America’s premier right-wing political carnival came to Britain this week for the first time. Just without much of the carnival.
For almost a decade in the United States, the Conservative Political Action Conference, also known as CPAC, has served as a raucous, over-the-top venue to celebrate all things Donald J. Trump, promote his agenda and hawk MAGA merchandise.
Its three-day event in London, CPAC-GB, promised to “feature global heavyweights” and “aligned global movements to chart a course for a prosperous, sovereign future,” according to its website. But if the organizers hoped to recreate the energy of the original conference on this side of the Atlantic, they seemed to struggle.
Day three of the event, Saturday, was attended by just 100 or so people, none of them decked out in outrageous costumes or covered head-to-toe with political paraphernalia, as is typical at the American conference. There were no Make Britain Great Again hats to be seen. And to several attendees, the pulsing red and purple spotlights in the ballroom of the Intercontinental Hotel seemed a bit garish for British sensibilities.
“You know, it’s the first one, and everyone has to start somewhere,” said Philip Andreewitch, a recent university graduate. He said his experience living in Harrow, an ethnically diverse suburb of London, had motivated him to come to the conference.
“I know what it’s like to live in an area of London where I’m an exotic animal,” he said. “Not because I’m white, because I was raised British and because I speak the English language.”
There was little mention on Saturday of Mr. Trump, who is broadly unpopular in Britain, even among its conservatives. Most of the Conservative Party’s leading politicians, including Kemi Badenoch, its leader in Parliament, stayed away from the conference.
Instead, the British CPAC seemed designed to celebrate Reform U.K., the populist, anti-immigration party that is currently polling well ahead of the Conservatives as well as Labour, the governing party. Labour’s new leader, Andy Burnham, becomes prime minister on Monday.
Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, a Trump ally, was CPAC-GB’s headline speaker on Friday night. People who attended his speech said several hundred people were there, most of whom joined in a standing ovation.
Mr. Farage listed the problems plaguing what he calls “Broken Britain,” such as crime, rising national debt and what he called excessive welfare spending. He pledged that his party would “overcome these short-term unpleasantnesses,” adding that “together we’ll fight and win that next election.”
Mr. Farage — who is under investigation in Parliament for his acceptance of a 5 million-pound, or $6.7 million, donation by a British cryptocurrency billionaire who lives in Thailand — did not mention that the conference was sponsored by The Bitcoin Collective. The CPAC organizers hailed the collective in a news release as “the leading voice for Bitcoin adoption across British business and society.”
In the United States, CPAC was originally a gathering of fringe activists and libertarians. But it was transformed under Mr. Trump into a platform for some of his most robust supporters.
The London conference was organized by Liz Truss, a Conservative who was Britain’s prime minister for 49 days in 2022. In brief remarks on Saturday morning, she pledged to make the conference an annual event.
“This is the final day of the first ever CPAC-GB,” she said. “Well, it will not be the final day of CPAC-GB. We will be running this event again next year.”
Several attendees said they were glad to hear it, even if they were disappointed that Ron DeSantis, a Republican who is the governor of Florida, had canceled his Saturday appearance. (Organizers said his plane had been grounded by severe weather.)
Instead of Mr. DeSantis, the audience heard from Pauline Hanson, a firebrand right-wing senator in Australia, who described what she called efforts by mainstream politicians and the news media to silence her. She said the governments of both Australia and Britain were flinging their borders open to migrants.
“Don’t bring people in that all they want to do is get onto our welfare system and feed off the taxpayers,” she said. “We, the white people, we’re proud to be there. We want to be Australians.”
She added: “Do not apologize for being white. I’m sick of hearing about white privilege.”
Dawn Templeton said she was drawn to the event by the anti-vaccine panel she had just attended. “I rejected the Covid vaccine. I did a lot of personal research at the time,” she said.
Ms. Templeton called Mr. Farage “the only chance we’ve got to sort this country out.” She added: “We’re in a mess. Yeah, morally, you know, there’s so much corruption. There’s so much evil stuff going on.”
She said she was impressed by Britain’s first CPAC, despite the relatively few people who were there on Saturday morning.
“It’s new,” she said. “I think we’ll get there.”
