James Orr is a far right, Class Warrior for the rich. John Medhurst traces his career. 
Because the UK’s fearless media probably won’t report much on this guy beyond that James Orr is/was “Farage’s chief policy advisor”, which is to say Reform’s Head of Policy, and that he liked the sound of easy cash that circumvented the legal requirements on making donations to political parties, this is a bit more on who he is.
James Tristan Ward Orr comes from a family of affluent lawyers and until he was nine he lived in Brussels where he spoke French as his first language. Educated at Winchester, the most expensive public school in England, he went on to Cambridge where he studied Classics. When he speaks of the Euro-elite and the British Establishment, he’s talking about his class and his people.
Orr then went into corporate law at the very top end, working for Sullivan & Cromwell, the powerful American corporate law firm with an “interesting” history of support for Nazi Germany and U.S-backed coups in Iran and Guatemala, where it represented its client the United Fruit Company, work made easier because two of its senior partners were Allan Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles, respectively Eisenhower’s CIA Director and Secretary of State. More recently, Sullivan & Cromwell have represented Big Tobacco, crypto-currency manipulators and Donald Trump.
It seemed that Orr had found his natural home but in 2003 he had a “religious awakening”, although not of the kind that leads to renouncing worldly riches and working for the poor. After this he left the law to take a PhD in Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University. He is currently an associate professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge, having previously spent four years as a post-doctoral fellow at the McDonald Centre of Theology, Ethics, and Public Life at Christ Church, Oxford. He apparently meets Oxbridge’s strict academic standards and one can see how he would fit right in.
Politically, Orr is a “National Conservative”, i.e a discrete racist and polite fascist. He is a fellow at the private Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia, an institution funded by Paul Marshall, the owner of GB News and the Spectator. He is also a director of the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation, which has received funding of £512,500 (almost all of its income) from the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Hungary. MCC is funded by government-provided shares in the Hungarian multinational oil company MOL Group, which refines oil from Russia and elsewhere.
Orr opposes abortion at any stage and in all circumstances, including in cases of rape, has described asylum seekers as “invaders” and considers immigration the “most existential threat facing our nation since the Norman invasion”. He believes that universities need to be “decolonised” from a “new form of soft imperialism, an ideology that is dividing us from each other, politicising our culture, and eroding our freedoms”. He regards Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “regional Slavic conflict” and opposes military support for Ukraine. In July 2025, addressing the MCC’s annual Feszt in Hungary, Orr praised the Trump administration’s trade wars, accused Britain of being infected with “Ukraine Brain” and praised Orbán’s government for blocking EU military aid to Ukraine and sanctions on Russia.
Orr’s expertise in “Ethics” was on full display in Channel 4’s undercover reporting which showed Orr and Dan Jukes arrange for an American company to fund three polls on behalf of the party, which would break campaign finance laws. Orr was recorded saying: “Am I gonna tell anyone… obviously not, so the reality is we could easily get away with it.” He said there was little chance of consequences because the regulator, the Electoral Commission, was “so dumb and ineffective”. Of the payments, Orr said that Nigel Farage “doesn’t know, won’t know” and would “rather not know”. Farage is also shown openly laughing at the ease with which the fake polls have influenced the news and welcoming the illegal funding.
It goes without saying that the free-speech supporting, iconoclastic journalists of the Spectator, Telegraph, Mail, GB News etc will be as relentless as they were with Jason Arday in exposing this hypocritical liar and con-man. Expect expose after expose to appear any day now.
James Orr, with his privilege, his connections, his flirtation with fascism and his personal lack of honesty, is the perfect symbol of Reform’s politics. But if you’re looking for someone whose grasp of morality and ethics exceeds that of a small-time mafia lawyer, you’d be better off talking to a random stranger on the bus.
