Reform UK advisers Dan Jukes and James Orr resign after Channel 4 sting on donation practices

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. Vice President JD Vance.

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.

‘Clandestine projects’

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.

“It worked. Boom,” Farage said.

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.

“The impression over dinner was Nigel was going to back them to the hilt,” said one senior figure in the party who was present at the business event. They were granted anonymity like others in this article to speak frankly about an internal party matter. The argument was that there had been “no law breaking” and that Farage could stand by the embattled duo.

“Different combinations of [deputy leader Richard] Tice, Orr etc. were regularly stepping away from tables, having hushed chats in the corners, then coming back,” said a second attendee. “They didn’t acknowledge or mention it to anyone, they certainly weren’t laughing it off.”

Meanwhile, there was what one invitee described as a “watch party” of the Channel 4 footage in a hotel room, where senior officials discussed how to handle the situation.

At the fifth-floor Sky Bar where many of the conference revelers gathered, senior figures in the party were asking each other “how bad is bad?” over 11.30 p.m. gin and tonics.

Most were insistent the row would blow over. If the support for Orr felt more rudimentary, the expectation that Jukes would be fine seemed certain.

“At the bars it was obviously the central topic of conversation, but I don’t think anyone predicted that this morning Orr and Jukes would resign,” the second business dinner attendee said. “The assumption was they would try and brush off and basically fight back, say it’s a hoax etc.”

By breakfast there was clarity. Ed Sumner, now indisputably Farage’s most senior communications adviser, spent his birthday morning confirming Jukes and Orr had “stepped down” pending an internal investigation.

“The party believes it is important that the investigation is allowed to proceed independently and without prejudice. No further comment will be made while the investigation is ongoing,” read a statement.

What prompted the about-turn was unclear, but one senior adviser said Jukes is a “rational thinker,” adding: “When the time was up, he knew the time was up.”

The fightback

After the defiance over late-night drinks at the Sky Bar, talk of a fightback came at Friday morning’s breakfast buffet. Reform remains neck-and-neck with the governing Labour Party in the polls, and had intended to use Friday to show their readiness for government.

“No way is our conference going to get derailed by some stupid posh boy and a Channel 4 investigation,” fumed one of Reform’s gruffer, high-profile champions.

Lee Anderson, who serves as Reform UK’s chief whip, told broadcasters “there’s no chance” of Orr or Jukes coming back — but privately some at the top of the party are holding out for exactly that.

The senior figure quoted above predicted the loss of the two aides represented a “tactical retreat” to “take the heat off today” — a “temporary thing,” where an investigation paves the way for a potential return.

They also discussed how the party might go on the attack, trying to paint the investigation carried out by journalists at Verbatim, an organization founded by the Centre for Climate Reporting, as the work of an “activist.” One Reform MP was overheard reassuring a supporter of Jukes, “It’s alright — we’ll look after him.”

Tice, who serves as Farage’s deputy, publicly made the case that Channel 4 itself may have “broken the rules” with an “entrapment” operation.

But there was no doubt the conference mood had been sullied. “What a sh*tshow,” raged one prospective candidate for Westminster as he joined the long queue into the venue.

The senior party figure who spoke of a tactical retreat described Orr as a “very good interlocutor between different people in the party,” a particularly crucial role considering some of the fractures involving Farage’s home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf.

“He gets on with Nigel, he gets on with Zia. So he would sort of broker stuff,” the figure said of Orr. “It will be a major loss.”

Farage’s set-piece conference moment with Jordan Bardella, the president of France’s far-right National Rally party, now comes against the backdrop of scandal. And the scrutiny is unlikely to die down beyond Birmingham. Farage separately expects to be interviewed by parliament’s standards commissioner over the Harborne funding row in the next few weeks.

“We clearly need not to create negative headlines that make it harder for people of all stripes [to support us], whether they’re from the respectable tendency or anti-establishment people, who don’t like stories of dodgy money and all that,” the senior party figure said. “It’s bad from all points of view.”