BIRMINGHAM, England — Nigel Farage dined with business executives Thursday night — and seemed determined not to allow Reform UK’s party conference to be commandeered by a swirling new scandal. But by Friday morning, two of his closest advisers were gone. The loss of Dan Jukes and James Orr to an undercover sting over — yet again — questionable Reform UK donation practices cannot be underestimated.
Jukes is known as Farage’s most loyal attack dog — a communications chief who began unflinchingly batting for his boss as a teenager and has lasted for more than a decade in the Farage orbit. They are so close that their relationship is often spoken of as being more like father and son. Orr was Reform’s big policy brain.
A Cambridge academic who was leading work to build a robust platform for governance, Orr is a theologian with deep links into the MAGA movement, including a friendship with U.S. Aides had billed this get-together of the party faithful as the moment Farage got “serious” after a summer dominated by his Clacton by-election battle against comedy candidate Count Binface. That was a fight Farage started himself to try to extinguish separate allegations he had failed to declare millions of pounds in donations from crypto businessman Christopher Harborne.
Now fresh headlines in which Farage insists the party has “broken no laws” and denies his team has taken any “dodgy money” are overshadowing the right-wing outfit’s Birmingham gathering. Smoked trout and fillet of beef was on the menu Thursday evening as anxious attendees of the Reform UK business dinner at the National Exhibition Centre watched the Channel 4 footage of the sting on their phones. There was Orr caught on camera arranging potentially rule-breaking funding from a foreign benefactor — via a middle-man in the U.K — to produce favorable polling.
There was Jukes discussing “little clandestine projects” that he deems “so valuable” to the party. There was Farage, too, speaking to a fake U.S. donor in his Clacton constituency, appearing to celebrate the great “bang for buck” that the poll — carried in national newspapers with no declaration of its links to Reform UK — had provided. Jukes was uncharacteristically not seen at Farage’s side during Thursday night’s dinner.
He had been there at his boss’s drinks with political editors shortly before the investigation aired. But his presence on the mind of Reform’s top brass was evident. They were granted anonymity like others in this article to speak frankly about an internal party matter.
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