Just a few moments' walk away from the Houses of Parliament, an alternative centre of political power is emerging. Pass through the Gothic facade of The Sanctuary, the striking Victorian building overlooking Westminster Abbey, head up a few floors, and you will find an office space that has become a secretive hub for right-wing and “anti-woke” power players. On the wall of the entrance hall? A framed copy of a presidential pardon from Donald Trump.
Inside are meeting rooms, podcast studios and event spaces that are thought to have hosted a veritable who’s who of the British right, from establishment politicians to more fringe players. At the heart of all of this is the man whose name is on that framed pardon – Ben Delo, the crypto billionaire who has just made history by handing £36m to Reform, the largest donation ever given to a UK political party.
But these offices, seemingly acting as an incubator for a host of right-wing endeavours, suggest his political interests might extend well beyond Farage and co. The Sanctuary, which borrows its name from the building that houses it, provides a hotspot for those involved in Delo’s chosen causes, where they can meet, connect and establish a global network free of charge.
He has had a base at The Sanctuary since at least 2022, and camped out there ahead of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral along with the conservative philosopher Jordan Peterson, in order to get a good view of the cortege leaving the Abbey. “There was some back and forth with the Metropolitan Police,” Delo later told Perspective Media. “But of course we had every right to be there. They brought their sniffer dogs in and sniffed our sleeping bags. Then they said: ‘Don’t open your windows, or our snipers will shoot you.’”
This sleepover with Peterson encapsulates just how cosy Delo seems to be with major players in the so-called culture wars. Free speech is one of his main preoccupations: “I’d always just taken for granted that as a British citizen, we had rights… Freedom to enquire, freedom to think, freedom to think,” he told The Telegraph last year.
At his summer party, mainstream figures rub shoulders with provocateur podcasters against the backdrop of Westminster’s cloisters, the Overton window surely shifting in the process. On the guest list last year? Former cabinet minister and current Spectator editor Michael Gove, and Reform’s failed Gorton and Denton by-election candidate Matthew Goodwin.
One video posted on social media hailed it as “an evening of joy, freedom and quiet revolution”. The emphasis, presumably, fell upon “quiet”. The Sanctuary is a space that has remained largely below the radar, despite its proximity to power, and its ubiquity as a backdrop for various media endeavours.
It has hosted shows such as Triggernometry, the self-styled “free speech YouTube show and podcast”, including their episodes featuring Boris Johnson and Kemi Badenoch, and productions from Courage Media, “a platform dedicated to fostering free and open dialogue”. It has provided a filming location for Restore Britain’s social media posts, featuring their founder Rupert Lowe – a one-time Reform MP himself, and was the launch site for the party’s campaign for mass deportation of immigrants last year.
And yet, according to reporting from Hope Not Hate and The Guardian, “organisations that use The Sanctuary are told not to refer to it online”, and Delo’s name is not listed among the office’s occupants on the plaque outside. Instead, this features the name Jeremy Hildreth, a close friend of Delo’s from university whose company, Jeremy Hildreth and Comrades, is registered at The Sanctuary.
Hildreth, a branding specialist who seems to have acquired a reputation as “the Indiana Jones of branding”, has been described as taking a chief-of-staff type role for the organisation, whose premises are reportedly decked out like a pseudo-members club, with taxidermy decorations, a drinks cabinet filled with champagne and a wall-hanging replica tapestry. As is so often the case, it seems as if self-styled disruptors have ended up duplicating all the visual trappings and status signifiers of the establishment they profess to disdain.
Born in Sheffield and raised in Oxfordshire, Delo studied maths at Oxford University before working in banking, eventually co-founding the crypto exchange platform BitMEX in 2014, at a time when cryptocurrency was a niche concern. Within just a few years, though, the platform was handling around $1 trillion in trading volume, making Delo Britain’s first Bitcoin billionaire by 2018.
Soon after, Delo signed up to the Giving Pledge, the initiative founded by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffett to encourage the world’s wealthiest people to give away at least half of their fortunes. To date, he says that he has given more than £100m to support various causes, including the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences and the Sheila Coates Foundation, the charity he set up to help children with autism.
In 2022, though, Delo was convicted in the US for failing to implement and maintain an adequate anti-money laundering programme at BitMEX. He was sentenced to 30 months of probation and slapped with a $10m fine, but a pardon from Trump followed a few years later, part of a recent spate of presidential pardons for crypto magnates.
Delo’s decision to move back to the UK from Hong Kong, where he was based for more than a decade, made headlines back in April, framed as a way that he could get around Labour’s cap on political donations from expats. But it seems as if he has been slowly re-establishing roots in his home country for the past few years.
Inevitably, organisations and events purporting to protect this have benefitted from his largesse. The Ben Delo Foundation is listed as a backer for the Battle of Ideas, the free speech festival run by Baroness Claire Fox (the Foundation is not listed in the UK, but Delo’s lawyers have told The Guardian that his philanthropy is managed through a donor-advised fund with a UK charity provider).
Delo has also funded Tory peer Toby Young’s Free Speech Union, the membership body dedicated to countering so-called “cancel culture”. Indeed, his free speech fixation seems to have drawn Delo into divisive company. In 2023, it was reported that he helped to fund a lecture series at Oxford University’s Sheldonian Theatre, which featured Palantir founder Peter Thiel discussing his book The Diversity Myth. He sat on the front row, just a few seats away from James Orr, the Cambridge theology academic who served as Reform’s head of policy until earlier this month, a man described by vice president JD Vance as his mentor and “British sherpa”.
Back in 2024, The Sanctuary reportedly hosted an event for Aporia, the media outlet for The Human Diversity Foundation, a “race science” network advocating discredited eugenicist ideas. Beforehand, guests were told that they would only be given the venue details on the morning of the event, Hope Not Hate reported. The panel included Nathan Cofnas, the academic and “race realist” who accused the late Cambridge sociologist Jason Arday of plagiarism.
According to Hope Not Hate’s investigation, Delo backs more than 50 projects; his chosen organisations sit across the political spectrum, and some are not politically affiliated at all. Some seem to have goals that contradict those espoused by others.
But sources have referred to these groups as making up “the Ecosystem”, a range of organisations that broadly define themselves as “anti-woke”, even if they hold different beliefs and aims on smaller issues.
By “scattering his donations”, Hope Not Hate has suggested, Delo seeks to increase the surface area of his clout and political sway. The Sanctuary’s guest book certainly suggests an A-Z of influence that may extend far beyond one huge headline-grabbing cheque.
