Mysterious Right-Wing Think Tank Demanding Charity ‘Transparency’ Won’t Say Who Runs or Funds It

A new right-wing think tank which has made the headlines over recent months demanding charities be more transparent about their backers has gone to significant lengths to hide the people behind it.

Cambridge Circus Research (CCR) launched at the end of May 2026 with Breaking the Blob, a report calling for charities whose main activity is deemed to be political campaigning to lose charitable status. It also wants compulsory disclosure of grants, annual “political-activity returns” and a test of where advocacy charities get their money.

The report’s appendix names more than two dozen individual charity trustees who, it claims, “illustrate the personnel network connecting migration, civil-liberties, environmental, development, and legal-advocacy organisations”.

Yet CCR applies none of this transparency to itself. It doesn’t name any of its own funders, publishes no address, and appears to have no formal legal status. No charity or company is registered to it. The credited authors of its flagship report, “Charles Talbot” and “Zack Salisbury”, are pen names, according to Reform UK board member Gawain Towler in a review CCR itself promoted.

Even so, it has won reams of coverage in right-wing outlets and a joint investigation with GB News.

A leading transparency group, Who Funds You? has now urged media outlets to be “very cautious about using any of the research outputs produced by this organisation,” and given CCR its lowest grade, E, for transparency.

CCR’s website domain was registered through Njalla, a privacy service set up by Peter Sunde, a co-founder of the file-sharing site The Pirate Bay. Rather than simply masking an owner’s details, Njalla registers domains in its own name, so no individual can be identified behind the think tank’s web address. The only registrant details shown point to Njalla’s base in St Kitts and Nevis.

The group’s only contact is an encrypted ProtonMail address. The file data of its September paper, The Care Worker Visa Disaster, appears to have been deliberately stripped of creation dates and software details.

Towler, Nigel Farage’s long-time press chief, wrote in his 4 June review that “Charles Talbot” and “Zack Salisbury” are “Noms des Plumes” because “it is not safe in large parts of industry to speak out of turn”. CCR shared it the same day as a “wonderful review of our work”. Towler also praised the report’s analysis of charities as “precisely the kind of auditable transparency the authors are demanding of others”.

Yet the report names private individuals as part of a supposed lobbying network. CCR’s site also hosts a placeholder page for an interactive “Who’s Who in Charity Land”, alongside one billed as mapping “Iranian-linked UK charity & protest networks”. At the time of writing, the “Who’s Who” page still shows the developer’s instructions, apparently unchanged since July.

CCR’s reply to Byline Times was signed “Thomas Maitland”. Sir Thomas Maitland, known as “King Tom” (1760–1824), was Governor of Ceylon and Malta and Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands. Talbot and Salisbury are also the names of British historical figures.

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Do as we say

The report proposes a statutory “safe harbour” for charities whose policy work is evidence-based, non-party-political, “not primarily designed to mobilise public pressure” and “not a vehicle for a predetermined ideological or legislative campaign”. This, it says, “would protect genuine think tanks, educational bodies, animal-welfare charities, free-speech charities, poverty charities”. In other words, think tanks would be shielded.

UK Fundraising and Alliance magazines have both placed the report in the context of US attacks on non-profits. The ‘Blob’ report’s foreword explicitly praises Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative.

That introduction is by Fred de Fossard, director of strategy at the Prosperity Institute, formerly the Legatum Institute. The institute’s former charitable arm was censured by the Charity Commission in 2018 over its Brexit work, and was removed from the charity register in 2024, leaving it outside charity regulation altogether.

De Fossard was previously special advisor to the former Conservative minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, who now presents State of the Nation on GB News. Another Prosperity Institute researcher, Guy Dampier, is thanked in the report, alongside “many more who will wish to remain anonymous but know who they are”. The Prosperity Institute is funded by Legatum, which co-owns GB News with billionaire hedge fund boss Sir Paul Marshall.

Torrin Wilkins, director of the Centre Think Tank, which has researched think tank transparency, said the aim appears to be to “deflect any attempt to remove charitable status from think tanks with a clear political ideology, by pointing out that charities such as Oxfam also campaign and lobby politicians as part of their work. It is a frequently used argument.”

“In response, we proposed a purpose test similar to the one the Electoral Commission applies to non-party campaigning. This would cover all political activity and require those organisations to disclose the sources of their donations.”

Rhodri Davies, director of philanthropy knowledge at Alliance magazine, said CCR’s arguments on transparency are “quite hard to take at face value when it’s an organisation going so far out of its way not to be transparent itself”. On the naming of charity trustees, he added: “If it’s not doxing, it feels like it’s getting pretty close to it.”

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Undisclosed links

On 13 October GB News published an “investigation, conducted in conjunction with Cambridge Circus Research”, which found that 208 firms fined a total of £9.3 million had stayed on the Home Office’s visa sponsor register. The article was bylined by David Shipley, who co-wrote CCR’s September paper on care worker visas and is thanked in Breaking the Blob. GB News did not tell readers this.

The article quoted Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp, who said Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood lacked “the backbone to crack down on illegal working or end mass low-skilled migration with a cap”, adding: “That is exactly what the Conservatives will do.”

Eight days earlier, the Telegraph had published a report on CCR’s wages paper, co-written by Shipley, which did disclose his CCR co-authorship and described CCR as having “undisclosed funding”.

Shipley also spoke on a Prosperity Institute panel at Reform UK’s conference in September. A GB News commentator, Jack Hadfield, is thanked in the Blob report too.

The Critic magazine has published six pieces by “Charles Talbot”, including one titled “Follow the donations” (14 September), which argues that outrage over Reform UK’s mega-donors overlooks supposedly larger flows of money to left-wing organisations.

His author bio says he “tweets @emergenteffects” but does not mention CCR, or Towler’s statement that the name is a pseudonym. The Critic has been contacted for comment.

CCR’s wages paper, Wages After the Wave, was reported by the Telegraph, Daily Mail and GB News, and Reform’s Robert Jenrick called it “vital research”. But CCR told Byline Times it was “adapted from previous academic work” which its author is “now developing into a formal journal submission to be peer-reviewed”.

The author, Hubert Kucharski, graduated in May, according to his LinkedIn profile. It is not clear whether the “previous work” was his undergraduate dissertation. GB News introduced him as an “independent economist”.

Some of the the first outlets to cover CCR’s work were Toby Young’s Daily Sceptic, The Conservative Woman, spiked and Pimlico Journal, which is thanked in the Blob report.

Tom Brake, director of Unlock Democracy, said: “Transparency and accountability should be watchwords for any organisation publishing research or reports, or conducting investigations, particularly when it’s advocating mandatory disclosure of information by others. And for the media covering the story, some due diligence is in order. Understanding who is behind reports or investigations, and who funds them, could be the bigger story.”

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‘A bit of a circus’

Reform UK figures have championed CCR from the start. Towler reviewed its debut report, Jenrick praised the wages research, and on 14 October Reform’s website republished the GB News findings: “An investigation by GB News and Cambridge Circus Research found that 208 firms, fined a total of £9.3 million, have remained continuously on the Home Office’s visa sponsor register since receiving their penalties.”

CCR’s care visa paper, in turn, sets its own estimates against Reform UK’s The Cost of the Boriswave, citing it four times.

CCR’s X account has also complained that the “charity-industrial complex” creates “the illusion of grassroots support. It is all manufactured.” It sits uneasily with a pseudonymous group amplified by a small, interlinked circle of friendly writers, think-tankers and Reform figures.

Rhodri Davies said the operation had “the feel of a relatively small number of people creating the illusion of something being published and then other people independently commenting on it and sharing it… clearly there was a strategy behind it to try to amplify what they were saying”.

Charles Keidan, who runs the progressive philanthropy consultancy Keidan Philanthropy, argues CCR looks like “the kind of operation that can morph into something else as and when it needs to, if it no longer serves its purpose.”

“That’s what makes it feel like a bit of a circus. A circus is something you erect, then you close it down and move on somewhere else, leaving everything else in the dust,” he said, adding: “There’s also maybe the enigma and allure of imagining you’re part of this smoke-and-mirrors operation.”

Keidan believes the anonymity “undermines their credibility, their legitimacy as people making a serious, good-faith contribution to the debate”, adding that it was “hypocritical, when they’re complaining about a lack of transparency in funding mechanisms, not to be transparent themselves”.

“GB News calls itself the home of free speech, yet these free speakers don’t feel free enough to reveal who they are,” he said. “They always talk about the left being snowflakes, and about the marketplace of ideas. So why can’t they put their names behind it and have you or me on GB News to debate it?” Keidan added.

While nothing links CCR to Reform UK’s funding, or to funding from GB News co-owner Sir Paul Marshall, Keidan said the right’s ecosystem was far better resourced than before.

Crypto-billionaires Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne, unti recently based overseas, gave Reform £72 million between them this summer. “[Paul Marshall] is backing the conservative and radical conservative ecosystem,” Keidan said. “Think about the number of think tanks, jobs, policy papers and social media influencing that allows you to do.”

A spokesperson for Who Funds You?, the think tank transparency project, said: “Cambridge Circus Research does not publish any information about how it is financed on its website. There is also no public information available about who manages the organisation, its corporate structure or its governance arrangements.”

“Consequently, we have awarded Cambridge Circus Research our lowest grade, a Grade E, and we would urge other policy makers and journalists to be very cautious about using any of the research outputs produced by this organisation. Uncritical use of material produced by any Grade E rated project caries a significant reputational risk to any media or policy organisation.”

A representative for Cambridge Circus Research told Byline Times: “We disclose no funders because we have none. We are all volunteers who have received no money for the work that we do, simply because we care about the state of the country.” It did not answer our other questions, including whether it had received support in kind from other organisations.

David Shipley, the Telegraph, GB News, the Prosperity Institute and others named were contacted for comment.

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Cambridge Circus Research response in full

Sir, We disclose no funders because we have none. We are all volunteers who have received no money for the work that we do, simply because we care about the state of the country.

With regards to Mr Kucharski’s paper, this was adapted from previous academic work he conducted which he is now developing into a formal journal submission to be peer-reviewed.

I have the honour to be, with highest consideration,

Sir,

Your humble and obedient servant,

Thomas Maitland

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