Liz Truss Book Calls for Climate Laws to be Abolished and Boasts of Effort to Cancel UK COP Summit
Original article by Adam Barnett republished from DeSmog.
The former prime minister attacks flagship climate deals and makes false claims about electric vehicles, Russia’s influence on energy policies, and net zero.
The new book by former Prime Minister Liz Truss urges the UK, U.S. and EU to drop their landmark climate change laws, spreads falsehoods about green policies, and fondly recalls an attempt to cancel a major climate conference.
Truss, who is the Conservative MP for South West Norfolk, resigned as prime minister in October 2022 after just 49 days in office.
Since leaving 10 Downing Street, Truss has attempted to expose the “deep state” forces that allegedly brought down her premiership, while advocating for “free market” ideas within the Conservative Party, helping to launch the Popular Conservatives group.
In her book, Ten Years to Save the West, which she is promoting widely this week, Truss writes that “the zealous drive to net zero”, the UK’s legally binding 2050 climate target, amounts to “unilateral economic disarmament” and is “a drag on economic growth”. She also claims that, while serving in the Treasury, she attempted to cancel the 2021 COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.
Truss writes: “We should abolish the Climate Change Act and instead adopt a new Climate Freedom Act that enables rather than dictates technology”. She adds that “the U.S. should reverse the Inflation Reduction Act, and the EU should abandon its equivalent measures”.
The Climate Change Act legalised the UK’s commitment to reducing carbon dioxide emissions by at least 80 percent by 2050 from 1990 levels. The Inflation Reduction Act is a $369 billion package of grants and subsidies by the U.S. government to spur green technology investment.
Scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have said that without “immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors” limiting global heating to 1.5C is beyond reach.
Restricting global temperatures to this threshold – the target agreed by the UK as part of the 2015 Paris Agreement – would prevent the worst and most irreversible effects of climate change, including floods, droughts, heatwaves, and wildfires.
In the book, Truss also attacks climate advocates, writing that “the environmental movement is fundamentally driven by the radical left”, adding: “This ‘watermelon’ tendency is green on the outside, red on the inside – a modern rebranding of socialism. It features the same instincts of collectivism and authoritarianism.”
Truss writes that “we should cancel” the United Nations annual COP climate summit, and falsely claims that electric vehicles are worse for the environment than those powered by fossil fuels.
“In recent years, more radical forms of climate misinformation and disinformation have become mainstreamed”, said Jennie King, director of climate research and policy at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue think tank. “Such content continues to grow in virality and engagement online, but its impacts are vastly increased when platformed in the media or by politicians.”
King said “the normalisation of wild and outlandish claims”, with climate action “being framed through a conspiratorial, tribalist and anti-scientific lens”, can lead to “real-world harm”.
“When such ideas are conveyed from the very corridors of power, it sets a dangerous precedent”, she added.
The IPCC warned in 2022 that efforts to tackle climate change were being delayed by “rhetoric and misinformation that undermines climate science and disregards risk and urgency”.
Truss Claims ‘Couldn’t be Further from the Truth’
Truss’s book is published by Biteback Publishing, a company owned by former Conservative deputy chair and major party donor Michael Ashcroft.
The former prime minister dedicates a chapter to green policies, titled ‘A Hostile Environment’, apparently a play on the term used by the Conservative government about its anti-immigration policies.
Truss writes that current environmental policies should be scrapped in favour of a “free market” approach. On energy, she calls for more fossil fuel extraction, advocating a mix of “oil and gas as well as nuclear and renewables”, adding: “The use of North Sea oil and gas is crucial, so there needs to be investment in that too. There also should be fracking in the UK.”
Fracking for shale gas is a controversial practice that risks causing air, water, and noise pollution.
She fails to mention that oil and gas firms receive major subsidies and tax breaks from the government, which would logically be removed in a “free market” energy system. The UK government has given £20 billion more in support to fossil fuel producers than renewables companies since 2015.
Truss’s book also attacks the multilateral UN COP process, which has seen agreements on transitioning away from fossil fuels, and financial support for poorer countries suffering the worst effects of climate change.
Truss writes that “we should cancel the COP gravy train”. She claims that, in 2018, when she was chief secretary to the Treasury, she made “11th-hour attempts to ditch COP26”, the UN climate summit hosted by the UK in 2021, arguing that it was not a spending priority.
At COP26, nearly 200 countries agreed to ramp up efforts to cut emissions, also calling on wealthy countries to double their funding to poorer nations that have contributed the least to climate change. More than 40 countries also pledged to quit coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel and the world’s largest source of carbon dioxide emissions.
The book also spreads false claims about climate policies. Truss writes that “in the UK and Europe, Russia has funded anti-fracking campaigns”, a claim which is not supported by any evidence.
Truss claims that policies like “the switch from petrol to diesel in cars or the use of electric vehicles, have either harmed the environment in other ways or empowered our polluting adversaries elsewhere in the world”.
Colin Walker, head of transport at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit think tank, told DeSmog: “The notion that the switch to electric vehicles will have little discernible environmental impact, and make us dependent on imported gas and coal, couldn’t be further from the truth.
“The total lifetime CO2 emissions of an electric vehicle, from being built to being driven, are three times lower than a petrol vehicle – a figure that will only get higher as our grid becomes cleaner. And while older technologies like petrol cars and gas boilers rely on fossil fuels imported from abroad, EVs and heat pumps can be powered by electricity generated by British wind and solar farms.”
Truss also writes of “ludicrous claims that pursuing a net zero agenda … will boost the economy and drive growth”.
Walker added: “The UK’s net zero economy is now worth £74 billion, and grew by nine percent in 2023. The wider economy grew just 0.1 percent. Talking down the economic opportunities net zero has to offer the UK is at odds with a growth agenda when the U.S., EU and China are all competing for clean industries.”
Truss’s Climate Denial Ties
Truss has a long history of opposing climate policies. In the 2022 Conservative Party leadership contest, she attacked solar farms on agricultural land and, during her brief time in 10 Downing Street, she overturned the UK’s ban on fracking. (A policy reversed by her successor, Rishi Sunak.)
As DeSmog reported at the time, Truss’s leadership campaign received £30,000 from a pro-fracking lobby group, £10,000 from a climate denial activist, and £100,000 from the wife of a former BP oil executive. Truss received a further £5,000 from Lord Vinson, a Tory peer who has provided funding to the UK’s leading climate science denial group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Since leaving office, Truss has received £250,000 in speaking fees, including £7,600 last April from the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing U.S. think tank that has long promoted climate science denial. Heritage President Kevin Roberts provides a long and glowing blurb for Truss’s book.
Earlier this year, Truss helped to launch the Popular Conservatives (PopCon), a new initiative run by Truss-ally Mark Littlewood, the former director general of the Institute of Economic Affairs, a think tank which received funding from oil major BP for at least 50 years.
At the PopCon launch, Truss attacked “net zero zealotry”, claiming voters “don’t like the net zero policies which are making energy more expensive”
.Additional reporting by Sam Bright
Original article by Adam Barnett republished from DeSmog.
New Liz Truss Faction ‘Pops’ With Climate Science Denial and Fossil Fuel Ties
Original article by Adam Barnett republished from DeSmog.
The launch of Popular Conservatism saw attacks on “net zero zealots” and the Climate Change Committee.
Liz Truss’s new ‘Popular Conservatism’ faction of the Conservative Party launched today with attacks on net zero targets and environmental bodies, using the playbook established by libertarian lobby groups.
The self-styled PopCons included politicians critical of climate policies and science, including Lord Frost, who is a director of the climate science denial Global Warming Policy Foundation, as well as Conservative MP Lee Anderson and Reform party president Nigel Farage.
PopCon director Mark Littlewood is the outgoing managing director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), an influential free market think tank that has talked up its access to government.
The IEA received funding from oil company BP every year from 1967 to 2018, according to an Unearthed investigation confirmed by the IEA. Both IEA and BP have declined to say if this funding continues, when asked by DeSmog.
A branded leaflet handed out at the event, under the heading “what we stand for”, stated: “End net zero zealotry and promote energy pragmatism to provide both security of supply and low prices”.
The leaflet also named the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the government’s independent advisory body on hitting its climate targets, as one of the institutions which “stand in the way of meaningful reform”.
Littlewood’s speech criticised the UK’s net zero target, complaining about “the Climate Change Committee, pronouncing on our progress to the eye-wateringly [sic] expensive and almost certainly unachievable aim of being carbon net zero”.
Lee Anderson, former deputy chair of the Conservative Party, repeatedly attacked net zero in his speech, which he claimed “never comes up on the doorstep” aside from when it is brought up by “the odd weirdo”.
Anderson said: “if we became net zero tomorrow, this country… it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to the earth’s atmosphere”, pointing to the higher emissions produced by other countries.
Anderson argued that net zero would cost voters money, calling for an “opt-in, opt-out” approach to what he called “green levies” on energy bills, adding: “Not one politician can put their hand on their hearts and tell you how much it’s [net zero] going to cost.”
The CCC has estimated the cost of net zero at less than one percent of GDP, while the Office for Budget Responsibility has said that “the costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero”.
Liz Truss used her speech to say: “If we look at the net zero zealots that Lee has just been talking about, the need for cheaper energy is being drowned out by some very active campaigners.” She claimed voters “don’t like the net zero policies which are making energy more expensive”.
The International Monetary Fund found in September 2022 that the energy crisis was hitting UK households harder than any country in western Europe, due to the UK’s reliance on gas for heating homes.
Tufton Street Links
Politicians fronting the PopCon group have a history of working with anti-green think tanks and supporting more fossil fuel extraction.
Truss (who went to the University of Oxford with Littlewood) has extensive ties to the IEA, which is part of the Tufton Street network – a cluster of libertarian pressure groups and think tanks that oppose state-led climate action.
In 2022, Truss’s campaign for Tory leader was run by Ruth Porter, a former communications director at the IEA. Once in 10 Downing Street, Truss hired Porter as her senior special advisor, and has since appointed her to the House of Lords. A number of former Tufton Street figures were appointed to government advisory roles during Truss’s short-lived tenure in Downing Street.
The IEA publicly supported Truss’s ‘mini-budget’, which caused economic chaos by promising large tax cuts without explaining how they would be funded. While in office, Truss lifted the UK’s ban on fracking for shale gas, a policy advocated by the IEA. (The policy was ditched by her successor Rishi Sunak.)
The IEA has consistently opposed UK government climate policies, preferring “market solutions”. In October 2022, IEA executive Andy Mayer said the government should “get rid of” its net zero target, which he called a “very hard left, socialist, central-planning model”.
During her 2022 leadership campaign, Truss received £5,000 from Lord Vinson, one of the few known funders of the Tufton Street-based Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s main climate science denial group.
Rees-Mogg also has a long record of opposing climate policies. Earlier this month he said: “the current headlong rush to net zero risks impoverishing the nation to no global benefit on emissions”.
The UK government’s legally-binding target to cut carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by 2050 is part of international efforts to keep global warming below 1.5C.
As Business and Energy Secretary in 2022, Rees-Mogg supported overturning the UK’s ban on fracking, and said “we have to stop demonising oil and gas” in a meeting with the UAE’s state investment company.
He also receives around £29,000 per month to host a show on right-wing broadcaster GB News. A DeSmog investigation last year found one in three GB News hosts spread climate science denial on air in 2022, while more than half attacked net zero policies. The channel‘s co-owner, Paul Marshall, has £1.8 billion invested in fossil fuels via his investment fund Marshall Wace.
Science Denial
Several figures with ties to climate science denial turned out for the PopCon launch. They included Lord Frost, a trustee of the GWPF who last year said global warming could be “beneficial”, along with Dame Andrea Jenkyns, who sits on the board of the GWPF’s campaign arm, Net Zero Watch.
The IEA and GWPF have both received funding from Neil Record, a Conservative donor who was IEA chairman until July 2023 and remains chair of Net Zero Watch. Record has donated thousands to Tory MP Steve Baker, an IEA ally and former GWPF trustee who has claimed much climate science is “contestable” and “propagandised”.
The PopCon launch was also attended by GB News host Nigel Farage, honorary president of right-wing party Reform UK, which campaigns to “scrap net zero”. Last year the party received £135,000 from donors who spread climate denial or had fossil fuel interests. Reform leader Richard Tice has claimed that “CO2 isn’t poison; it’s plant food”.
Farage posed for a photo at the PopCon event with Lois Perry, director of climate denial group CAR26, who is running for leader of UKIP and last month said she does not believe in human-caused climate change.
Original article by Adam Barnett republished from DeSmog.
Liz Truss attacks ‘left-wing extremists’ at Tory PopCon launch
…
Addressing the audience Truss made a series of bizarre attacks on the Left, taking aim at “wokeism” and said the Tories had failed to “take on the left-wing extremists”.
“Wokeism seems to be on the curriculum,” said Truss. “There is confusion about basic biological facts, like what is a woman.
“Look at the net zero zealots, if you listen to the Today programme, I don’t recommend it, you’ll hear demands for more public spending.”
Truss went on to warn that the left were “on the march and actively organising”.
“These people have repurposed themselves, they don’t believe they are socialist or communists anymore. They say they’re environmentalists, they say they’re in favour of helping people across all communities, they are in favour of supporting LGBT people or groups of ethnic minorities.
“So they no longer admit that they are collectivists but that is what their ideology is about.”
She went on to claim that anti-capitalists were being “pandered to” by the Government and that Conservative values were being eroded and said it was “only through Conservative values that we can give the British people what they want”, however fell short on saying what this was exactly.
…
Liz Truss attacks ‘left-wing extremists’ at Tory PopCon launch
Truss summons ‘Secret Tories’ to fight Davos and Left
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Running through a list of enemies almost longer than her catastrophic time in Downing Street, Ms Truss nevertheless claimed that Britain was “full of secret Conservatives — people who agree with us but don’t want to admit it,” while the Tory party had been appeasing “left-wing extremists.”
Painting a picture of a world on the edge of socialism, the former prime minister, best known for crashing the economy in a matter of days, asserted that “the left have been on the march.”
“They have been on the march in our institutions, they have been on the march in our corporate world, they are on the march globally,” she claimed.
Taking on this menace and “changing the system itself” will require “resilience and bravery,” Ms Truss added.
Unfortunately, rather than resilience and bravery, she had to hand only Lee Anderson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, former frontbenchers taking a break from their present gigs on GB News.
…
Truss summons ‘Secret Tories’ to fight Davos and Left
Venture Fund Set to ‘Take Control’ of Telegraph Has Fossil Fuel Investments
Original article by Sam Bright republished from DeSmog.
The group, which reportedly has UAE state backing, is leading the race to buy the British newspaper.
The investment fund that has reportedly reached an agreement to buy the Telegraph Media Group has stakes in several oil and gas companies, DeSmog can report.
U.S.-based RedBird Capital has entered into a joint venture to take control of The Telegraph alongside International Media Investments (IMI) of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The two groups have reportedly agreed to provide loans to The Telegraph’s existing owners, the Barclay family, to allow them to pay off their £1.16 billion debt to Lloyds Banking Group. The family lost control of The Telegraph and the Spectator magazine, which is also part of the media group, earlier this year due to this outstanding debt.
News reports suggest that the deal is being backed by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who serves as the deputy prime minister of the UAE, the head of its state-owned investment company, and the owner of Manchester City football club.
Conservative MPs have voiced concerns over the potential purchase and the danger of foreign influence, asking the UK government to use national security laws to investigate the agreement. Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer has echoed these concerns, warning that the deal could undermine “free expression of opinion” and prevent the “accurate presentation of the news”.
The UAE is a petrostate that has the world’s largest oil expansion plans. The state-owned energy company, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), intends to increase its oil production by more than any other fossil fuel firm in the world, according to data from the Global Oil and Gas Exit List (Gogel). Adnoc said that Gogel’s data and assumptions were “incorrect and misleading” but has not provided its own figures.
RedBird-IMI has said that, under its proposal, The Telegraph and Spectator will be managed by RedBird Capital “alone” and IMI would be a “passive investor”.
RedBird Capital trades in a number of core investment sectors, including energy. The firm’s website states that it holds investments in at least six fossil fuel firms: Aethon United, CapturePoint, FireBird Energy, Four Corners Petroleum, Lambda Energy Resources, and Tally Energy Services.
All of these companies are based in the U.S., with a majority operating in Texas.
Aethon United was listed by Enverus Intelligence Research as one of the most prolific private oil and gas producers in the U.S. in 2023. It was reported in 2022 that the firm was considering a public listing that would value it at more than $10 billion.
CapturePoint specialises in carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS), a favoured technology of the fossil fuel industry that it claims will help to limit global warming. The RedBird website claims that CapturePoint is “building out a carbon capture network on the Gulf Coast and in the Midwest”.
There is limited evidence of the efficacy of CCUS at scale. DeSmog recently analysed 12 large-scale CCUS projects around the world and found countless missed carbon capture targets, as well as cost overruns, with taxpayers picking up the tab via billions of dollars in subsidies. Meanwhile, captured carbon is often merely used to extract more oil.
“If this deal goes through, it will pollute our press and the UK’s fight against climate breakdown,” Alexander Kirk, fossil fuels campaigner at Global Witness, told DeSmog.
RedBird Capital also holds an investment in Majority Strategies, a political strategy firm that claims to have worked for every official Republican presidential nominee since 2000. Majority Strategies received more than $27 million during the 2022 election cycle, including $9.2 million from the Republican Senate Leadership Fund.
Responding to media speculation about The Telegraph’s future ownership, the paper’s editor Chris Evans sent an internal memo earlier this week. Seen by Politico Playbook, the memo read: “You’ve been asking me how we can be confident that editorial independence would be protected. At the moment I know no more than you will have read.”
Polly Truscott, a foreign policy adviser at Amnesty International UK, told The Times that: “Any Emirati state ownership of the Telegraph may have serious implications for press freedom in the UK and should be carefully scrutinised by the government. In the UAE, anyone who dares to speak out against the Emirati authorities is likely to be at serious risk.”
The UAE ranks 145 out of 180 in the 2023 Press Freedom Index produced by Reporters Without Borders.
Other sources claim that the bidding process for The Telegraph and the Spectator is still ongoing and that no deal has been finalised. Paul Marshall, the co-owner of GB News, is also reportedly interested in buying the titles. DeSmog revealed in October that Marshall’s hedge fund has $2 billion in fossil fuel investments.
RedBird Capital and the Telegraph Media Group did not respond to our request for comment.
Climate Attacks
A new DeSmog analysis has found that eight in 10 opinion pieces from The Telegraph on environmental issues downplay the climate crisis.
Our analysis, for the six months ending 16 October, found that of the 171 articles covering environmental issues, 85 percent were identified as “anti-green” – attacking climate policy, downplaying climate science and ridiculing environmental groups.
Of the 1,930 opinion pieces published by the paper during this period, nearly one in five (17.6 percent) featured an attack on climate science, policy or environmental groups. Ten writers linked to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s leading climate science denial group, wrote a total of 144 opinion pieces for The Telegraph during the period.
The Telegraph’s print circulation at the end of 2019, when it last released the data, was over 300,000. It had an online audience of 13.5 million in September this year.
World leaders next week gather in Dubai, UAE, to negotiate how to reduce emissions and limit global warming. The COP28 summit is being led by Sultan Al Jaber, the chief executive of Adnoc, which is the world’s 11th largest oil and gas producer. Al Jaber has claimed that fossil fuels should “continue to play a role in the foreseeable future” – a statement labelled as “very dangerous” by former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres.
The UAE has also attempted to emphasise the importance of CCUS in capturing emissions. However, according to an analysis by Global Witness, based on Adnoc’s carbon capture plans, it would take 343 years for the firm to capture all the CO2 emissions it will produce in just the next six years. This week, the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition also revealed that at least 7,200 fossil fuel lobbyists have attended UN-led climate over the last 20 years.
Total trade between the UK and UAE exceeded £25 billion in the year ending Q2 2023, an increase of 47.3 percent compared to the year before. The Gulf state has also pledged to invest £10 billion in “priority” UK industries.
In the year following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the UK imported £2.5 billion in fossil fuels from the UAE. The average monthly value of fossil fuel imports from the UAE increased from £84.4 million in the year to February 2022, to £195 million the year after.
In total, UK fossil fuel imports from authoritarian petrostates surged to £19.3 billion in the year following the invasion – an increase of more than 60 percent.
Original article by Sam Bright republished from DeSmog.
Director of Climate Science Denial Group Tony Abbott Reappointed as Board of Trade Adviser
Original article by Sam Bright republished from DeSmog.
Government keeps the ex-Australian leader on the high profile advisory body despite previous calls to sack him over anti-green ties.
Former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, a director of the UK’s principal climate science denial group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), has been reappointed by the government as an adviser to the prestigious Board of Trade.
Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch has today announced the 13 advisers who will provide counsel to the Board of Trade – one of the government’s most high profile economic advisory bodies.
The Board of Trade provides advice to the government on its trade deals with foreign countries, which often encompass environmental and climate standards.
The news of Abbott’s reappointment comes as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is set to make a speech today setting out several delays to the government’s net zero policies. It is thought that he will announce that a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles will be pushed back from 2030 to 2035, while also watering down schemes to phase out gas boilers and scrapping new energy efficiency regulations on homes.
Abbott, who was originally appointed to the Board of Trade in September 2020, is one of only four advisers reappointed by Badenoch, who has relaunched the board to focus on exports following her appointment as business and trade secretary earlier this year.
The former Australian leader has been retained despite opposition parties and campaigners calling in February for the government to remove Abbott after he joined the senior ranks of the GWPF.
Abbott has previously said that “climate change is probably doing good” and is a long-standing advocate for coal power, the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel.
Green Party peer Baroness Bennett told DeSmog that, by reappointing Abbott, “Sunak has lined himself up very firmly on the side of Trumpian populism – the direction that the prime minister is clearly increasingly taking as this chaotic Tory government desperately flails its way towards a general election.”
The GWPF was founded by the late Conservative chancellor Nigel Lawson with the purpose of combating what it describes as “extremely damaging and harmful policies” designed to mitigate climate change.
The GWPF has gained a number of high profile directors over the last year. New trustees include Tory peer Lord David Frost, the UK’s former chief Brexit negotiator, Conservative MP Andrea Jenkyns, and Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson.
The GWPF said in 2015 that “policies to ‘stop climate change’ are based on climate models that completely failed to predict the lack of warming for the past two decades”. It has also expressed the view that carbon dioxide has been mis-characterised as pollution, when in fact it is a “benefit to the planet”.
In September 2022, Net Zero Watch – the GWPF’s campaigning arm – published a report which stated that “changing atmospheric carbon dioxide has minimal impact on Earth’s temperature and climate”, and “efforts to decarbonise in the hope of affecting global temperatures will be in vain”.
This year, the world experienced its hottest July on record, with climate change fueling extreme weather events. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading climate science body, has warned of the spread of climate misinformation which “undermines climate science and disregards risk and urgency” of cutting emissions.
Tory MP Chris Skidmore, a former energy minister who led a recent review into net zero by the government, said that Sunak risked making “the greatest mistake of his premiership”.
DeSmog has previously revealed that the Conservative Party received £3.5 million in donations from fossil fuel interests and climate science deniers in 2022, while two-thirds of the directors in charge of the party’s multi-million-pound endowment fund have a financial interest in oil, gas, and highly polluting industries.
Businessman David Meller has also been announced as a new adviser to the Board of Trade.
Meller is a Conservative Party donor whose company Meller Designs was given £160 million in personal protective equipment (PPE) contracts during the pandemic via the government’s notorious ‘VIP’ lane.
Meller has donated more than £70,000 to the Conservative Party and its politicians since 2009, including £3,250 to Michael Gove’s short-lived 2016 Conservative leadership bid, with Meller serving as Gove’s finance chair. Meller Designs was referred to the VIP lane by Gove’s office.
Meller has continued to donate to Conservative MPs following the pandemic. Electoral Commission records show that he gave £4,990 to Grant Shapps on 6 July, who was at the time serving as Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary.
There is no suggestion of wrongdoing on the part of David Meller or Meller Designs.
A Department for Business and Trade spokesperson said: “We’ve announced a revamped Board of Trade that brings together a wide range of private sector expertise to help boost British exports, identify barriers to trade and represent the best of Brand Britain to the world.
“All advisers to the board serve in personal capacities, do not speak on behalf of government and do not set government policy.”
Tony Abbott and the GWPF have been approached for comment. David Meller has been approached for comment via Meller Designs.
Original article by Sam Bright republished from DeSmog.