Free from fear or favour
No tracking. No cookies

Who is Neil Record? Meet the Climate Change Sceptic Think-Tanker Bankrolling Kemi Badenoch’s Campaign

Conservative leadership favourite Kemi Badenoch is running her campaign from the home of a wealthy Tufton Street donor

Badenoch is being funded by the Chairman of the Tufton Street-based ‘Net Zero Watch’ lobby grop

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on ‘what the papers don’t say’ – without fear or favour.

To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

Kemi Badenoch is the current favourite to become the next Conservative party leader. She has made it to the final two candidates and is currently touring TV studios and making her pitch to members, with offensive comments about civil servants and autistic people.

In the Telegraph Tony Sewell hailed her as the true inheritor of Thatcher’s legacy. One way in which Sewell’s words ring true is that Badenoch’s campaign received £10,000 from arch Thatcherite city trader and climate change sceptic Tufton Street think-tanker Neil Record.

According to a report by Bloomberg, Badenoch has also been quietly using Record’s house as her campaign office. Record has also previously compared Badenoch to Thatcher suggesting she has similar “stardust” to his here. So just who is Badenoch’s wealthy benefactor?

Neil Record began his career as a Bank of England economist before moving into the private sector to work for the Mars group. He soon struck out on his own, founding Record Treasury management and began to make his name in currency trading. When Record’s company floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2007, over 20 years after it was founded, he netted a fortune of £170 million.

EXCLUSIVE

Robert Jenrick Accepted £25,000 Donation from Firm Controlled by Sanctioned Oligarch

The Conservative leadership candidate received the money from a company controlled by billionaire Sir Len Blavatnik – who has been sanctioned by the Ukrainian government

Record spent the 1990s currency trading and warning about the potential for derivatives to blow up in the faces of those trading them. In 1994 he presciently argued that the lack of understanding of derivatives would “prove to be the undoing of some companies, banks and even governments”. When the scale of traders’ negligence became clear following 2008, he argued for a limited-liability model for bankers bonuses meaning that over a certain amount they would be held liable to replenish equity capital wiped out by bad trades from their bonuses.

By the time the 2000s came around Record had begun making more interventions into policy debates. A longtime Eurosceptic, he opposed the European Single Currency and argued that the EU was dragging the UK into a mire of low growth because of labour protections promoted by the union, which he argued stemmed from “early 20th century socialist philosophy”. He also argued that the Blair Government’s transport policy was motivated by a “deep seated prejudice against private transport”.

His main policy interventions during this period were critiquing the system of public sector pensions. Record offered up a series of apocalyptic warnings (that he continues to make to this day) about the state of the public sector pension system’s finances. His chief gripe with public sector pensions is that they are offered on a defined benefit basis, proportional to the career earnings of the worker and are therefore in his opinion a financial burden that acts as a drag on the state (one day, he argues, the whole pensions systems will collapse) .

He instead argues for a public sector pensions system based on the returns of private investments made by each pension pot. In 2009 journalist Solomon Hughes criticised Record, pointing out that as a Forex trader, Record’s customers included private pension funds and that therefore capitalising public pensions would likely benefit him. In 2010 Record was cited in an article in the Financial Times titled “Forex managers vie for pension business” about how firms in the currency trading sector were trying to make themselves stand out to attract pension funds as clients. 

Kemi Badenoch’s Plans are a Mirror Image of Donald Trump Backers’ ‘Project 2025’ Agenda

The Conservative leadership candidate plans to dismantle Britain’s institutions, in a hard-right overhaul that echoes that of Trump supporters in the US

As the voting public fell out of love with the last Labour government, Record began to use his fortune to try and influence their likely successors. In 2009 he was named the 38th biggest political donor in Britain by the Sunday Times Rich List for the £52,500 he gave to the Conservative Party in opposition. By 2010 he had jumped to 20th on the list having given £158,000 to the Tories, in the same year he sat on the Independent Public Sector Pensions Commission which criticised Gordon Brown’s Government over lack of transparency in public pension figures. He also got involved in the right wing think tank world, writing reports for Policy Exchange and joining the Institute for Economic Affairs (a free market think tank that received fossil fuel industry funding) as Chairman in 2015. In 2024, Record remains a lifetime Vice President of the IEA.

In 2014 it was revealed by the website DeSmog that Record was one of two principal funding streams for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a climate change denialist think tank. Record remains the chair of Net Zero Watch, the Tufton Street-based campaigning arm of the GWPF which DeSmog describes as the UK’s most prominent climate science denial group.

The GWPF and its founder Nigel Lawson has a long record of making inaccurate statements about climate science. Among many other claims, in 2011 the GWPF posted a speech from Cardinal George Pell, who claimed that Global Warming “had stopped” and that if CO2 doubled in the atmosphere “plants would love it”.

In 2015 Neil Record told Unearthed “I believe that the important scientific enquiry required for us to understand man’s effect on the climate is being hampered by a monolithic ‘establishment’ view that the science is settled”. In reality, metastudies show that between 97-99.9% of scientists endorse the evidence of anthropogenic climate change.

ENJOYING THIS ARTICLE? HELP US TO PRODUCE MORE

Receive the monthly Byline Times newspaper and help to support fearless, independent journalism that breaks stories, shapes the agenda and holds power to account.

We’re not funded by a billionaire oligarch or an offshore hedge-fund. We rely on our readers to fund our journalism. If you like what we do, please subscribe.

Where there is any debate it is over the scale of the catastrophe facing the biosphere. More recently Net Zero Watch wrote positively about Reform UK’s proposal to scrap Net Zero targets. Reform’s policies are based on a series of discredited falsehoods about the climate – such as Richard Tice’s attribution of climate change “to the power of the sun and volcanoes” and  irrelevancies such as carbon dioxide’s importance to photosynthesis and the warmth of Roman Britain.

As well as Net Zero Watch, Neil Record was previously the chair of Restore Trust until November 2023. Restore Trust is an astroturfed lobby group pushing back against the perceived ‘wokeness’ of the National Trust as well as its policies on re-wilding and land conservation.

Restore Trust previously told Byline Times that “Mr Record’s involvement with the Global Warming Policy Foundation is not relevant to Restore Trust, which is not connected with policies to mitigate climate change, which is what that group is interested in. However, we would encourage the National Trust to stop using palm oil margarine in its scones and cakes.”

Record has previously played down his influence over the Conservative party, telling the Financial Times in 2010 that “If someone said have you got influence in the Tory party, I’d say no. But it’s unlikely I have an idea that I think is a good one that has not at least been aired [with senior Conservative politicians].”

However, given the leadership campaign for the likely next leader of that party is now being run from his own house, he may have changed his mind.

Neil Record and Kemi Badenoch’s campaign were both contacted for comment but did not respond by time of publication.


Written by

This article was filed under
, , , , , ,