Journalists at play,
Lisa Davies – Licence CC BY-SA 2.0
During a career in the Greenpeace press office (explored in yesterday’s article) punctuated by award-winning undercover stings aimed at the likes of Exxon Mobil and the United Arab Emirates’ COP28 conference, Lawrence Carter highlighted ‘corporate climate hesitation’.
Amongst others, Channel 4 News, The Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times amplified his pieces. Funding came from a predictable list of left-wing progressive globalist foundations.
In August 2024, in anticipation of November’s US presidential election, and now a one-man band operating under his Centre For Climate Reporting (CCR) banner, Lawrence and a hired professional actor repositioned from environment to partisan politics.
Posing as relatives of a wealthy donor, they sought to expose those behind Project 2025 – a comprehensive political initiative designed by the conservative Heritage Foundation to restructure the U.S. government.
During a two-hour hidden-camera meeting with ’25 co-author Russell Vought, Vought admitted that Donald Trump’s public disavowal of the scheme was misleading. Vought revealed that his group had secretly drafted 350 regulatory documents and executive orders to, for instance, use the military against domestic protesters, begin mass deportations, and dismantle federal agencies.
Early the next year, in January 2025, back on the other side of the Atlantic, Carter begins another company from his £500,000 luxury home in an English Midlands county town. This was Global Investigations Ltd. With no mention of the environment in the title, the nature of its business is described as ‘investigation activities’.
Close to the conclusion of what Carter describes as a twelve-month-long sting aimed at Reform UK donations, he sets up yet another front, Verbatim Investigations, from the same convenience address in Suffolk as used by CCR. He moves the registered office of Global there too.
In submissions to Companies House, the defined object of Verbatim is to carry out investigative journalism focused on public policy and politics. To promote and defend the rights to freedom of speech, of access to information, and to be informed about public policy. Also to disseminate that research to a wide audience.
Given that these changes take place on 9th July 2026 and the Reform UK funding ‘spoiler’ is required for their annual party conference scheduled to begin at the start of September, it is fair to assume Verbatim Investigations is a corporate vehicle designed to be used for the high-profile undercover sting. Due to Verbatim’s recent establishment, we will have no evidence to suggest how it’s funded until April 2028, when the first accounts should be published.
Carter made the headlines, and ‘spoiled’ the conference when his year-long undercover hoax aired on September 3rd 2026 on Channel 4 News. Alex Thomson, the network’s chief correspondent, introduced the investigation on-air. In its post-broadcast publicity, government-owned Channel 4 stressed that Verbatim conducted the undercover work and is independent of the network.
In Carter’s hoax, an actor called Louis Wilson posed as ‘William Lockwood’, the son of a wealthy, fictional American tycoon. Carter and Wilson spent a year communicating with high-level officials from Reform UK, pretending to be donors who wanted to funnel money to the party. Since UK law bans foreign political donations over £500, a non-UK citizen cannot fund a British political party.
Following the broadcast, both Dan Jukes and James Orr stepped down from their positions in Reform UK pending internal party investigations. The Labour and Liberal Democrat parties reported Reform UK to the Metropolitan Police and the Electoral Commission to investigate potential criminal breaches of political financing laws.
Suspiciously close to the start of that ‘year-long investigation’, on the 28th June 2025, Reform Watch Ltd is incorporated at the same convenience address in Suffolk that hosts the Centre For Climate Reporting, Verbatim Investigations and Global Investigations. Remember: CRR, Verbatim, and Global are all, and only, one person – Lawrence Aiden Carter.
Likewise, Reform Watch is also a single individual, Jack William Dart.
Grandly titling himself ‘executive director’ of his one-man band hobbyist enterprise, Dart’s self-defined responsibilities involve: Strategic direction and organisational management, content curation and political monitoring, managing communication services, developing citizen engagement tools such as petitions and surveys, and building and maintaining the digital platform.
However, the Reform Watch website consists of little other than links to Reform UK ‘knocking copy’ from elsewhere – including material from CCR/Verbatim – as well as ‘fishing trip’ links asking for reader tips-offs.
The site also claims:
‘Reform Watch is funded through a combination of donations from individuals who support transparency in politics, grants from non-partisan good governance organisations, and volunteer contributions. We maintain complete funding transparency and do not accept donations from political parties or their affiliated organisations.’
However, this investigator could find no donors named on the site, and a submitted request for a list of such remains unanswered.
There is an accompanying Twitter feed consisting of remarks moronic even by the standards of the platform. The Daily Telegraph are ‘F*****g obsessed maniacs’, GBNews, ‘F*****g mental cases.’ A newsagent’s display of the day’s headlines prompts: ‘The f*****g state of it.’
As for the great communicator himself, Dart is a former social media officer for illegal immigrant enablers Care 4 Calais and was formerly involved with a series of pro-EU lobbyists such as Inspire EU and the Soros-funded Young European Movement UK. He is also a former Liberal Democrat Torbay councillor, who once broke council rules in sweary social media posts that including the terms ‘Nigel Farage as a w***er’, ‘F*** Brexit’, and ‘F*** Boris’.
As for Alex Thompson and government-owned Channel Four being independent of Carter, the Press Gazette informs us that Carter’s ExxonMobil piece ‘Lobbying War on Climate Change’ enjoyed a British Journalism Award nomination in 2021.
Besides Carter, the other associated nominees were Nanette van der Laan (a Channel 4 News producer), Damian Kahya (of Greenpeace and a former reporter at the BBC) and, yes, you’ve guessed it, Alex Thompson of Channel 4 News.
Therefore, a straight and direct line can be drawn, ironically, from foreign foundation funding, to one-man-band UK reporters, to amplified partisan domestic left-wing mainstream media – all as part of an all-out propaganda war against Reform UK.
It would be naive to think Carter’s exposes rely upon pure luck. The cynic might suspect an even shorter and more direct route, with foundations and political opponents quietly acting as clearinghouses, passing information to the mainstream via single-operator journalists to maximise public impact while maintaining plausible deniability.
In any case, expect much, much more of the same in the run-up to the 2029 general election.
© Always Worth Saying 2026
