Liz Truss looks out of place. In her neat pink jacket and white blouse, the former U.K. prime minister, who served a brief but eventful 49 days in the role back in 2022, strikes a contrast to the hoopla around her in the packed ballroom. Truss has come to Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia this October evening for the yearly “CEO summit,” drawing corporate figures, conservative influencers and donors for a night of fiery speeches about the triumphs of the MAGA movement — seasoned with the university’s Christian conservative tradition of mixing politics with prayer.
Truss rises somberly as the crowd is enjoined to repent, soul-search and double down on tithe payments to the Baptist mega-church originally founded by the late televangelist Jerry Falwell. From the stage at the front of the room, she nods along to the heady mixture of God and politics, waiting to start a talk about the so-called “deep state” — which, she claims, includes the Bank of England and the U.K. Treasury. She announces that she is “on a mission” to transform the U.K., and when someone cries a noisy “amen,” that throws her for a moment before she resumes.
If the juxtaposition between the ex-prime minister and fire-and-brimstone MAGA evangelicals seems unlikely — Truss later tells me she is still a stalwart of the Church of England, which is much more establishment than evangelical, even if she thinks it has gone a bit “woke” on social issues like trans rights — her presence here nonetheless represents an increasingly popular trend. A transatlantic “Magafication” movement is luring traditional conservatives from the U.K. to identify with the provocative style of U.S. President Donald Trump — and to try their hands at imitating him on his home turf, participating in rousing conservative speaking events across the U.S.
For some, like Truss, these events are a lucrative, mood-enhancing chance to establish a new identity after the stinging defeat of the Tory party at the last general election in July 2024. For her more charismatic predecessor Boris Johnson, they are a chance to hear the roar of the crowd that more sedate speaking gigs with hedge funds and law firms can’t deliver. For Nigel Farage, from the ultraconservative Reform UK party, they are a chance to re-forge British politics in the image of Trump — a benediction and a bro-mance all in one.
Whether it’s connecting with voters on either side of the Atlantic, however, is a less certain proposition. Most of the students going about their early evening outside the hall don’t seem to know who Truss is. “They kind of told us she was the leader in the U.K.,” muses one business studies major, “but I never heard of her.”
Just a few weeks earlier, it was Johnson — the premier who rose on the wings of Brexit and preceded Truss in a carousel of Tory leaders after the Leave vote — who spoke on campus at the new-term convocation, following a sequence of Christian rock numbers.
“We’re in a congregation, folks, convocation — I mean, we’ve been convoked,” Johnson riffed. The ruffle-haired charm and Old Etonian levity were a preamble to a speech about the Christian university as a “bastion of freedom” and a paean to the memory of Charlie Kirk, the murdered conservative activist, whom Johnson hailed as “a martyr to our inalienable right as human beings to say what is in our hearts.”
Later, he zoned in on the need to keep supporting Ukraine and lambasted the authoritarianism of Russian President Vladimir Putin — to a muted response from the audience. It’s not exactly a popular take here; there are no follow-up questions on the topic. And at the CEO event, none of the speakers mention Ukraine or the U.S. role in its future at all.
Much like the isolationism Johnson encountered, the British MAGA trail is a sign of the times. Trump’s twofold electoral success is attractive to some U.K. conservatives who feel there must be something in the president’s iconoclasm they can bottle and take home. And unlike tight-lipped debate forums in the U.K., such events give them a chance to be noisy and outspoken, to paint arguments in bold and provocative colors. In other words, to be Brits on tour — but also more like Trump.
And, for added appeal, these tours are a lucrative field for former inhabitants of 10 Downing Street. One person who has previously worked at the Washington Speakers Bureau, one of the main hubs for booking A-list speakers, said that the fee for a former premier is around $200,000 for a substantial speech, plus private plane travel and commercial flights for a support team. That is a level of luxury unparalleled at home. Well known figures like Johnson and David (Lord) Cameron, the British premier from 2010 to 2016, can aim even higher if travel is complicated.
Having “former prime minister” in front of your name in writing may open a lot of doors, but these politicians nonetheless have to tailor their resumes to appeal to American audiences.” Political CVs are duly bowdlerized to appeal to the target market of U.S. institutions and interests. Johnson’s profile at the Harry Walker agency in Washington, for instance, stresses his interest in deregulation and claims that he “successfully delivered Brexit — taking back control of U.K. law, marking the biggest constitutional change for half a century and enabling the United Kingdom to generate the fastest vaccine approval in the world.”
This sequence of events and superlatives is debatable at best. Failures are routinely airbrushed out — Johnson’s premiership crashed in a mess of mismanagement during the pandemic and party divisions unleashed by the Brexit vote and his controversial handling of the aftermath, including the temporary dissolution of parliament to push through his legislation.
But for characters whose legacy at home is either polarizing (like Johnson) or more likely to elicit a sly British eye roll outside a small fan base (Truss), there is also a degree of absolution on the American performance circuit that feels refreshing, in the same way that U.K. Indie bands stubbornly try to conquer America.
Neither of the former Conservative leaders however, have as much to gain or lose by speaking at Trump-adjacent events as Farage, the leader of Britain’s Reform party — an “anti-woke,” Euro-skeptic, immigration-hostile party that is leading in the polls and attempting to expand its handful of lawmakers in the House of Commons into a party in contention for the next government.
Farage has the closest access to Trump — a status previously enjoyed by Johnson, who last met Trump at the Republican National Convention in 2024 to discuss Ukraine. Proximity to Trump is the ultimate blessing, but it’s far harder to secure out of office than in it. Johnson endorsed Trump’s comeback at CPAC in February 2024 and wrote a column in support of Trump’s attack on the BBC for splicing footage of the January 6 uprising, which was deemed to be misleading and led to the abrupt departure of the broadcaster’s director general. Johnson was at Trump’s inauguration along with Truss (no other former U.K. politician was asked), but the invitations appear to have dropped off since chummy relations in Trump world can be ephemeral.
Farage, by contrast, is a frequent visitor at both Mar-a-Lago and the White House. On November 7, he joined Trump at a fundraising auction for military veterans and has arranged to donate the prize of a walk with a centenarian veteran on Omaha beach, commemorating the D-Day landing site for U.S. forces. “I see him often,” he told me of his visits to Trump.
Farage’s relationship with Trump could prove advantageous to him if he and his party claim greater power at home. He’d have the ear of the president, perhaps even the ability to sway Trump into a more sympathetic stance toward the U.K., even as the Americans embrace a more isolationist foreign policy.
For now, Farage is certainly the most in-demand Brit on the MAGA circuit. He was the main speaker at the $500-a-head Republican party dinner in Tallahassee, Florida in March. Guests paid around $25,000 for a VIP ticket, which included having a photograph taken with the Reform UK leader.
For the leader of a party that has a skimpy presence in parliament and faces the challenge of keeping its surge momentum and newsworthiness intact on a long road to the next election, being in the Trump limelight is a vote of confidence and a sign that he is taken seriously across the pond. The quid pro quo is performative loyalty — Farage, by turns genial and threatening in his manner, has echoed the president’s rancorous tone toward public broadcasters and media critics of MAGA.
All of this transatlantic networking has threatened to ensnare the British visiting troupe in ethical quagmires about how their lucrative American freelancing relates to duties and strictures at home. Farage has attracted envious attention among his peers in parliament for earning around $1.5 million a year in addition to his MP salary, but he was forced to apologize recently for failing to declare the March dinner appearance and any fees associated with it in the official registry. So far, he’s revealed only that the trip was “remunerated in three separate installments over the course of two months,” without naming the funder.
Even Farage’s friendship with Trump — the envy of his compatriots on the MAGA trail — could present vulnerabilities among the U.K. electorate. Farage’s base of Reform voters largely supports Trumpian stances on immigration and diversity, and they love Trump’s personality. But beyond core Reform voters, the president does not enjoy broad support in the U.K. Recent polling shows only 16 percent of British people like the president.
That’s a challenge for the Reform UK leader, whose party polls at just under 30 percent support in the U.K.; he needs to reach Trump-skeptical voters beyond his base in order to claim power.
On top of those liabilities, avid Christian nationalism of the kind Truss encountered at the Liberty event presents a cultural problem for British politicians. Mixing ideology with religious fervor is awkward back home where church-going is largely regarded as a private matter, even if there are signs of more evangelical commitment among influential Christian Conservatives like Paul Marshall, a hedge-funder who recently acquired The Spectator, the house publication of well-heeled Tories, expanding its digital reach into America.
Hardline evangelical stances could undermine support for campaigners like Farage, says Tim Bale, an expert on elections and political trends at Queen Mary College, University of London. Farage “probably needs to be careful of getting into things like anti-abortion arguments or even term limits on abortion. That does not play in the U.K.,” he told me.
Duly, on their U.S. pilgrimages, both Truss and Johnson side-step direct engagement with the religiosity of their hosts. Johnson, who once joked that his own Anglican faith “comes and goes like Classic FM in the Chiltern hills,” basks in his reputation as a cheerful libertine with an array of past wives and mistresses. He fathered one child by an affair, and a scandal arising from allegations that he paid for an abortion during another affair got him sacked from his party’s front bench in 2004. (Johnson married his current wife, with whom he has four children, in 2021.)
Religion isn’t the only subject that makes British MAGA-philes modulate their tone toward Trump. Johnson spoke of Trump’s “boisterous and irreverent” treatment of journalists, but dismissed it as minor compared to the attacks on the fourth estate in Moscow. Despite her previous support for Ukraine as Johnson’s foreign secretary, Truss awkwardly ducked questions on the Westminster Insider interview podcast when I pressed her about whether the administration should send Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, which Trump opposes. “I’d have to know about the facts on the ground,” she said.
But Farage, Johnson and Truss are betting that the benefits of being a transatlantic Trump acolyte well outweigh the risks.
And there might be more to it than personal vanity tours and cushy earnings. The sense of grievances unheard or unaddressed that first elevated Trump to power have echoes across the Atlantic: worries about national decline, a feeling that traditional parties have lost touch with voters and a capacity for making Barnum-style entertainment out of the business of politics. It is a long way from being interrupted by the Speaker of the House of Commons shouting, “Order, order!”-
Whether it is a flattering transatlantic afterlife for fallen leaders or a precursor to pitch for power at Westminster for Farage (who tells me that, like Trump, he is “building an unstoppable movement”) the MAGA circuit is the place to be — even if it’s not where everybody knows your name.
It is also about embodying something these political pilgrims reckon their rivals fail to grasp: namely, the way one man’s MAGA movement has redefined Conservatism and opened up space for imitators in Europe to identify with more than their own election flops — and for newcomers to seek to remake their own political landscape. After all, if it happened to America, it might turn out to be a bankable export.