spencer House in London, the event celebrated the British-born president, honoring him as a “warrior and statesman.” Herzog was an officer in the Israeli military during the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of around 750,000 Palestinians in order to establish the State of Israel.
As the longstanding president of United Jewish Israel Appeal, a group that aims to increase British Jews’ connections to Israel, Chinn has helped to raise millions to fund free birthright-style trips to the Middle East. One 2023 event at London’s Kensington Palace alone raised £1 million (U.S. $1.36 million). The function was attended by former prime minister Naftali Bennett, who praised his work profusely.
Chinn’s ties to Israel go far beyond economics and culture. Last October, at the height of the Israeli attack on Gaza, the 89-year-old tycoon quietly met with the U.K. Foreign Office to advise them on arms exports to Israel. Officially, the British government claimed they were merely “discussing geopolitics with [a] businessman.” Documents obtained by investigative journalist John McEvoy, however, revealed the real purpose of the meeting was far less innocent.
Bankrolling the British Cabinet
Chinn, McEvoy told MintPress, plays an “important but overlooked role in British politics.” Since the 1980s, he noted, Chinn has funded both Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) and Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), pressure groups within the U.K.’s two largest political parties. He was also a member of the executive committee of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), the most influential pro-Israel lobbying organization in the United Kingdom.
“Quantitative analyses of these groups’ activities are instructive,” McEvoy said, adding:
Eighty percent of Tory MPs are members of CFI and, between 2012 and 2022, the organization paid for elected members to go on more overseas trips than any other donor. Last year, LFI counted some 75 MPs as supporters, while 32 sitting Labour members had accepted funding from the group. For its part, BICOM has flown scores of journalists to Tel Aviv since the turn of the century.”
As such, Chinn sits at the head of a massive influence operation aiming to make sure that Great Britain continues to support Israeli interests. The scope of this operation is staggering; pro-Israel lobby groups have funded the majority of the British cabinet. In total, 13 out of 25 sitting cabinet members have accepted money directly from Chinn, or pro-Israel groups, according to McEvoy’s investigation.
This includes many extremely powerful figures, such as Foreign Secretary David Lammy, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, and Health Secretary Wes Streeting. Chinn himself has donated hundreds of thousands of pounds to these individuals.
Without a doubt, though, the most important recipient of his largesse is Prime Minister Keir Starmer himself. In 2020, Chinn donated £50,000 (approximately $68,000) to Starmer, bankrolling his campaign to become leader of the Labour Party. The donation was not registered until five days after the election.
It was around this time that Starmer very publicly began to shift his position on Israel. Until 2019, he had been a member of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East, and promised to “put human rights at the heart of foreign policy.” Yet just a few weeks after he received Chinn’s money, he publicly stated, “I support Zionism without qualification.”
His administration has vocally supported Israel, sending weapons to the country and providing other military assistance from U.K. military bases in Cyprus. It has also cracked down on pro-Palestine protests at home and defended Israel in international bodies such as the United Nations. In 2021, Starmer’s office even went so far as to hire Assaf Kaplan, a former Israeli spy, to conduct what it calls “social listening” within the party.
Lowkey, a rapper, activist, and host of “The Watchdog” on MintPress, has tracked Chinn’s activities closely, stating that:
Trevor Chinn is a key officer of the Zionist movement in this country. He is a vehicle through which the Israel lobby is able to fund key political figures, like Keir Starmer and David Lammy, and thus extend Israeli influence over what happens in British politics.”
Shaping the Labour Party
Tony Blair was the driving force behind Labour’s move away from social democracy and its embrace of big business, and Chinn’s cash helped make it possible. According to a 1996 report in The Independent, Chinn was one of several Labour megadonors who each contributed around £500,000 to bankroll Blairism and ensure its success.
Along with its economic approach, Labour’s traditional foreign policy positions also shifted. As former chairman of LFI, Baron Mendelsohn approvingly noted at the time,
Blair has attacked the anti-Israelism that had existed in the Labour Party. Old Labour was cowboys-and-Indians politics, picking underdogs to support, but the milieu has changed. Zionism is pervasive in New Labour. It is automatic that Blair will come to Labour Friends of Israel meetings.”
To this day, Blair maintains a close relationship with Israel. He is a patron of the Jewish National Fund, the largest builder of illegal settlements in the West Bank. His wife, Cherie, meanwhile, worked as an adviser to NSO Group, the controversial Israeli software firm behind the Pegasus spying software.
Since Blair, Chinn has continued to fund senior Labour figures. The one notable exception was during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure, from 2015 to 2020. Corbyn, a lifelong socialist, anti-imperialist, and advocate for Palestinian statehood, was unexpectedly elected leader of the party in a landslide.
Almost immediately, senior figures in the Labour establishment began organizing against him. And they were helped by Chinn’s money and connections.
Chinn provided the financial backing for Labour Together, a think tank of right-wing figures with the stated goal of “defeat[ing] Corbynism,” and “win[ning] Labour back from the left.” He also financed the political ambitions of Corbyn opponents, including Owen Smith, Ruth Smeeth, and Deputy Leader Tom Watson. Corbyn was relentlessly attacked from all sides and suffered constant accusations of antisemitism designed to undermine public support for his project.
Also in Labour Together’s crosshairs were Corbyn-supporting media outlets, such as The Canary. A left-wing alternative media site, The Canary rapidly expanded its reach to 8.5 million monthly viewers. Labour Together devised a plan to, in their own words, “Kill The Canary.” To that end, they launched a sham “stop funding fake news” drive, claiming the outlet was spreading antisemitic content, and putting pressure on advertisers to pull their commercials from the site. Like the campaign against Corbyn, the antisemitism claims were false, but effective, and The Canary’s finances and reach were dealt a serious blow.
Equal Opportunities Oligarch
Chinn, however, is far from a strictly partisan donor. The elderly business magnate has also funded the Conservative Friends of Israel, the Tory equivalent of Labour Friends of Israel. CFI is, if anything, more influential than its Labour counterpart. Publicly available data shows that the organization has funded at least 118 Conservative members of parliament to travel to Israel on 160 occasions, providing over £330,000 (U.S. $450,000) towards the visits. Around 80% of Conservative MPs are members of CFI.
CFI wields significant influence within the halls of power, enough to force Prime Minister Boris Johnson to drop his plans to appoint Alan Duncan as his Middle East Minister. In his memoirs, Duncan noted that their opposition was “for no other reason than that I believe in the rights of the Palestinians.” Johnson was reportedly indignant. “They [the Israelis] shouldn’t behave like this,” he said. “The CFI and the Israelis think they control the Foreign Office. And they do!’” Duncan said, adding that Israeli penetration into British politics amounts to what he called “entrenched espionage” and a national security threat.
Going further back, Chinn repeatedly lobbied the administration of John Major (1990-1997) on its Middle East policy. “He can be quite a tough protagonist of the Israeli cause and is by no means a dove… My own feeling is that he is not very subtly tuned into the Israeli political scene,” one Foreign Office official wrote about Chinn in 1991.
The overall goal of his activities—the political donations, private meetings, funded trips and media work—McEvoy told MintPress, is to “persuade politicians and journalists that supporting Israel is in their interests.” Chinn and the wider pro-Israel lobby employ a “carrot and stick approach,” whereby good behavior is rewarded with free trips, favorable media coverage and political donations, and bad behavior is punished with a loss of funding, political flak, and pressure campaigns. Thus, McEvoy concludes:
While many legislators in Britain are already avowed Zionists and need little persuading, the carrot and stick approach can achieve an important disciplining effect on politicians who are either equivocal or easily shunned into silence, which accounts for a significant proportion given the extent of careerism and cowardice present in Westminster.”
You Can Cut Down the Flowers, But You Can’t Stop the Spring
Sir Trevor Chinn is far from a self-made man. He inherited his substantial wealth and power from his father, Rosser, who owned the automotive giant, Lex Services, now called the Royal Automobile Club (RAC). In addition to his business interests, Rosser was also the president of the Jewish National Fund, helping Israel dispossess Palestinians of their land.
Trevor served as chief executive of the RAC and later became chairman of its chief competitors, the Automobile Association (AA) and Kwik Fit. Since 1973, he has served as president of the United Jewish Israel Appeal and holds or has held a number of other significant positions of influence. These include serving as a governor of Tel Aviv University, and his positions on the executive committees of the Jewish Leadership Council and BICOM.
In 2023, BICOM participated in an attempt to remove the music of MintPress’ Lowkey from the streaming service Spotify. Their plan failed, thanks to massive public pushback and widespread resistance from top names in the entertainment industry.
“I was, at that time, identified as a key target. But we defeated them, thanks to MintPress, The Electronic Intifada, and all the amazing people who supported me,” Lowkey said. “It really does go to show that these lobby groups are really only powerful when they are not confronted.”
One successful cancellation operation Chinn did participate in, however, was the 2014 campaign against a north London arts venue. After finding out that the event was sponsored by the Israeli Embassy, the Tricycle Theater refused to host the U.K. Jewish Film Festival.
Israel, at the time, had just launched Operation Protective Edge, a bombardment of Gaza that killed over 2,000 people. Chinn sprang into action, threatening to pull his funding from the theater unless they reversed their decision. “We are as a community under pressure from the boycott movement. We can’t accept boycotts and whenever one comes along we have to fight it,” he said.
Tricycle was eventually forced to concede after Culture Minister Sajid Javid—himself a member of Conservative Friends of Israel—“made it absolutely clear what might happen to their funding if they, or if anyone, tries that kind of thing again.”
For all his work, though, Chinn has not been able to stem the tide of pro-Palestinian sentiment across the United Kingdom and beyond. In November 2023, an estimated one million people attended a London demonstration calling for a ceasefire.
Since then, polling shows that public attitudes towards Israel have only hardened.
A recent YouGov survey found that more than twice as many Britons support Palestine (32%) as Israel (14%). Only 17% of the country holds positive views of Israel (including 4% that are very positive), compared to 63% negative (including 39% that are highly negative). And the vast majority of the country supports an arms embargo, with only 13% opposing an end to weapons sales to Tel Aviv. Worse still for Israel, these are among the best numbers in Europe for their cause.
In response, both Conservative and Labour governments have cracked down on public support for Palestine, suppressing demonstrations, arresting protesters, and harassing and intimidating pro-Palestine journalists.
How much, if any, influence Chinn had on these responses is a matter of debate. But what is incontrovertible is that he and his network of pro-Israel organizations are not an omnipotent force. This is especially true when they and their activities are exposed to the wider public.
Feature photo | Sir Trevor Chinn (left), pictured alongside Jacob Rothschild (center) and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (right) | Editing by MintPress News
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. He completed his PhD in 2017 and has since authored two acclaimed books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams. Follow Alan on Twitter for more of his work and commentary: @AlanRMacLeod.
Original article by Alan Macleod republished from MintPress News under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.
