Turning Point UK Downplays John Mappin Link

Turning Point UK issues a stern corrective to Jessica Simor QC:

Hi Jessica, John Mappin is not “of Turning Point UK”, he does not and has not held any position in the organisation.

As for our stance on Ukraine I’m sure it is fairly obvious from our tweets.

As a QC I would’ve expected you to have done your homework before tweeting nonsense.

The millionaire hotelier Mappin has long described himself as the “co-founder” of Turning Point UK, and Simor responded with a 2019 Tweet from Channel 4 News that quoted him thus:

I’ve been helping with the Trump movement since he announced his election. I co-founded Turning Point UK and it has a duty to-to share good ideas with the Conservative party. Trump is absolutely a political phenomenon and it’s global.

TPUK’s response to this was to say that the media “just print whatever they want”, although they did not explain how the quote is misleading or false.

Of course, just because someone has co-founded a group it does not mean that they have an ongoing interest in its activities. However, it reasonable to assume some kind of continuing association unless stated overwise. At an event at in Pall Mall in late 2018, Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA reportedly told attendees that potential donors “can talk to John [Mappin] or some of our other very good friends in the room” (1), and in 2019 Mappin spoke in first-person plural of having “appointed” the head of Turning Point UK (Oliver Anisfeld).

Simor had referred to the link between Mappin and TPUK in response to a Tweet by Tom Scott that included a screenshot of Mappin writing in support of Putin on 24 February (2). Mappin had Tweeted:

What President Putin @KremlinRussia_E has done is a gift for the freedom of the world.

Those who love freedom have a duty to back him up.

It is so important that the deep state’s Nazi collaborator’s are fully confronted,

The deep state is on the ropes, the whole world sees.

Mappin subsequently deleted this, along with a Tweet from the same day stating “I stand with Russian Bear“. However, his output remains pro-Putin, and he is currently speculating about the possibility of the British government staging “a Nuclear False Flag just to cover up vax side effects”.

Mappin’s hotel is a castle in Cornwall that he calls Camelot, and he previously achieved notoriety for flying a “Q” flag in support of the QAnon conspiracy theory. He is in good standing with various activists who have expressed scepticism either of Covid-19 or of measures to protect against it: those who have enjoyed his hospitality include Piers Corbyn, James Melville and Laurence Fox, and early last month he was out on the town with Melville and with GB News’s Neil Oliver (3).

He is also a friend of Nigel Farage, who sits on the advisory board of a company in which Mappin and his wife have a 30% stake (4).

TPUK’s Tweets to Simor appear to be an attempt to distance the organisation from Mappin without being drawn into an explicit repudiation.

Notes

1. This has long been described as TPUK’s launch event, but TPUK now state that it was “a TPUSA event in the UK, as TPUK did not exist until 2020”. This is either a ret-con or a very pedantic distinction given the event’s purpose.

2. Tom Scott previously wrote about Mappin and Camelot for West Country Voices, in an article called “QAnon in Cornwall”.

3. According to Mappin, the night out was co-organised by Emma Sayle – it was through Sayle that Times journalist Kate Spicer got an introduction to Mappin for her profile of him published last year.

4. The company, Dutch Green Business, is based in the Netherlands. According to The Times:

All of the key figures behind DGB are linked to Scientology. Mappin, who is company chairman, and his wife, a board member, are followers of the cult and frequently recommend Dianetics — one of Scientology’s central texts — to followers as a “cure for depression”.

Selwyn Duijvestijn, DGB’s chief executive, is an ambassador for the Scientology-run Youth for Human Rights (YHR), as is Hilda van der Muelen, a former Miss Netherlands, who was introduced to Scientology by Mappin while both were living in Hollywood in the 1990s.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.