Matthew Elliott

Matthew Elliott is a Conservative peer and political campaigner who founded the Taxpayers' Alliance in 2004 - a lobby group campaigning for a low-tax, small-state society - and served as CEO of Vote Leave, the official Brexit campaign, co-founding it alongside Dominic Cummings. Vote Leave was responsible for the false claim that the UK sent the EU £350 million a week. Elliott also founded Big Brother Watch and the Politics and Economics Research Trust (PERT), a charity from which he was forced to repay a £50,000 grant after using it to produce an anti-EU report, following a Charity Commission investigation. He was a prominent member of Conservative Friends of Russia, which attracted controversy in 2012 when it emerged that the Russian diplomat liaising with the group was the son of a top-ranking Kremlin spy. DeSmog describes Elliott as sitting "at the nexus of a group of 'hard Brexit' campaigners closely linked to the UK's climate science deniers and other anti-regulation think tanks", with connections to the Koch brothers' network via his technology firm Awareness Analytics Partners. He was a senior fellow at the Legatum Institute between 2017 and 2018, and has said he has spent over 14 years visiting the US to learn campaigning techniques from anti-tax groups including Americans for Tax Reform.