She is American; he is British. She is a professional provocateur; he is a spotlight-shy financier. She is the Black granddaughter of a North Carolina sharecropper; he is the white son of a British lord. They—Candace Owens and George Farmer—are married, have four children, and share a religious, right-wing sensibility that is unifying conservatism across the Atlantic in a way not seen since the days of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
At the nexus of this transatlantic movement is the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, more commonly known as “the Brompton Oratory.” The 141-year-old, neo-Baroque Catholic church, which counts Farmer among its congregants, and in which Owens converted to Catholicism last year, has become an unexpected link between American nativism and a newly radicalized English right. It’s a meeting point where aristocracy and old-world grandeur mix with culture-war invective and anti-elite rhetoric to create a powerful force roiling both countries’ politics.
The YouTuber and the Buller Boy
Over the past decade, Owens has risen to the upper ranks of the New Right with a relentlessness bordering on the obsessive. After internships at Vogue and Glamour and a brief moment as the writer of an anti-Trump blog, she was roundly attacked—by both left and right—for her attempts to create an online bully database. (Critics said she was violating their privacy.) This convinced her that “liberals were actually the racists.” Soon she was embracing Trump, befriending Kanye West, and launching furious broadsides against Black Lives Matter and trans activists. Moving through a series of new right-wing institutions—Turning Point USA, PragerU, the Daily Wire—she became that rarest of political creatures: a Black conservative star.
Owens’s controversial comments on the Israel-Hamas war, which were widely criticized as anti-Semitic, led to her ouster from the Daily Wire, at which point she struck out on her own. Her self-titled podcast, which has around 3.5 million downloads per show, and her YouTube channel, which has more than five million subscribers, are a grab bag of anti-vaccine skepticism, moon-landing conspiracies, culture-war sermonettes, and a rotating demonology of everything from rap music to women’s workout clothes, aided and abetted by guests such as Alex Jones, Russell Brand, and Andrew Tate.
Recently, she has implied that the murdered right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was eliminated either by the Israeli government, the French Foreign Legion, or a multi-national team of assassins, causing conniptions among MAGA talking heads. And in what is perhaps her most virtuoso provocation, she is currently being sued for defamation by French president Emmanuel Macron, for claiming his wife, Brigitte Macron, is a man. (Owens did not respond to air mail’s request for comment.)
George Farmer has led a comparatively quieter life, though who hasn’t? Nevertheless, it has not been without some notoriety. The son of Lord Michael Farmer, a commodities magnate once known as “Mr. Copper,” for supplying a vast share of China’s copper needs in the early 2000s, he grew up in an evangelical household—somewhat rare in the U.K.—where Christianity and capitalism intertwined. Whether it was God’s will or Mammon’s due, Lord Farmer soon leveraged his fortune into political influence, becoming treasurer of the Conservative Party and eventually earning a life peerage from Prime Minister David Cameron in 2014.
The younger Farmer studied theology at St. Peter’s College, Oxford University. He was a member of the Bullingdon Club, an exclusive and notorious dining society whose alumni include Cameron and Boris Johnson. His fellow members were the sons of barons and earls and, somewhat surprisingly, Cassius Marcellus Cornelius Clay, Kanye West’s future stylist. “George was involved with some pretty awful people,” recalls one Oxford contemporary.
The Bullingdon Club celebrated the Glorious Twelfth—the start of hunting season in the U.K.—by shooting sandgrouse in South Africa while wearing tailcoats and bow ties. Farmer once allegedly boasted that he had flown eight Buller boys to Bordeaux on his father’s private jet. During his second year at Oxford, police were called to a hotel in nearby Aylesbury—the Bullingdon is banned from meeting within 15 miles of the university—after members allegedly smashed glasses and ripped plumbing from the walls.
Farmer’s tenure as social secretary of the storied Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA) was no less tumultuous. A racist-joke competition (which Farmer was not present at) led to the group temporarily losing its university status. It was rumored that Lord Farmer had quietly bailed out his son’s organization after the scandal left it struggling for funds. However, an unpaid four-figure bill after a party at a Pall Mall club caused OUCA to lose its affiliation once more.
Upon graduating, Farmer worked at Jefferies, an investment bank, and, later, at a hedge fund owned by his father, before joining Turning Point UK, the British offshoot of Kirk’s right-wing campus organization. It was at the group’s launch, in December 2018, that Farmer met Owens. Two weeks later, he proposed over FaceTime, and in August 2019, they were married at the Trump Winery in Virginia, with Nigel Farage—the English far-right populist—Jerry Falwell Jr., and Jon Voight among the well-wishers.
Farmer had a brief and unsuccessful run as a Brexit Party candidate in the 2019 European elections, before becoming the C.E.O. of Parler, a right-wing social-media app. His goal, he told the Financial Times, was to build a refuge for “the disenfranchised and the voiceless”—a mission complicated when Big Tech companies dropped Parler from their app stores after it was revealed to have been used in the coordination of the January 6 Capitol riot, in 2021. A planned sale to Kanye West—brokered by Owens—collapsed as West spiraled through a string of anti-Semitic outbursts.
Since then, Farmer has kept relatively quiet. But in 2022, Raheem Kassam, the former editor of Breitbart News London and a former adviser to Farage, accused the Farmer-Owenses of a sham marriage and declared—on X, where else?—that Farmer had sexually assaulted him, but no charges were pressed. And in 2023, Farmer caused an online flutter when, in an interview with the Christian podcaster Taylor Marshall, he declared that Andrew Tate—the influencer who has faced allegations of rape and human trafficking—was “a wonderful guy in many ways.” (Farmer did not respond to air mail’s request for comment.)
Earlier this year, he appeared in The Catholic Herald, his “favourite magazine,” where he discussed converting to Catholicism while at Oxford. (Farmer and a group of U.S. investors had unsuccessfully tried to buy the publication in 2024.) He credited Owens with restarting his spiritual life, and praised the courage of American Christians—in contrast to his more retiring countrymen—“to be bold about their faith.” But the interview also displayed his sense of embattlement within society.
He likened his struggle, and that of Catholics in general, to those of Christ. “We are living in a secular pagan society,” he said. “We don’t have Zeus and Jupiter being worshipped at the temple, but we do have neo-secular materialism. The new gods are Kim Kardashian and Taylor Swift. The new missal is TikTok.”
Bells and Smells
Traditionally, British conservatism has been more moderate than its American cousin. After all, Britain is a country with nationalized health care, strict gun laws, high taxes—including a 40 percent inheritance tax—legal abortion, and a largely secular public square. On the American political spectrum, the Conservative Party would land somewhere on the right edge of the Democratic coalition—a considerable distance from Trumpism.
But the ground is shifting. Brexit created a yearning in the traditionally temperate British electorate for ideological combat—Farmer once called the E.U. “a toxic, socialist, genocidal superstate”—and Farage’s stridently anti-immigration Reform Party has brought American-style populism fully into the British mainstream. Reform won 14 percent of the vote in the 2024 general election, and although the vagaries of Britain’s electoral system meant it won only five seats in Parliament (out of 650), it is now the bookies’ favorite to win the most seats next time around.
Farmer has positioned himself firmly within the new right-wing-media eco-system. He produces his wife’s podcast and sits on the board of GB News, the TV channel backed by the evangelical billionaire Paul Marshall, a key Reform ally and the owner of The Spectator magazine and the news-and-opinion Web site UnHerd. Neither publication is shy about wearing its Christianity on its sleeve—“Put Christ back into Christmas cards,” read one recent column in The Spectator.
No place embodies this fusion of conservative politics and traditionalist faith in the U.K. better than the Brompton Oratory. A few minutes’ walk from Harrods, in the tony West London neighborhood of Kensington, the oratory is a relative newcomer—it was consecrated in 1884—but what it lacks in history it makes up for in traditionalism.
Built in an opulent Renaissance style, the church is clad in marble and frescoes. Its nave is wider than St. Paul’s, its dome rises 200 feet to the heavens, and it holds reliquaries containing fragments of the bones of early Christian martyrs. It is unashamedly Roman and is a favored wedding, baptism, and Communion spot for European royals-in-exile and generations of young fogeys with a longing for “bells and smells.”
Two of the seven Sunday Masses at the oratory are in Latin, including one that uses the 1962 Missal, the last before Vatican II’s liberalizing reforms, which still rankle the Brompton crowd. These services—which some women attend wearing veils—have drawn increasingly youthful congregations, part of what the oratory’s provost, Father Julian Large, described to The Spectator as “a veritable tsunami of new parishioners” since the pandemic. “They are in search of truth and authenticity,” he said. It’s notable that Westminster Cathedral, the mother church for Catholics in England, does not perform this type of traditional Latin Mass.
“The oratory is linked to radical conservatism in a way that has never quite taken root in England,” says Fergus Butler-Gallie, an Anglican priest and the author of Twelve Churches: An Unlikely History of the Buildings That Made Christianity. “It has more in common with conservative political movements in America. It’s just not how English Catholicism usually works.... [The oratory is] simultaneously seeking to be a flagship conservative institution in England, and yet also subversive of the English establishment.”
George Farmer has long attended Mass at the oratory and, in 2024, Owens—dressed in a baptismal gown—converted to Catholicism there, announcing on Instagram that she had “made the decision to go home.” Large performed the rite and shares the couple’s political, as well as religious, sensibilities.
Raised in Liverpool, a working-class city in the north, by a single mother—Large has allegedly told friends that he is the illegitimate son of a baronet—he converted to Catholicism before becoming a gossip columnist for the staunchly pro-Conservative Daily Telegraph. In 2012, he was elected provost of the oratory. After years of chronicling the misdeeds of the upper classes, he was now well placed to absolve them.
Large has close ties to the Conservative Party, not least to Michael Gove, the editor of The Spectator and a former Cabinet politician. Those ties were clearly on show in Large’s most recent “Letter from the Provost,” in which he railed against the BBC (a favorite bugbear of the U.K. right) and “the mainstream media,” advised his congregants to treat everything they read in newspapers “with the highest level of circumspection,” especially anything about “climate, pandemics, healthcare,” and warned them that “agenda-driven reporting in the media leads to downright mendacity.”
Such strident, right-wing, culture-war pronouncements are rare to hear coming from a British priest, let alone in a church newsletter, which traditionally concern themselves with Biblical teachings or donations to repair the church spire. It seemed more like something Candace Owens might say.
For all its snobbishness, the oratory is also a place of intense social mobility. “There’s an awful lot of people who have actually come from slightly outsider backgrounds, and they view it as a place where they can rub shoulders with a duchess or princess,” says Butler-Gallie. As the journalist Michael Coren noted, the oratory is renowned for “the impressive upper-class English accents of even its American clergy.”
Perhaps the fact that the oratory is a magnet for arrivistes should not be surprising. Catholics have traditionally been snubbed by the British establishment—sneered at as “left footers,” supposedly because they genuflect with their left foot forward—but the Catholics of the oratory see themselves as different.
“English Catholicism is largely a mix of descendants of the Irish diaspora, with a mix of recent Polish arrivals and Nigerian priests all praying in a 1960s concrete building,” says Butler-Gallie. “That’s not what these people want. They don’t want the actual reality of it. They want something that has all the pomp of the establishment,” but with “a valorization of Franco and Salazar kind of bubbling away under there, a kind of authoritarianism.”
Conversion to Catholicism is a well-trodden path for those wishing to slow down a turning world. Owens followed on the heels of J. D. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, partly because of his revulsion at “the modern age” and “a society oriented entirely towards consumption and pleasure.” UnHerd U.S. editor Sohrab Ahmari converted to Catholicism in 2016 after attending a service at the oratory and seeing that “the Catholic Church didn’t need to bend herself to the vacuous fads” of the moment. Further back, Evelyn Waugh chose to become Catholic partly, as he wrote in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, in defiance of “everything … that had happened in his own lifetime.” Converting to Catholicism is essentially a romantic gesture, a sign of the rejection of modernity, an attempt to turn back the clock. It’s a wish familiar to anyone in a MAGA cap.
When Margaret Thatcher paid tribute to Ronald Reagan in 2002, she recalled that, even when she was prime minister and he was president, “we remained an opposition, we were never the establishment.” In Candace Owens and George Farmer, the New Right has found its latest transatlantic pairing of self-proclaimed outsiders—proselytizers of grievance, members of an elite church of complaint, who feel besieged even as they inhabit the halls of power.
George Pendle is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL. His book Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons became a television series for CBS All Access. He is also the author of Death: A Life and Happy Failure, among other books
