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Multi-millionaire hedge fund boss Paul Marshall began this year’s Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, as could probably be predicted, with a lengthy tirade against woke. “I can’t get through breakfast until I’ve performed a land acknowledgement, checked my privilege, changed gender at least three times,” he mugged, to chuckles from the audience.
Known as ARC, the conference was founded back in 2023 by Marshall, who owns GB News, UnHerd and the Spectator, along with controversial Canadian academic Jordan Peterson and Conservative life peer Baroness Philippa Stroud. On its website, it proclaims itself to be “an international movement with a vision for a better world”. But other media outlets have somewhat different names for it. The Guardian has called the conference “alt-right heaven”, whereas Novara Media has branded it as a “far-right” collection of climate-change deniers.
Flicking through this year’s list of speakers, where everyone from Nigel Farage to the Russian-British libertarian Konstantin Kisin was invited to speak, I wanted to understand more about the people who come here. Did attendees — including MPs from every populist right party in Europe, oil execs, American preachers and tech moguls — really travel from 85 countries just to discuss “regeneration”, the theme of this year’s conference? And why would they part with as much as £25,000 to do so?
A celestial conference room and an anti-woke bookshop
As I was enrolling for the conference, I was hit with a warning that signing up “allows the app and website to share information about you”. It felt a little worrying. Just a few days before, tech mogul, Palantir-founder and former ARC attendee Peter Thiel’s secret society group Dialog was hacked — revealing the details of the gathered elite who had signed up. Not simply convening the tech and business elite, but hosting social and even dating events too — a sort of modern day Bilderberg group, to which MP Tom Tugendhat was inexplicably invited. Dialog looked, perhaps at a slightly higher level, a little like the elite gathering ARC is trying to form.
Flicking through ARCs data privacy notice did little to reassure me. Any information I provide will be supplemented “with personal data from elsewhere”, I was told. But the speakers list for ARC was simply too tempting. After all, they had an astronaut speaking, freshly back from circling the moon. And how could I pass up the chance to meet the theologians and US evangelists making up the brave new world of the conservative movement? I signed myself up.
My name, age and, probably, my national insurance number now ceded, I arrive to Olympia on Wednesday morning to a cavernous room that has been so plastered in white it feels like a kind of purgatory. An enormous gilded painting of an arch — titled “An Arch for the West” — welcomes you into the all-white conference space. The carpet is grey-white, laid specially for the event over an ungodly black rubber floor.
Pure white stalls have been set up to cater to the discerning modern conservative — an offering of biblical and industrial paintings by the English oil painter Roger Wagner; an anti-woke bookshop compiled by Piccadilly stalwart Hatchards, selling, among other titles, a biography of Margaret Thatcher and climate-skeptic Bjørn Lomborg’s popular 2020 book False Alarm.
Motoring around the room are an assorted collection of conservatives eagerly networking. Intense young men in impossibly tight navy suits are here to talk business. “I have to test the boundaries of every possibility”, one boasts to his enraptured counterpart, the two men perched on — you guessed it — pure white armchairs outside the main hall. Strutting around them are several besuited guys wearing stetson hats and cowboy boots, here to spread the good Christian word.
As I’m admiring one of the tapestries, a tall and smartly dressed man in his early 30s approaches me to introduce himself. He’s Lev Perlman, British–Israeli founder of an AI-driven recruitment company called Metamindz. Unlike many of those keenly perambulating around the main hall, Perlman’s bought himself a higher tier ticket for the event. It grants access to the “Leaders Circle” and with it the chance to meet useful contacts.
When we get talking, he initially frames this purchase as an almost benevolent act. “We’re on board with the mission,” he says humbly, before offering, unprompted, that “DEI is absolute shit”, and that the UK’s hiring and equality laws means that he employs most of the developers for Metamindz as freelancers from Ukraine. “We’re loyal to them, and we’ll pay them before we pay ourselves”, he says, not entirely convincingly, “but if they don’t perform well for a few months, they’re out.”
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