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It has been a spectacular rise for Dr James Orr, an Associate Professor 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 this year, 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”. He described the Palantir co-founder 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 head of policy and credited with “building networks of elite defectors”.
As this Byline Times investigation suggests, Orr appears to have played a major part in the defection of at least three senior Conservative politicians to Farage’s Party, as well as providing a pivotal role in the growing alliance between Trumpworld and the British hard-right.
Since becoming head of policy, Orr has refused to rule out replacing the NHS with an insurance-based system on the BBC’s Question Time. At CPAC in Budapest, he talked about not just stopping mass migration but “thinking about how we reverse it” – presumably with some kind of repatriation policy. On his increasingly active and partisan X account, Orr has been weighing in on Burka bans and Muslims, the “reckless insanity” of net-zero carbon reduction policies, and many other hot-button political topics.
But how did a former lawyer-turned theologian become Reform UK’s lead ideologue and political heavyweight on so many issues?
To understand that, you have to follow a covert combination of faith and finance, of evangelical doom-mongering and disruptive tech and media, from the two real kingmakers in right-wing British and American politics — the deeply religious and deeply wealthy owners of GB News and Palantir: Sir Paul Marshall and Peter Thiel.
Faith and Finance
An alumnus of one of Britain’s top public schools, Winchester, and a graduate of Oxford University, James Orr was already on the well-paved path to becoming a successful corporate lawyer working in the “magic circle” of UK and US law firms, when, at the age of 24, slightly worse for wear at a 2003 New Year’s Eve party, he asked for signs that God existed.
The signs came when, among other things, he narrowly avoided a fatal skiing accident.
It was a road-to-Damascus moment. But as Orr himself admits, it would not have been enough unless he had found a community – his commitment “probably would’ve disappeared quite quickly had I not been welcomed into an extraordinary church in London, Holy Trinity Brompton“.
Orr had luckily stumbled across the phenomenon of Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) church, and one of Britain’s most prolific and important political donors, Sir Paul Marshall.
As James Bloodworth has examined in Byline Times, HTB is not an ordinary parish church but the cradle of an evangelical revolution.
A Victorian gothic revival building “in one of London’s wealthiest neighbourhoods… it functions simultaneously as a spiritual home and a social hub – a place where theology and networking merge seamlessly”.
Sir Paul Marshall and the Rise of Elite Evangelical Nationalism
Sir Paul Marshall, co-founder of asset management firm Marshall Wace, is one of the UK’s most powerful – but least scrutinised – political actors.
In the 1980s, HTB launched the Alpha Course, which has since grown into one of Christianity’s most successful evangelistic tools, reaching tens of millions worldwide through small-group discussions on faith basics.
Of the Alpha course, Orr has said: “I think the warmth of the welcome of that church family was so intense and so real for me, that I just couldn’t deny that I’d stumbled on the truth.”
A similar revelation seems to have happened to Paul Marshall, co-founder of the Marshall Wace hedge fund, and now one of Britain’s biggest media moguls with his ownership of broadcaster GB News, the Unherd website, and the Spectator magazine.
Having lost his Christian faith after leaving Oxford University, Marshall found it again by attending the Holy Trinity Brompton and the Alpha Course in the late 1990s.
For the next decade or so, as Orr studied for an MPhil and then a PhD in the philosophy of religion at Cambridge University, Marshall’s hedge fund — now with more than £70 billion assets under management — grew along with his political influence.
Marshall became a major architect of Liberal Democrat policies and a co-author of the Orange Book manifesto, the bible of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government of 2010-2015.
During the Coalition, Marshall forged a connection with the then Education Secretary Michael Gove (now Editor of the Spectator) after setting up the ARK charity of independent academy schools.
Meanwhile, Orr was a beneficiary of Marshall’s other philanthropic largesse as he progressed from HTB through the St Paul’s Theological Centre (SPTC) at St Mellitus College.
‘Reform TV’ has merged with MAGA TV and cannibalised key parts of the historic party with the help of Orr, and the hedge fund millions of Thiel and Marshall.
Paul Marshall was a founder member of St Mellitus, one of the Church of England’s largest and most influential theological training institutions, with HTB at its institutional core. His charity has given at least £10 million to the Church Revitalisation Trust, the vehicle through which HTB plants churches across Britain.
After four years on a McDonald Postdoctoral Fellowship at Oxford University, Orr moved to Cambridge and was appointed a director of his alma mater, SPTC, in July 2019. Marshall joined him as a director a year later.
A Second Conversion
By 2019, the now knighted Sir Paul Marshall had undergone another conversion – from middle-of-the-road Lib Dem supporter to an ardent Brexiter.
According to Tim Shipman in his book All Out War, it was Marshall’s intervention which persuaded Michael Gove