How a ‘dodgy money’ scandal hijacked Nigel Farage’s reset conference

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.”