Farage’s ‘Dugin’ Scandal

Rome. In the Channel 4 investigation into the funding of the election campaign for Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s party, the name of James Orr also featured – the Cambridge academic who has for years been working towards the ideal fusion of the ultra-conservative party with the guiding principles of various sovereigntist-populist movements in America and Europe. According to the television investigation, Orr is also alleged to have knowingly sought illicit funding from abroad and, pending an internal party investigation, has resigned. This is a significant blow for Farage.

Orr is regarded by J. D. Vance as his ‘British sherpa’; he is a friend and collaborator of Peter Thiel, whilst the ultra-conservative writer Rod Dreher has publicly reaffirmed his friendship and support on social media, even now that Orr’s fortunes appear to be on the wane: “It’s a conspiracy,” he wrote on X. Orr, for his part, puts his trust in God, who revealed himself to him in a way that only happens in films or in the great lives of saints: on New Year’s Day 2003, in the mountains above Verbier, when he was twenty-five and still somewhat disoriented by the alcohol he’d consumed the night before, he saw Him. Out there, amongst the snow-covered gullies, the weather was dreadful. He was with his sister when he suddenly shouted at her to stop: without realising it, they had ended up on the roof of a chalet, a stone’s throw from a ravine. A miracle, in short. The fog lifted and they saw a two-metre-tall crucifix propping up the house. For Orr, it was a moment of ecstasy, given that only the night before he’d asked that God – in whom he didn’t really believe – to reveal Himself. He began his new life, devoted to the assiduous reading of the New Testament, searching at all costs for that historical Jesus by whom he was now obsessed. He abandoned his established career and set about studying theology.

More than two decades later, James Orr is a professor at Cambridge and, above all, he is Nigel Farage’s great confidant – if one may put it that way. Those who are not fond of him call him ‘Rasputin’. He mentors students – much like a political mentor – whom he believes will be useful to the cause, namely that of Reform UK. The important thing is that they share his ideas, which are certainly not characterised by moderation. His rhetoric is frankly evangelical: ‘Yes, yes; no, no’. Special housing for married couples with children (obviously the couple must consist of a man and a woman), a ban on abortion even in cases of rape, immigration regarded as the ‘most serious existential threat our nation has faced since the Norman Conquest’, and the war in Ukraine is merely ‘a regional Slavic conflict’. He is the ideologue of the new British right, Farage’s Dugin. His energies are directed towards the far from straightforward task of constructing a British Christian nationalism, even if he himself does not like to call it that. Certainly, however, his sights are set on the liberal model – a failed one that must be eliminated, even in its remnants. This is another reason why Vance is so taken with him. His political ties are well known, starting with those to Viktor Orbán, who has been compared to Metternich and Bismarck. His home (a luxurious house in Cambridge where, according to the Financial Times, high-profile banquets are held) serves as a meeting place for all those right-wing Christians who feel marginalised. His wife, Helen, a Reverend in the Church of England, describes their home as a sort of monastic college situated outside the university’s progressive milieu, and she is its priestess (or mother superior), called upon to nurture – spiritually, at least – the future British sovereigntists.