Hedge Funds and Tech Bros:

Reform UK James Orr’s Road to Damascus

How did Nigel Farage’s head of policy move from corporate law to political religiosity? Peter Jukes and Nafeez Ahmed report

It has been a spectacular rise for James Orr, Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University, dubbed by US Vice President JD Vance as his “British sherpa”, and named his “English philosopher king”.

In January, Orr hosted Silicon Valley titan Peter Thiel in Cambridge for a series of his ‘Antichrist Lectures’, which he hailed as “the highlight of our academic year”. Orr described the co-founder of data analytics giant Palantir, and Donald Trump’s long-time backer, as “a walking antidote to the modern multiversity”.

The next month, at a press conference launching Reform UK’s ‘shadow cabinet’, Orr was named as Nigel Farage’s Head of Policy and credited with “building networks of elite defectors”.