Splits emerge within party after resignation of officials reported to police for apparent plot to evade donations law
Nigel Farage sought to shore up his damaged leadership on Friday as he attempted to distance himself from two of his most senior officials reported to the police for apparently plotting to evade the law on foreign donations.
As the scandal engulfed Reform UK’s party conference in Birmingham, Farage was forced to suspend close aides Dan Jukes and head of policy James Orr after an undercover investigation by reporters from a group called Verbatim.
He later acknowledged Jukes and Orr had made “human error” and were “not authorised” to act in the way they did when trying to orchestrate donations to benefit the party from a fake US businessman, who was not permitted to give money.
The Met police are now assessing the evidence after a complaint that Farage, Orr and Jukes may have broken political funding laws, with sources suggesting a full investigation is highly likely to be launched. They all deny wrongdoing.
One possibility would be for the police to extend an existing Met investigation into whether Reform took donations channelled through an intermediary from potentially impermissible sources, which the party and donors deny.
Orr is an associate professor of divinity at the University of Cambridge who had been working for Reform, reporting directly to Farage, since February. In relation to the undercover footage of Orr, a spokesperson for the university said Cambridge was “looking into these matters”. Jukes is Farage’s closest aide, and has been at his side for more than a decade working on communications and strategy.
Farage had been introduced by Jukes to the would-be donor from the US promising to give £500,000 despite not being eligible, who was really an undercover reporter. The Reform leader then appeared to endorse the scheme for the impermissible US donor to give money through his son, a UK intermediary, by saying “thank you, both” and “all above board”.
After dismissing the sting as a “hoax”, Reform began an organised campaign to limit the damage to Farage personally before his main conference speech, after a summer of scandals over his finances, including an undeclared gift of £5m.
Addressing the allegations, the Reform leader responded by reading out a legal statement in which he dismissed the allegations as “a little local difficulty” and described the reports as “an exercise in entrapment”.
Farage claimed Orr and Jukes had merely been “contractors” who engaged in “loose pub talk, including a couple of boasts that simply were not true”. One party figure, Nadine Dorries, claimed Jukes had merely booked transport and carried bags, despite being a senior adviser integral to Reform’s operations and success for many years.
When it was put to Farage that he had thanked the bogus donors and understood what was going on, he said: “It was the middle of the byelection. I was told I had to go and meet these people. I didn’t have to, but I did. I was told they had a global family trust headquartered in London. I asked the question: is this all above board?”
The Reform leader also insisted that the party’s internal processes would have stopped any impermissible donors and said neither Jukes nor Orr should have been carrying out fundraising. He said a suggestion by Jukes in the footage that other foreign donations had been channelled through UK intermediaries was not true and the donors did not exist.
The pair were caught out after being filmed by undercover reporters from the group Verbatim, founded by the Centre for Climate Reporting, and broadcast by Channel 4 News on the eve of Reform’s party conference.
In the footage, Orr and Jukes appeared to help orchestrate an impermissible donation of £30,000 from the fake US donor, which was used to pay for polling that would benefit Reform and made front pages of national newspapers. The money from an American company was transferred to the polling company JL Partners after being organised at the behest of Reform to boost its policies and political narrative. It was not declared to the Electoral Commission.
