Meet Lord Lawson's Shy Climate Denial Funders – Lord Leach

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BY HELEN NIANIAS

The Tory life peer, Charles Guy Rodney Leach, Baron Leach of Fairfordโ€”or Lord Leach for shortโ€”knows how to make the best of friends in highย places.ย 

The Harrow- and Oxford-educated banker has used his considerable wealth and connections to make sure he stays on top, and describes โ€œthose in the 40 per cent tax bandโ€ as โ€œthe aspirationalโ€. He is chums with Jacob Rothschild, who once funnelled ยฃ700 million into a planet-friendly Indonesian coal-miningย company,

Leach is a former deputy chair of Jardine Lloyd Thompson, a multinational insurance business, 40 per cent of which is owned by a Bermuda-registered conglomerate and still currently lists a shareholding in oil multinational BP on his House of Lords declaration ofย interests.

Leach aligns the bulk of concerns about man-made global warming with anti-capitalism, presumably afraid that people questioning free-market ethics would drive down his profitย margins.ย 

He believes that modern climate change activists want to return Britain to the โ€œpre-modern age, at a staggering expense to global prosperityโ€โ€”suggesting that his main concern about the polar ice caps melting is that his bottom line might beย undermined.

Occasional,ย Irregular

โ€œBritain must retainโ€”or regainโ€”its status as an airline hub,โ€ Leach argued in 2012. โ€œThe Climate Change Act [should] be suspended until the crisis is over. We are virtually the only major country still harbouring the illusion of carbon free energy, which is already bringing us unaffordable electricity bills and destroying our industrialย competitiveness.ย 

โ€œWe need thriving banksโ€ฆ During the emergency we [should] trust them to run their businesses soundly and will suspend enactment of any super-regulation.โ€

Leach, a natural eurosceptic, believes that โ€œthe EU is a bureaucratic oligarchy, not a democracyโ€. Some might point out that the idea of peerage is undemocratic inย itself.ย 

Leach was made a Lord for the Conservatives in 2006. In 2005 he donated money to the then shadow education secretary, David Cameron. Last year, he donated ยฃ3,000 to theย party.

After DeSmog UK named him as a donor to GWPF he made the following statement: โ€œI have been an occasional, irregular, small donor to the Conservative Party and to the GWPF.

โ€œI do not have a shareholding in BP. ย If I once did it was trivial. ย A stockbroker has discretion over my portfolio, so it is not impossible that from time to time he will buy an oil or gas share for me.
ย 
โ€œIn any case, from its publicity I have the impression that BP gives more money in opposition to Lord Lawson’s GWPF cause than in support of it. ย Did it not describe itself as ‘Beyond Petroleum’?โ€
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