Putin’s megaphone: Orbán’s far-right push into UK universities is fuelled by Russian oil

A conservative network led by Michael Gove and Nigel Farage’s senior adviser James Orr has spent more than half a million pounds pushing a far-right agenda – some of it fuelled by profits from Russian oil.

Good Law Project can reveal that the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation (RSLF) has received £512,500 – more than 90% of its funding – from Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) since 2023. This private college based in Budapest has close ties to Hungary’s authoritarian, far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán. It is funded by a huge endowment from the Hungarian state, including a 10% stake in the multi-billion Hungarian energy giant MOL Group – which refines oil, the majority of which comes from Russia.

RSLF has used this money to help the Orbán propaganda outfit access British establishment institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge, where it platforms far-right and anti-trans voices pushing culture wars in the UK.

Orr, an anti-abortion theologian who is a friend of JD Vance, has served as a director since the foundation was set up as an “international network of institutions and scholars dedicated to furthering the philosophical and cultural achievements of the West” in 2021. RSLF went on to award the controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson a $50,000 cash prize and silver medal the following year. And it wasn’t long before the network invited another of Orr’s friends, the Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, to speak at Oxford University. In 2023, the billionaire gave a lecture in which he attacked equality, diversity and inclusion and compared EDI initiatives to the Chinese Communist Party.

Spectator editor and former Conservative cabinet minister Michael Gove joined as a director in May 2025, a month before the anti-trans commentator Joanna Williams, head of education and culture at the Tufton Street think-tank Policy Exchange, spoke alongside Reform UK and Conservative politicians at an RSLF conference called “Now and England”. The network hosted the British anti-trans figurehead Kathleen Stock – a friend of JK Rowling who resigned from the University of Sussex in 2021 after students accused her of transphobia – at their 2025 Scrutopia Summer School. Stock also made a case against assisted dying as part of RSLF’s Oakeshott Lecture series in October, which featured the far-right US blogger Curtis Yarvin, who advocates for replacing democracy with a CEO-monarch, and historian David Starkey, who was dropped by his university and publisher in 2020 after he made racist remarks.

In 2023, RSLF signed an agreement in Budapest allowing MCC students to take part in “academic, literary, and public life” programmes at Oxford and Cambridge. Since then it has gone on to spend more than £190,000 ​​at these prestigious universities, from funding student societies to running events such as an intensive residential course in Oxford discussing “national loyalty and the nation-state” and “the roots of culture”.

When Good Law Project got in touch with Oxford, the university insisted that lectures and summer schools run by RSLF only use it “as a venue”.

“They are not official university-affiliated activities,” the university said. “University venues such as colleges host a wide range of summer schools and act as conference venues for a wide range of events, which are separate from and independent of the university’s core activities of teaching and research.”

Cambridge did not offer any response about RSLF’s activities at the university, which include a “philosophy of beauty” conference aiming to “cultivate dialogue and exchange amongst the next generation of academics and artists, with a primary audience of graduate students, young academics and young artists”.

Cambridge, where Orr teaches philosophy, is a crucial nexus in the network’s activities. In 2021, Byline Times found Orr and Peterson were central to another network based at the university and backed by Thiel, which it said was using the issue of free speech to “normalise white nationalism on UK campuses”. And only last month, Orr hosted Thiel at Cambridge for a series of closed-door events called The Antichrist Lectures, which were restricted to invited guests.

The connection to MCC gives RSLF valuable access – the Hungarian embassy in London hosted the network’s 2025 symposium, under the watchful eye of at least one representative from the Hungarian energy ministry. It also gives the foundation a link to considerable financial muscle. According to the EU’s transparency register, MCC’s outpost in Brussels received more than €6 million in 2025, only a small fraction of the $172m Hungary put into anti-gender funding in geographic Europe between 2019 and 2023 – making the country the highest spender in this area after Russia. MCC also runs a yearly summit at Kings College London.

Good Law Project has also found that RSLF, which is also registered in the US, has received funding from DonorsTrust, a non-profit which distributes grants to conservative causes including the Christian right Alliance Defending Freedom and the climate denialist Heartland Institute.

For Good Law Project campaign manager Charlene Pink, the irony of this global project funnelling Russian money through Viktor Orbán into the British anti-trans movement and members of a nationalist party like Reform is acute.

“It’s shocking to see elite universities lining up to use Russian oil money to indoctrinate students with far-right ideology,” Pink said. “You might expect that academics would have learned the lessons of history instead of handing foreign propaganda outfits a megaphone on campus. It’s time for Oxford and Cambridge to cut ties with networks like the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation who are pushing an extreme agenda which fuels harmful culture wars in the UK.”