A thinker and a theologian, James Orr has ties to both Vice President JD Vance and the tech billionaire Peter Thiel. He served as the head of policy for Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist Reform U.K. party. Some called him Mr. Farage’s brain.
Mr. Orr was the academic behind Mr. Farage’s hopes of being Britain’s next prime minister. But on Friday, he was suspended by the party.
His fall was set off by an undercover exposé, aired on Thursday, that secretly filmed Mr. Orr and another aide, Dan Jukes, discussing how political donations from a man they appeared to think was American could be secretly funneled to benefit the party without disclosure.
British law requires all donations to be disclosed and prohibits political contributions from foreign individuals. The American was an actor posing as a donor, according to the British broadcaster Channel 4 News, which aired the video.
Reform has denied breaking any law and has accused the broadcaster of a hit job. Mr. Orr has said that he was entrapped by opponents who were “politically motivated to discredit a political vehicle, Reform U.K.” Mr. Orr did not respond to a text message seeking comment on Friday. A spokesman for Reform did not respond to a request for comment about his and Mr. Jukes’s actions on the video.
The footage showed Mr. Orr discussing payments with an undercover reporter posing as a British donor and claiming to have a wealthy American father. According to the broadcaster, Mr. Orr suggested that the American parent could finance opinion polling favorable to Reform.
“The reality is we could easily get away with it,” Mr. Orr, who is an associate professor of philosophy of religion at Cambridge University, is seen saying.
“It’s definitely a tragic story, however much self-inflicted,” said Tim Montgomerie, who was a prominent member of Reform until his suspension last month after criticizing party figures. “A professor who specializes in ethics who’s caught on camera saying: We won’t get caught. It’s unbelievable.”
Verbatim, an investigative group founded by journalists from the nonprofit Center for Climate Reporting, conducted the undercover filming. The New York Times has not independently verified the actions in the videos.
In the recording, Mr. Orr boasts about his authority inside Reform. “Nigel has asked me to be his senior adviser,” he said. “I’d be one of three people reporting directly to Nigel, so that gives me a lot of — it gives me enormous — power in the party, if I want it. So, basically, the job will be fund-raising. I’m raising a lot of money for the party.”
Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, said of Mr. Orr: “He had been touted as Reform’s brain, and it turns out — at least from what he said — that he was heavily involved in fund-raising, which comes as quite a surprise.”
The fallout from the undercover filming is the latest recent challenge Reform has faced.
The party, which had led opinion polls for more than a year, has seen its popularity dip in recent months after it was revealed that Mr. Farage had accepted a gift of 5 million pounds (about $6.7 million) from a cryptocurrency billionaire, and following other questions about party financing.
Mr. Orr was a favorite of Mr. Farage’s, though not just because of his intellect, Mr. Montgomerie said. “Nigel Farage has always been really keen on him,” he added. “I remember him telling me not so long ago that he loves James because he got things done. That certainly fitted with what we watched on Channel 4, that sense of making something happen.”
Educated at Winchester College, an elite secondary school, Mr. Orr, now 47, studied at Oxford and then at Cambridge, and worked in corporate law before entering academia.
In a 2025 podcast discussing his Christianity, he described a religious awakening more than two decades ago, after interpreting survival from a potentially lethal skiing accident as a sign from God.
He is also well connected in right-wing circles in the United States.
Mr. Orr recalled in the podcast recent battles against liberal policies at Cambridge and described his friendship with Mr. Vance, whose own memoir about his religious journey, “Communion,” was published this year. Their early conversations were “about religion and God and faith and Catholicism,” said Mr. Orr, who described how he had welcomed the vice president to his home in Cambridge when the American visited Britain.
This year, he also hosted Mr. Thiel in Cambridge for what Mr. Orr called a “stunningly original and erudite” set of lectures.
“That’s what connected him to Reform in the first place,” Mr. Montgomerie said of Mr. Orr’s connections to well-known right-wing figures in the United States. “Whatever the modern equivalent of a Rolodex is — the contacts book — is definitely what made Reform interested in him.”
On Thursday, before the Channel 4 News report, Mr. Orr was a featured speaker at Reform’s annual conference in Birmingham, England.
In the early afternoon, he joined Robert Jenrick, who speaks for the party on financial issues, on a panel titled, “What Is Reform’s Economic Vision?” There, Mr. Orr presented himself as an architect of the party.
“We’re willing for the first time in a very long time to think outside the box,” he said, describing Reform to a packed crowd of business executives. “We’re not, as it were, being suffocated by the dead hands of legacy party orthodoxy. We’re not worrying about whether we are on the left or whether on the right.”
Moments after the hourlong panel ended, Mr. Orr was whisked away to another stage, where he moderated a discussion about Reform’s commitment to spending more on the military.
But by Friday morning, Lee Anderson, Reform’s chairman, had announced that Mr. Orr had “stepped back,” along with Mr. Jukes. Mr. Farage later referred to Mr. Orr in a radio interview as simply a “contractor” for the party.
In a statement after the exposé, Cambridge said it was “looking into these matters.”
Some friends say they believe that Mr. Orr will be back.
“I cannot imagine James staying out for a long time because he is very valuable for Reform,” said Frank Furedi, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, who described Mr. Orr as a charismatic orator.
“One problem Reform has — as all populist organizations — is their relative lack of support among intellectuals particularly, public intellectuals,” he said. He added that “what James believes is that policy needs to be informed by moral and ethical norms.”
That Mr. Orr’s reported comments in the recording appear to depart from ethical standards may be the result of loose talk or naiveté, Mr. Furedi argued, adding that to use them “as a basis to make hard and fast judgments about the moral status of the individual is wrong.”
Others were not so charitable.
“He was supposed to be in charge of policy. We haven’t seen that much policy, so maybe we know why: He had extracurricular activities,” Mr. Montgomerie said. “On a human level, I feel quite sad for him, but he was the author of his own downfall.”
