A secret Westminster influence network run by a protégé of Dominic Cummings is operating in Westminster.
HOPE not hate can reveal that Andrew Sabisky, a former government advisor connected to Peter Thiel and the race science movement, has quietly built an alliance to advance anti-immigrant goals.
In 2020, he was hired by Cummings to work in Downing Street but left when his participation at a clandestine eugenics conference and writings for race science websites were uncovered. Sabisky called for the forced sterilisation of poor people and said Black people are less intelligent than whites for genetic reasons.
This investigation reveals Westminster’s continued willingness to engage with Sabisky despite his racist views. Since leaving Boris Johnson’s team at No. 10, he has not meaningfully moderated his opinions but now operates mostly in the shadows.
Sabisky has built a hidden group of 60 Tory researchers, think tank staffers and journalists to not only rehabilitate his reputation but advance his far-right aims. Members of “Sabs Central”, as Sabisky has dubbed the network, include Will Dry, the former Conservative advisor; Charlie Peters, the GB News presenter; and Jack Hutchison, programme director of the talent incubator Civic Future.
We can also reveal that Dry commissioned Sabisky to write policy papers for the former prime minister, Rishi Sunak. Neither Sunak nor anyone else in No. 10 — except for Dry — knew about this arrangement.
This is the latest in a series of undercover investigations by HOPE not hate into the race science movement. Over a period of eight months, our reporter met six times with Sabisky and his contacts, who showed us the extent of his influence network and attempts to push politics in a more radical direction. At one of these meetings in June 2024, our infiltrator met Will Dry, who described immigrants as “dross” and discussed ways to encourage legal migrants to leave Britain by creating a “hostile environment”.
We can furthermore reveal Sabisky:
- Has met with Westminster policymakers, including an MP in the Conservative Party and on one occasion, a Labour peer
- Maintains his belief that there are intelligence differences between races, saying: “People know that. It’s not some huge secret”
- Enjoys a secret role as an informal advisor in Westminster, telling our reporter: “I’m still persona grata. Obviously not publicly, but unofficially, everyone comes to Uncle Sabs for wisdom”
- Recommends interns for the Westminster talent incubator, Civic Future, referring to them as “Sabs’s Angels”
‘We’re providing this secret service for No. 10’
Malcolm and Simone Collins, the eccentric American pronatalists,Inside pronatalism. Read more about Malcolm and Simone Collins and pronatalism in our report.
visited London in November 2023. While in the capital, they invited their friends to dinner at an Indian restaurant for a gathering of who they called “pronatalists and luminaries”. Among them was Andrew Sabisky.
Nobody knew that sitting at the table was an undercover reporter for HOPE not hate, investigating the Collinses and the wider pronatalism movement.
When Sabisky was introduced to our infiltrator, who was posing as a rich donor, he immediately asked: “How much?”
He later added: “I only ask because I have one super juicy thing I want funded right now.”
After the plates were cleared away, Sabisky said: “I’m informally advising the government on a super urgent basis relating to energy.” He arranged to speak with our reporter in private a week later. “It’s just really sensitive,” Sabisky said. “For instance, in my bag I’ve got a whole bunch of insider stuff in it right now.”
In advance of a video call with our undercover reporter in November, Sabisky sent over a document to outline the project he had in mind. It was called “Pitch”. Under a heading marked “What you are being asked to fund”, he wrote: “Me to work unofficially and exclusively for No.10 for a little over a month.”
He sought £32,000 in funding to pay for his leave of absence from work at the boutique US-consultancy Bismarck, adding that the then-Conservative government could not hire him directly due to the risk of leaks.
Under the heading “What the hell is going on”, it said: “A friend of mine is a spad in No.10 and works closely with the PM and his Deputy Chief of Staff, Will Tanner. My friend read some of my stuff on how the UK’s energy policy has gone off the rails and asked me to write it up for No.10. Rian [Whitton, a colleague at Bismarck] and I smashed out the “Bismarck on British Energy” paper as a freebie and sent it off. Rishi read it and liked it, and my friend started to work more intensively on energy policy as a result. Another generous benefactor paid for me to do a load of extra work on this in August and I wrote additional supplementary briefing papers on the parlous state of the offshore wind industry and the problems of the main EDF reactor design.”
On the call, Sabisky disclosed that the name of his friend working in No. 10 was Will Dry, a special advisor to the prime minister. “He’s one of the best people in government by miles,” Sabisky said. “So smart. So talented. So driven.”
Sabisky said his work was being conducted at “arm’s length” through Dry. “Basically anything I need from anywhere, anything that I need to read that’s going around internally, between the departments, I get it printed out and sent to me.” Nobody else within Downing Street knew about Sabisky’s work. “We’re providing this secret service for number 10, and trying to keep it as secret as possible,” he said on the call.
A paper headlined “Civil nuclear: roadmap to 2050” duly appeared on the government’s website in January 2024. Sabisky, in a follow-up meeting in April, said that he had worked on it. “I literally fed back on the roadmap while it was being written,” he told our reporter. “It got better, which was good. And it got stronger.”
In a statement, Dry denied providing Sabisky with government documents, adding that he enlisted him “as a mate” to answer questions about energy policy. As to Sabisky’s involvement with the nuclear roadmap. This is an extract of their conversation: “I asked him various questions. He did not contribute to the roadmap and none of his writing appears in it.”
However, in his own statement, Sabisky said: “I believe that I influenced Will’s thinking and I hope that he influenced others.”
And at a meeting in June 2024, our undercover reporter met with both Sabisky and Dry, who discussed the nuclear roadmap:
Sabisky: “Will got us to do a bunch of work. Getting someone to pay for stuff is pretty hard but we found a donor to pay Bismarck to work for Will on energy to brief Rishi on a bunch of things.”
Dry: “We made a bit of progress.”
Sabisky: “We made a bit of progress, we made a little bit.”
Dry: “We could have done more, the scale of the disaster.”
Sabisky: “It was hugely helpful. It definitely, massively upskilled my knowledge of how all this stuff works. We produced some good material. We made the nuclear roadmap mildly less retarded than it would have otherwise been.”
Dry: “Yep.”
‘Everyone puts on the mask’
Sabisky was hired by Dominic Cummings, then the prime minister’s chief advisor, who in January 2020 requested that “weirdos and misfits with odd skills” join his Downing Street operation. “What SW1 needs is not more drivel about ‘identity’ and ‘diversity’ from Oxbridge humanities graduates but more genuine cognitive diversity,” Cummings wrote on his blog. He found Sabisky, bringing him onboard as a contractor. The two remain close, speaking often about politics, in particular Cummings’s tentative plan to launch “the Start-up Party”.
Sabisky did not last long. In February 2020, his writings on Cummings’s own blog, plus comments on far-right and race science websites like the Unz Review and HBD Chick were uncovered by the press. “There are excellent reasons to think the very real racial differences in intelligence are significantly – even mostly – genetic in origin,” he had said. Sabisky, it emerged, had also addressed the 2015 London Conference on Intelligence, a gathering of eugenicists and far-right activists.
When he left his government job, part of Sabisky’s defence was that the media was acting hysterically “about my old stuff online”. However, in meetings with our undercover reporter, Sabisky confirmed that he still believes in advancing far-right policies. He described his vision of bringing about “voluntary repatriation”, whereby immigrants, both illegal and legal, would leave for their countries of origin. In April 2024, he explained in the Jugged Hare pub in Pimlico that the way to do this would be by “massively restricting immigrant access to benefits and housing”:
When asked what his end goal was, Sabisky said:
“Obviously Britain should be only full of the smartest people. There’s really no reason for us to be importing people unless they can probably earn 40, 50K a year minimum. A really high salary goal will get around regression to the mean.”
Regression to the mean is a statistical term used by race scientistsWhat is scientific racism? Read more about the misinformation pushed by scientific racists.
to claim IQ scores are falling in the developed world. When our undercover reporter asked if Sabisky was referring to IQ, he said:
“Yeah. The whole system should probably actually run on IQ. At the moment it runs on credentials, which is fucking insane, because so many Third World credentials are fake. We’re importing people with fake credentials for nursing, medicine, social care, teaching. If they’re not fake they’re of massively lower quality. There’s no quality adjustment being done by these departments. It is the biggest false economy imaginable.”
Sabisky went on to say that his contacts in Westminster covertly or implicitly agreed with his assessment, identifying a Conservative MP he claimed to have informally advised:
“I know — I know — most elites actually know the score. They won’t talk about it, but they know. I know, because secretly, I’m still persona grata. Obviously not publicly, but unofficially, everyone comes to Uncle Sabs for wisdom... Politicians like Neil O’Brien. Same thing. Everyone knows. It’s not some big fucking secret. People have got the message.”
Our undercover reporter then asked Sabisky: “You’re talking about race and IQ?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he replied. “People know that.”
To make absolutely certain they understood each other, our reporter asked Sabisky again: “Just to be clear?”
“Yeah,” he said. “People know that. It’s not some huge secret. The question is, what do you do about it?”
While Sabisky’s views may not have meaningfully changed since he first began writing about race and IQ, he has learned to act more subtly:
“In the UK you either lose or you do democratic politics and you win. Personally, I like to win. I don’t want to be a heroic loser, I just want to win. Glory on my name, I just don’t care. I just want to win.”
“You win in Britain through the long march through the institutions. Everyone puts on the mask and they get into the machine and that’s how it works. It’s how everything has ever worked, pretty much.”
In a statement, Sabisky accused HOPE not hate of presenting a “mangled version” of his comments. “I got into a lot of trouble because of ‘race and IQ’ and I don’t want to go there ever again,” he said. “I didn’t suggest that people agreed with (the media caricature of) my old remarks. That would be impossible because it’s not something I talk about.”
‘I expect many of you here to become eminent figures in public life’
Much of Andrew Sabisky’s activism focuses on ensuring that political institutions are staffed with ideologically-aligned friends who can affect long-term change. To this end, he has set up a private group on the social media messaging app, Slack, for his Westminster networking. It includes 60 of his contacts: among them are journalists, think tank workers, plus Conservative-aligned parliamentary researchers and political advisors. Will Dry is in the group, as is the GB News presenter Charlie Peters.
By way of introducing members of the group, Sabisky texted our undercover reporter: “This is actually a pretty right-centrist gang, insofar as my pals go. All the Angels are in there.” The “Angels” are Sabisky’s protégés. When asked about how spicy — how extreme — the conversations in the group are, Sabisky replied: “Mild spice only.”
In a chatroom titled “demographics”, Andrew invited members to discuss “all different facets of the people problem: 1) do we have the right people 2) are enough people being born 3) are there enough places for the people to live.”
Despite his directive to avoid extreme politics, there were messages complaining about the ethnic makeup of different parts of the UK, and messages about a “migration blackpill”, an online term for a despairing fact, this time applied to the “10-year route” to British citizenship being deemed excessively lenient. Another post hinted at the prescience of Enoch Powell, the Conservative MP who gave the infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968.
“I expect many of you here to become eminent figures in public life,” Sabisky wrote of his group members. When they publish articles or reports online, they ask fellow members of Sabs Central to promote them on social media. In September 2024, Sabisky posted a link to an essay on the state of the British economy. “Can we please aggressively promote this on twitter,” he wrote. “especially b/c I had a big influence on and wrote some of the energy section (keep that secret tho).”
The article appeared on a website called Foundations, and featured Ben Southwood and Samuel Hughes — both present at the Collins “pronatalists and luminaries” dinner — plus the political commentator Sam Bowman. The members of Sabs Central shared it on their social media profiles, where the article racked up millions of views. The Sunday Times published an edited version of the essay on 29th September 2024.
‘Dross’
Among Sabisky’s growing Westminster network is the former Downing Street special advisor, Will Dry. Still in his twenties, Dry advised Rishi Sunak before leaving to join a cabal of Conservative politicians and donors who tried to oust the ex-prime minister near the end of his government. A member of the Sabs Central Slack group, Sabisky invited Dry to a pub meeting in June 2024 to meet our undercover reporter. Before he arrived, Sabisky said his friend Dry was mulling over “offering his services to [Nigel] Farage”.
When Dry showed up, both he and Sabisky complained about the state of UK immigration.
Dry said:
“The quality of the population matters a lot. We’ve neglected that fact massively, to our detriment, over the last two decades. Particularly in the last four years, the amount of dross that’s come in is, like, horrific. And we’re going to be living with the consequences of that for quite a long time. I agree with Sabs that the most politically feasible way to address this is essentially a hostile environment for unproductive people you don’t want in the country. I would then be very supportive of a state that’s got the capacity to deport people who are illegally here. I think moving the dial to getting rid of people who are legally here is more difficult.“
He then asked Sabisky: “Has anything been done on taxing remittances?”
“Interesting question,” Sabisky responded. “I don’t know a lot about this.”
“I think that would be very politically feasible,” Dry said.
“And it would probably be another quite good way to cut the incentives,” replied Sabisky.
As the summer election was days away — and polls were predicting a disaster for the Conservatives — the conversation turned to the likely outcome. “I know a fair amount of the different players,” Dry said. “And I just want to try and make sure something good emerges from the wreckage basically. I think it could take us a while for the best vehicle to become obvious. It could even take three years. We’re way less collectively organised than we should be.”
The two discussed who they thought would make the best leader of the Conservative Party after Rishi Sunak. Dry called Robert Jenrick “probably the best”. Both described their excitement at Nigel Farage’s rising poll numbers.
In a statement, Dry denied interest in working with Farage and defended his comments on immigration. “The scale of what is happening, not just in this country, is causing serious social and political harm,” he said. In reference to Sabisky, he added: “I don’t know what he told you about me but you shouldn’t rely on it.”
‘We met Lord Adonis on Saturday morning’
Sabisky, when he first met our undercover reporter, described himself as “well-networked”. The claim was not entirely bluster. In conversations with our reporter, he recounted meetings he had with Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech entrepreneur, saying: “I had breakfast with him on his own, I had dinner with him in the UK when he came over not that long ago, six months, a year ago. I know Peter pretty well.” He also suggested advising Neil O’Brien, a Conservative MP: “Everyone comes to Uncle Sabs for wisdom... Politicians like Neil O’Brien.”
Sabisky’s rehabilitation in Westminster has also been facilitated by his network of friends. Will Dry in particular has opened doors for Sabisky and introduced him to influential individuals. One such case is a meeting with Lord Adonis, the former Transport Minister under Gordon Brown, on 4th November 2023.
He texted our undercover reporter on November 8th:
— oh I forgot to mention btw
— we met Lord Adonis on Saturday morning
— for some quiet but extremely helpful advice on managing the Treasury and giving ourselves maximum flexibility to get stuff through this year
— he was great
We verified that this meeting did take place, and it appeared that Will Dry had an appointment to see Lord Adonis and brought Sabisky along unannounced. “I recollect a meeting with Will Dry and a few others to discuss infrastructure strategy,” Adonis said in a statement. “I wasn’t aware Andrew Sabisky was going to be there.” Had Adonis known, he might have thought twice about taking the meeting, having previously written about Sabisky’s “ultra-right prejudices” during the 2020 race science scandal.
Sabisky also claimed to have befriended a special advisor in Keir Starmer’s policy unit, although he would not be drawn on his identity, beyond saying he was male, working in energy, and “really on board”, adding: “They know who I am, it’s OK. They’re prepared to work across the aisle. It’s good. I get around.”
In a statement, Sabisky said: “Of course I want to interact with people of all parties and of none. Perhaps I have overstated how far I have advanced so far in fulfilling that aspiration but in my experience people are always interested in good ideas, no matter the source.”
New Deal for Parents
Although he first outlined a plan to influence the government on nuclear power, Sabisky’s involvement in policy is not limited to energy. He is also involved in pronatalist campaigning. Sabisky has spoken with Boom, a pronatalist organisation, explaining to our undercover reporter that extreme policies could be enacted while claiming to be mainstream. Critics of pronatalism say that the movement falsely claims to focus on boosting all birth rates while secretly wanting a rise just in “elite” fertility.
During an April meet-up, Sabisky described his assessment of paid childcare provisions.
“Any time you’re saying you want to make childcare cheaper you’re already addressing a concern that only affects graduates, because they’re the only people actually using paid childcare,” he told our reporter. “So, like again, you don’t need to go out there and be like ‘we want to boost the fertility of the elite’. The fact that your policies are going to be stuff like targeting tax and childcare costs, you are already targeting the fertility of the elite, you don’t even need to fucking say it.”
In January, the Conservative MP Neil O’Brien, who Sabisky claimed to informally advise, endorsed a think tank report called “New Deal for Parents”. It is a title that Sabisky twice said he assisted with, telling our undercover reporter that he took a policy worker out for dinner with a political journalist to discuss the issue. “Between us, we brainstormed this whole New Deal for Parents,” he said.
HOPE not hate reported last year that O’Brien shared an article headlined “The West’s Fertility Crisis” when it appeared on the race science website, Aporia.
O’Brien, according to a Conservative source, denied working with Sabisky. “Neil O’Brien has only spoken to Mr Sabisky once to discuss energy policy,” the source said. “Sabisky has never acted as an adviser nor provided advice to Neil on any subject.” O’Brien, we understand, denies that Sabisky was involved in creating the title of “New Deal for Parents”.
In a statement, Sabisky — who had sent our undercover Boom's confidential pitch documents — denied working with the Boom campaign.
Civic Future
Sabisky revealed in conversations with our undercover reporter that he was informally advising a Westminster talent incubator named Civic Future. According to its website, Civic Future “identifies and educates talented people in early, mid, and late career, supporting them to make a public contribution”. The organisation is run by Munira Mirza, the former head of Boris Johnson’s policy unit who once said institutional racism was “a perception more than a reality”. Civic Future takes around a dozen interns each year and teaches them “to navigate the arcane and often intimidating world of the British political system, providing intellectual insight and practical know-how”.
Civic Future took 14 interns in 2024. In total, Sabisky put forward eight candidates, three of which were accepted. He named each of them at a meeting with an undercover reporter. Will Dry is on the scheme this year, although he was not one of Sabisky’s recommendations. “They don’t have woke people,” Sabisky said during an April meet-up. “You can get a Civic Future fellowship from a variety of ideological backgrounds as long as you’re not woke, is basically the deal.”
Sabisky further said he was a close friend of Jack Hutchison, the programme director of Civic Future, attending the same church as him. “I talk to Jack at least once a week,” Sabisky said. “A whole bunch of candidates were on my recommendations. Everyone who I recommended got an interview and three of them got fellowships. He’s really keen to get me and Rian [Whitton, a Bismarck colleague] to do teaching sessions, not just for the fellows but the extended rejects as well.”
In June, Sabisky set up a meeting with our undercover reporter and Jack Hutchison to discuss potential investment opportunities. Over tea in the Corinthia Hotel bar, Hutchison praised Sabisky. “Andrew’s been influential,” he said. “We run this fellowship programme and Andrew put a lot of the new fellows in touch with us originally.”
Hutchison described Civic Future as follows: “Really what we’re doing is laying the groundwork for allowing people to think properly and deeply about the issue of woke in public life.” One of the sessions the programme offers is a workshop by a former civil servant — Stephen Webb, currently Head of Government Reform and Home Affairs at the Policy Exchange think tank — on how to carry out Home Office deportations.
Hutchison further indicated that Sabisky would likely address the 2024 interns as part of the Civic Future programme. When asked if he was not concerned about potential blowback, Hutchison said:
“So there is a rehabilitation of Sabs going on. And people are totally fine, generally in the wider policy world — they know that Bismarck has Sabs on staff. So he obviously turns up to stuff as a private employee and we had a chat the other day about whether it would be OK if Samo [Burja, the founder of Bismarck] has a plus-one and brings Sabs along to the conference. And we decided yeah, that would be fine.”
When we referred Hutchison to quotes he made with our undercover reporter, he tried to downplay Sabisky's involvement in Civic Future. “No candidates were interviewed nor selected for the Civic Future Fellowship based on the recommendation of Mr Sabisky,” he said in a statement. “To be clear, dozens of people make informal recommendations to us, some as a result of being asked to do so, others on an unsolicited basis. Mr Sabisky was in the latter category.” Hutchison said although he and Sabisky discussed hosting a Civic Future event on energy, it had not taken place.
Operating behind the scences
When Andrew Sabisky’s comments about race and IQ were uncovered in 2020, he had to quit his role as a Downing Street contractor. Even within the Conservative government, he was considered too controversial to work with. Kwasi Kwarteng, then Tory business minister, said Sabisky’s writings were “racist, offensive and objectionable” and called for the Downing Street hiring process to be revised.
Little has changed in the intervening years except for Westminster’s willingness to work with Sabisky. Since leaving Boris Johnson’s No. 10 team, he has not substantially moderated his opinions, but now chooses to operate largely in the shadows, or behind a mask, as he put it. Our investigation raises questions not only about the willingness of Westminster to work with a discredited, disgraced advisor but his ability to grow a substantial network with the complicity of policy-makers.
This is not a case of separating the art from the artist: Andrew Sabisky, in addition to his energy work, is trying to push extreme policies by stealth under a mainstream guise. His strategy is effective and far-reaching, with a long-term plan for success. Sabisky, in one of his final meetings with our undercover reporter, made a claim that at first sounded like a boast, but now sounds apt: “I’ll always be the Svengali behind the scenes.”