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Revealed: UK Home Office paid £80,000 to a lobby group which has funded Conservative MPs

The Conservative government gave over £80,000 to a right-wing lobby group which has paid thousands of pounds in benefits to Priti Patel and Michael Gove.

By Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis
Revealed: UK Home Office paid £80,000 to a lobby group which has funded Conservative MPs
Priti Patel and Michael Gove, with Boris Johnson in background, pictured in June 2016 | Isabel Infantes/EMPICS Entertainment
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This article is co-published by openDemocracy and Declassified UK, an investigative journalistic organisation investigating UK foreign, military and intelligence policy.

The Henry Jackson Society (HJS), a London-based neoconservative pressure group, received £83,452.32 from the Home Office in four payments during 2015-17 to produce a report on UK connections to Islamist terrorism.

The HJS has donated more than £12,000 to mainly Conservative MPs since 2013. Priti Patel, now the home secretary, was given £2,500 by the HJS in 2013 to cover a visit to Washington DC, while Michael Gove, the current Cabinet Office minister, was given £2,764 in 2016 for a visit to New York. Gove is closely involved with the HJS and served as one of its directors.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0