Truss’s Foreign Office bankrolling Stonewall

Looking back, it wasn’t a great 2021 for LGBT+ group Stonewall. There were the allegations it misrepresented the law in its advice to Essex University, accusations from founder Matthew Parris that it was trying to delegitimise critics and the ongoing exodus of Whitehall departments from its much-criticised diversity scheme. But despite all this controversy, the charity’s latest accounts reveal a still-reliable stream of income from one reliable source: the taxpayer.

Stonewall received £1.25 million in taxpayer-funded grants in just 18 months to March 2021, according to documents published this week. This figure is a near-67 per cent increase on the £748,000 they received in their previous accounts, which covered the 12 months up until September 2019. All the great and the good quangos and ministries are there: the Welsh and Scottish governments both handed over hundreds of thousands of pounds, while NHS Scotland provided a grant of almost £50,000.

And which department came top of the funding pile? None other than Liz Truss’s Foreign Office, which handed over more than £750,000 up until March 2021, compared to just £145,000 in the one-year period to September 2019. This