Red meat, no lettuce: Nigel Farage and Liz Truss attend private lunch after week of Tory defections

If it was on the menu, a side helping of lettuce never made it to the table. Over blood-red steak and chips, Nigel Farage and Liz Truss came together on Monday for a discreet lunch at a swish Mayfair club, organised by a climate-denying US thinktank.Lois Perry, a former leader of the far-right Ukip party who is now Europe director of the Heartland Institute, posted photographs, now deleted, on X of Farage addressing others, including Truss, at the meal.While Reform UK appears to be keeping the former prime minster at arm’s length publicly, despite welcoming other former Tories, the gathering at Mark’s Club organised by the Heartland Institute raises potentially fresh awkward questions for the party.“Liz Truss would not be welcome in Reform UK,” the party’s press team replied within seven minutes of being asked by the Guardian if the party would ever allow the UK’s shortest-serving prime minister into its ranks.The former Conservative housing secretary Robert Jenrick, centre, defected to Reform UK on 15 January. Photograph: Jacob King/PAYet speculation has persisted about the next moves of Truss, whose mini-budget was described by Farage as “the best Conservative budget since 1986”.“She is very comfortable in that group, a lot whom hang out together, and both she and Nigel are clearly close to a lot of the same people, including some of Reform’s biggest backers,” said one of the other 20 or so people who attended.The thinktank they were lunching in aid of has made some extreme and incorrect comments on the climate. In the past, it has compared people who believe in global heating to the Unabomber, the US terrorist jailed for killing three people and injuring many others.Those present included David Starkey, the historian dropped by his university and publisher in 2020 over racist remarks, who has become a favoured guest at Reform’s annual conference, and Mike Graham, the broadcaster sacked from Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV after it said he had failed to cooperate with an investigation into a racist post that appeared on one of his social media accounts.Others included Alan Mendoza, a founder and executive director of the right-leaning Henry Jackson Society thinktank, and Lance Forman, the smoked salmon mogul and former Brexit party MEP who gave financial backing to Truss’s Tory leadership campaign.Lance Forman, seen here in 2016, said he spoke to Liz Truss at the lunch about Robert Jenrick’s criticism of her mini-budget and she was ‘not upset at all’. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian“It was basically about climate change,” Forman told the Guardian when asked about the lunch, which happened to take place on the same day that one of Reform’s newest recruits, Robert Jenrick, had claimed he told Kemi Badenoch to kick Truss out of the Conservative party because of her “cackhanded” mini-budget.A report in the New Statesman has suggested Truss spent the lunch visibly annoyed about Jenrick’s attack on her and her record in a piece for the Times and, after Farage’s departure, she complained to other guests that “dark forces” were behind the article.However, Forman said: “The timing of it was quite funny because of what Robert Jenrick had said that very morning. I was talking to Liz Truss and we mentioned it – she was not upset at all. She is very cheerful and robust.“It was a ridiculous thing for Jenrick to have said, actually. He said it on the back of her budget and Nigel Farage was one of those who congratulated her on her budget.” He said the food on offer was an “unmemorable” set menu featuring a chocolate mousse for dessert.Labour seized on the presence of both Truss and Farage, with a spokesperson claiming that Farage is “hellbent on reassembling Boris Johnson’s cabinet of failed Tories who broke our public services and hammered family finances”.They added: “On the same day Robert Jenrick said his old boss Liz Truss should be thrown out of the Tory party because of the damage she did to families, his new boss Nigel Farage was quaffing champagne and enjoying a lavish lunch with her.”Hard copies outlining the views of the Heartland Institute were also passed around at the lunch, where one diner said Farage gave a short speech that endorsed the institute’s ideas.“I think it’s likely that some of the things they are calling for will end up in a Reform programme for government,” they added.Once owned by the entrepreneur Mark Birley, Mark’s Club was sold in 2007 to Richard Caring, who also owns The Ivy and Sexy Fish restaurant chains, and is seen by the rightwing elite as a new money establishment with a less exclusive membership list than in its storied past.The club recently had a migraine-inducing makeover, stuffed with chintzy furnishings, gigantic oil paintings of dogs and brightly patterned wallpaper. Membership of Mark’s is £2,750 each year plus a £1,250 joining fee.The home of the Tory right is now unanimously understood to be 5 Hertford Street, which is owned by the late Mark Birley’s son, Robin. Truss may have struggled to secure a booking at this club; she is understood to have irritated its owners by wandering the premises in search of members to poach for her own rival club just one street away, which asks “founding members” for an eye-watering £500,000.While a much more fringe figure, Perry too has increasingly been working to establish herself as a major player on Britain’s new right. She spent much of this week in Zurich at a “Davos alternative”, run by the Heartland Institute, where Truss was billed as a keynote speaker, opining on “a vision for the UK and the democratic west”.The lunch was not the first time Perry has brought Truss and Farage together. Both graced the launch of the Heartland’s UK chapter at a glitzy party last year, held at Brooks’s private members club – one of the few remaining London gentlemen’s clubs that does not admit women.