Within days of the launch, internal tensions emerged among those Kirk assembled to lead his campaign, according to several people familiar with the group’s internal discussions. Harwood, who featured prominently in the launch video, told the organisers he no longer wanted to be one of Turning Point’s public faces, BuzzFeed News has learned. On Thursday, images of Harwood and the other influencers were removed from the UK website.

On Friday, Harwood told BuzzFeed News: “I don't have a formal role as part of Turning Point UK.”

According to the sources, some in the group were unnerved by the initial backlash. There were concerns over Farage's endorsement, which, it was feared, could discourage some students from joining. And there was disappointment that Turning Point’s arrival hasn’t been embraced by more of their colleagues on the Tory right.

Speaking on the phone on Friday, the chair of Turning Point UK George Farmer put some of the skittishness around Tory politics to the Conservative party being scared of losing its grip on right-wing politics in Britain.

“In the same way that momentum has grabbed hold of the left in the UK and that now controls the narrative, the Conservative party wants to control the narrative about right-wing politics in the UK," Farmer told BuzzFeed News.



“We're not going to let them be in control.”

But it’s not just the party leadership that is unwelcoming. One Conservative activist who isn’t involved with the group told BuzzFeed News that while Turning Point shares some of the Tory right’s political aims — lower taxes, less government, a hard Brexit — grassroots British conservatives are also wary of them.

In recent months, some of the Tories’ most committed members have grown restless about the direction of the party — not just because of Brexit, but because they think Theresa May abandoned traditional conservative values of free enterprise and less government. Amid this agitation, conditions could be ripe for an insurgency on the right that takes over the party in the way that Trump did to the Republicans in the US.



Yet, those members also nervous that the Conservatives will repulse many voters if it is seen as drifting too far to the right, the activist said. They think Turning Point’s wholehearted embrace of Trump and its campaigning style will be unpopular in Britain.



Turning Point is best known in the US for its “Professor Watchlist”, set up to monitor academics it deems to have advanced left-wing propaganda, which critics have called a threat to academic freedom. It has also been criticised for inviting inflammatory speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at campuses. Such tactics, some young Tories feel, would be counterproductive to their political aims in Britain, and so they’ve warned their colleagues not to get involved.

“The associations they have in America are not people who’d be welcomed in the UK,” one activist posted this week in one of the numerous closed groups that Tory activists use to coordinate their political activities.

Not everyone at Turning Point is worried about how it has been received. For some, there’s a sense of genuine excitement that this could be a significant event in British politics. One view internally, the sources said, is that the backlash was inevitable, as Kirk said in London before Christmas, and that it shows the UK’s political, media, and educational elites are unsettled by their arrival. In their thinking, the doubters are just being soft.