Everything you need to know about Liz Truss’s CPAC Great Britain

While most former prime ministers set up foundations or lecture at Ivy League universities, Liz Truss has launched a YouTube channel. Upon this soapbox, with its average audience of 6,000 views per video, she is promoting her latest venture: bringing the MAGA movement’s biggest annual conference to the UK.

CPAC Great Britain, which begins today, is a gathering of some of the oddest and most disturbing figures in the radical right. Among them are conspiracy theorists, Islamophobes, campaigners seeking an end to abortion and the curtailing of LGBT rights, plus pro-fracking lobbyists, cryptocurrency advocates, and a man who settled a sexual assault lawsuit for half a million dollars.

Chaired by Truss, this conference marks the latest American attempt to export paranoid and socially regressive policies to the UK. Washington tends to see us as a failed state, no thanks to Elon Musk’s frequent assertions that we are on the brink of civil war, and there is money to be made for sycophants willing to repeat these lines in front of American crowds. And so Truss, who was only in Downing Street for 49 days, is happy to lick the boots of her MAGA paymasters and beg them to “advise” us on topics like immigration. 

Prepare for a deeply weird spectacle as speakers from the American radical right include:

Penny Nance, CEO of Concerned Women for America, which campaigns against abortion, divorce and homosexuality. “Homosexuality is dangerous, and individuals with same-sex attraction have the right to full disclosure of information concerning this risky behavior,” says a briefing on her website.

Jack Posobiec, the far-right activist who spread the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that Democratic Party leaders were operating a paedo ring from the non-existent basement of a Washington pizzeria. He has spoken of the need to “overthrow” democracy.

Greg Swenson, chair of Republicans Overseas UK. He has used his parliamentary and media appearances to lobby for fracking and chlorinated chicken. Swenson further described abortion as an “epidemic” that has given rise to a culture that is “self-loathing, confused, dying”.

From Europe there is:

Andrzej Duda, the former Polish president who described LGBT rights as “even more destructive” than communism. In 2024, he said he would veto a bill that would have eased abortion laws (it was rejected by Poland’s lower house before that could happen).

Carlo Fidanza, an MEP in the Brothers of Italy party. He was filmed giving a straight-arm salute at a meeting and in 2023 was handed a suspended sentence in a corruption case — he was accused of making a councillor resign in exchange for hiring his son as an assistant.

George Simion, of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians party. He opposes gay marriage, criticised Holocaust education and shared a post that claimed hot weather was divine retribution against LGBT people.

Dominik Tarczyński, a former Polish MEP who said “not even one Muslim” should be allowed to immigrate to Poland. Like Duda, he belongs to the Law and Justice party. Tarczyński, who has ties to Britain First, was listed as a speaker but has been refused entry into Britain on the grounds that he was “not conducive to the public good”.

In addition, there are a range of figures from the British radical right: 

Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, who is under scrutiny for accepting £5 million from a crypto billionaire and additional funding from a convicted fraudster.

Alex Phillips, the TalkTV commentator once described as “the female face” of Reform UK. On her Substack, she has called for “only British born citizens of sole nationality to hold public office” and asked: “Is an Islamist Fifth Column now dictating our Global Affairs too?”

Dame Andrea Jenkyns, Reform’s Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, who has called for the moratorium on fracking to be lifted and shale gas extraction to commence in her county.

One of the scheduled events is a panel on grooming gangs, featuring two survivors and Mercedes Schlapp, a former White House advisor and CPAC leader. Speaking elsewhere at the conference is her husband Matt Schlapp, chairman of CPAC and a major figure in the MAGA world who enjoys close ties to Donald Trump. He has also been accused of sexual assault. Among the allegations have been claims from a Republican campaign worker that Schlapp groped him, which he denied. He ultimately settled a lawsuit for $480,000, saying: “From the beginning, I asserted my innocence.”

Last year Schlapp was again accused in press reports of grabbing a man’s genitals. He has not discussed this allegation in public as far as we can tell. In a grim irony, given that grooming gang cases involve institutional failure to investigate reports of sexual crimes, CPAC was itself accused of ignoring claims of Schlapp’s alleged sexual misconduct dating back, according to the Washington Post, to 2017 (which he denies).

Embarrassingly for a former prime minister, Truss has spent her post-Downing Street career toadying to the MAGA world. In a podcast with Mercedes Schlapp, Truss praised the “astounding victory” that Trump won in 2024. “Everybody was very excited,” she gushed. “He’s achieved tremendous things that we’re all very jealous of here in Britain, like ‘drill baby drill’, cutting taxes, stopping immigration, making America strong again on the world stage.”

She also interviewed on her channel Gregory Bovino, the former commander-at-large who led the US’s Border Patrol crackdown in Minnesota. The taping took place weeks after two protesters were shot dead in January by Bovino’s officers. Truss asked him: “Would you be willing to come over to Britain and give advice and help solve the problem [of deportations] in Britain?” Three months after this interview, Bovino attended a far-right European conference on remigration, a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.

When she attended the most recent CPAC in America, held at a Texan convention centre in March, Truss elaborated on what her brand of activism entailed. It sounded a lot like so-called replacement theory: 

“We have a problem right across the west with illegal immigration and legal immigration and a direct challenge to our culture, a direct challenge to western civilization. It’s become a strategy of leftists in western countries to import people who don’t share our values specifically because they want to destroy our way of life and pave the way to their Marxist utopia.”

She hopes her version of the conference will become “a launchpad for the policies and leaders that will shape the future of the West”. Given her record of tanking the pound, Truss’s hope that her CPAC will also “chart a course for a prosperous, sovereign future” are perhaps overly ambitious. The only sponsors identified on CPAC GB’s website are The Bitcoin Collective, a pro-crypto organisation who offer “a competitive edge for UK companies navigating an uncertain economic climate” (again, caused in no small part by their corporate partner).

Another key figure in CPAC GB is Joseph Robertson (real name Josephmarie Dulston). He is a 29-year-old political activist formerly involved in the Orthodox Conservatives, an anti-LGBT, anti-abortion youth group. Robertson is listed as director at Touchpoint Strategy, a political consultancy firm whose accounts are more than six months overdue and which has been threatened with compulsory strike-off action. Charlie Downes, who as spokesman for the far-right Restore Britain party has called for the deportation of “over 10 million” people, was formerly involved in Touchpoint.

Robertson unsuccessfully ran as a Reform UK candidate in the May 2025 elections and appeared alongside Nigel Farage at the British launch of the Heartland Institute, the American climate denial pressure group.

He has described Christianity as engaged in an existential struggle with Islam in which birth rates are the key to survival. “The suicidal empathy that we’ve embraced,” he said in an Instagram reel, “the blind tolerance that masquerades as compassion, is allowing Islam to outbreed Christianity right here in our homelands.” Robertson further claimed that feminism has “disrupted the natural harmony between men and women” and led to “empty cradles and broken bonds”. His goal is to preserve “our religious and ethnic essence and identity”.

Truss, on her YouTube channel, has spoken about how she hopes CPAC will be a righteous counter-weight to “forces that are trying to destroy society”. Is it possible, given the number of hateful cranks attending her event, that, not for the first time, she might be wrong?