Palantir Co-Founder Peter Thiel and Reform UK’s Cambridge University Recruitment Pipeline Project Revealed

With luminaries from Erasmus and Isaac Newton to Alan Turing to Stephen Hawking, Cambridge University has always framed itself as a centre of scientific advance, progress, and the Enlightenment.  

It was famed for its rationalism and Puritanism, putting principle above power, compared to its great rival, Oxford, which became the royalist capital during the English Civil War. 

Since then, Oxford has been the traditional pipeline to national politics. Thirteen of the UK’s 18 post-war prime ministers were educated there, including David Cameron and Boris Johnson, contemporaries at the infamous hard-drinking Bullingdon Club.

Cambridge has preferred to boast of its intellectual and cultural achievements: the number of Trinity College Fellows who are Nobel Prize winners; Footlights, the comedy revue that powered Monty Python and the careers of Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, and Emma Thompson; Mathematical Bridge in Queens’ College, mythically built by Newton; and the Eagle Pub where Crick and Watson announced that they had discovered the structure of DNA.

Now, a very different type of ‘dark enlightenment’ has descended on the world-renowned university. Powered by US money and far-right European think tanks, Cambridge has recently become an outpost of a peculiar blend of national conservatism and apocalyptic Christianity, through the figure of James Orr – Head of Policy at Reform UK described as Nigel Farage’s “Kingmaker“.

A six-month investigation by Byline Times can now exclusively reveal that with the behind-the-scenes support of Peter Thiel — Trump backer and co-founder of the controversial data-mining and surveillance giant Palantir Technologies — Orr has used Cambridge University as a recruitment ground to bring students into a hard-right, theocratic political project aimed at bolstering talent in Farage’s party.

Sources across the university have raised urgent concerns about the safeguarding risks to students in Orr’s orbit.

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The House That Cannot Be Named

A quiet, narrow suburban road runs along the river Cam on the northern edge of Cambridge, where the city thins into ice cream shops and laundromats, and then water and trees.

Along a row of unremarkable English houses, behind a nondescript corner, stands a building easily mistaken for one of them.

From the front, the property looks faintly run-down. One window carries an anti-abortion slogan. Another displays an English flag. Painted across the wall of the front porch, in plain script, is a verse from the Book of Revelation: “And the leaves of the trees were for the healing of the nations.”

Behind this plain-looking building lies an acre and a half of hidden compound: a manorial main house, cottages, a chapel, a swimming pool, a pavilion for seminars, a long garden running down to the water, a shiny new motorboat docked at the river. The sprawling complex regularly houses at any one time half a dozen or so postgraduate students from the University of Cambridge. 

According to James Orr, the property is more than just a home, but a political and religious centre: a “right-wing Mecca” and a “Conservative Kibbutz”.

A regular resident, Rod Dreher, author of the 2017 book The Benedict Option, likens the place to “a Christian Asturias”, after the medieval Iberian kingdom that launched the Catholic Reconquista against Muslim rule. He has said it “needs to happen in as many places as it can”. 

Orr’s wife, an Anglican vicar, launched an online crowdfunding campaign to raise £500,000 to turn the gateway building into “a café, gallery and Fellow’s Hub” – offering “tax-friendly options for those who would like to donate from abroad or give substantially larger amounts”.

She described her home as “a riverside community in Cambridge”, which has become “a thriving space where students, scholars, artists, and pilgrims gather to share ideas, meals, and meaningful conversations”.   

Recent guests and visitors read like a ‘Who’s Who?’ of political pilgrims and scholars – almost exclusively from the right.

Peter Thiel has visited; as has his protegee, Donald Trump’s Vice-President, JD Vance, who described Orr as his “British Sherpa“.

So too have former Dutch MP and anti-Islam activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali; the conservative author and advocate of white identity politics Douglas Murray; the Canadian psychologist and anti-woke activist Jordan Peterson; and the comedian and writer John Cleese.

MP Danny Kruger, now Reform’s work and pensions spokesman, reportedly stayed at the house overnight. 

After Orr’s appointment as head of Reform UK’s policy think tank in September 2025, his work even attracted the attention of New Labour grandee Peter Mandelson, who was apparently planning to “hold drinks in honour” of him, according to a source – just before his sacking as UK Ambassador to the US, after the extent of his relationship with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was revealed. (Neither Orr nor the Foreign and Commonwealth Office would confirm or deny that this event actually took place).

Indeed, Orr’s lawyers have consistently refused to go on the record in response to this publication’s queries. However, they did threaten a legal injunction to prevent publication of any article which mentioned the name of his premises – his “right-wing Mecca” – on the basis that it breached his right to privacy and family life. 

When Byline Times pointed out the public interest – that the Orrs themselves had widely publicised the location in articles and podcasts, that it had been named by other media outlets, and that their son was standing as a Reform candidate in the local elections earlier this year – Addleshaw Goddard dropped the threat and asked this publication to withhold the name due to concerns about personal safety following the assassination of US conservative activist Charlie Kirk. 

Last year, Orr was appointed as a senior advisor to the Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage, telling the Telegraph that he had been tasked with “boosting the party’s acquisition of talent” by building “networks of elite defectors from academia, business, and law”. 

Orr’s Cambridge University position, he said, was central to this. He had met “hundreds” of Cambridge students he considered suitable allies, and his job at Reform was to work out how those students could be “recruited into the party at scale”.

When Byline Times asked Cambridge University several times whether this kind of explicit recruitment for a political party was in contravention of its safeguarding rules and policies on academic conflicts of interest, it did not reply. 

In the absence of any answers from the university, Byline Times has sought to ascertain: how does this recruitment work? How is it funded? And what does it promote?

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The Recruitment Pipeline

Byline Times has spoken to nearly 20 former and current Cambridge University students and academics – none of whom wanted to go on the record for fear of adverse consequences. Many described an oppressive atmosphere around the modernist wedge-shaped edifice of the Faculty of Divinity.  

All were concerned that James Orr’s increasing political workload leaves him little time to attend to his educational duties.  As an Associate Professor, Orr holds full-time research, teaching, and pastoral obligations to students. But his Reform role is also full-time.

According to sources, Orr has “hardly ever” been present on campus since the Reform policy appointment, and is making negligible research contributions – both unheard of for such an academic role.

On at least one occasion, Orr unilaterally delegated his university lecture obligations to one of his own graduate students. The student, a foreign national, was asked to deliver material which Orr had been contracted by the university to teach. The student was unpaid and carried out the work without a contract. Although formal complaints were raised with the faculty, no disciplinary action was taken against Orr.

When Orr does attend lectures, undergraduates have characterised his style as veering between “rambling” and florid, reading long passages of text in their original Greek, Latin, French, and German without translating them for students.

Subjects such as Palestine and human rights are frowned upon; and authors on the reading list include Orr’s former colleague at Oxford University, Nigel Biggar – a Conservative peer who has sought to rehabilitate the reputation of the British Empire against the consensus among academic historians.

When, during Orr’s absence on emergency sabbatical, a female philosopher – Iris Murdoch – was added to the list of male ethicists for first-year students to read, she was promptly removed on his return.

Meanwhile, Orr’s extensive Cambridge compound provides accommodation for at least half a dozen postgraduate students, though it is not clear whether this is on a fee-paying basis. Through his lawyers, Orr has defended the practice as being common in Cambridge, though fellow academics say that it is highly unusual. 

A senior Cambridge University academic in the School of Arts and Humanities, which also houses the Faculty of Divinity, said that the institution “clearly has major questions to answer about its relationship with Reform UK, and about the consequences of this relationship for students including both quality of teaching and research, and the dangers of hidden donor influence”.

“The university should, urgently, be transparent about its relationship with the party, and about Dr James Orr’s potential role in using the university as a political pipeline,” they added.

Down by the river, students find themselves mingling with a coterie of hard-right political figures, pundits, and operatives. 

One of Orr’s closest colleagues and repeat residents is Rod Dreher, who, until recently, was funded by the Danube Institute, a Budapest think tank sponsored by the Viktor Orbán administration to court Western conservatives. He is also a supporter of Steve Sailer, a notorious American advocate of race science.

Orr personally invited another American race science proponent, Charles Murray, co-author of the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve, to address staff and students at Cambridge via the Trinity Forum – a US Christian non-profit unconnected to Trinity College.

Jordan Peterson finished his 2024 book, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine, at the Orrs’ Cambridge base. He endorsed The Bell Curve in an interview with Douglas Murray, whom sources describe as another close friend of the Orrs and a regular guest at their compound. 

One Cambridge student familiar with multiple humanities departments outside the Faculty of Divinity described a “normalisation of disparaging views of ethnic minorities” among some Cambridge academics. 

In this context, it is not surprising that at least two students who passed through Orr’s Cambridge orbit have since become public voices of the hard-right.

Isaac Riley is a postgraduate student in Old Testament theology at the Faculty of Divinity who currently lives with the Orrs. He writes for The European Conservative – a Budapest-based far-right magazine previously funded by Orbán’s Government through a state-linked foundation. In November 2024, he published a “moral argument against migration”, contending that a government’s “primary obligation is to the native”. A second essay cast transgender identity as theologically “heinous”.

Charlie Bentley-Astor, a Cambridge English graduate, regularly liaised with Orr according to university sources, and by her own admission participated in several conservative “secret societies”, including to support figures such as Jordan Peterson. She moved swiftly after Cambridge to write and speak for right-wing media such as the Telegraph, The Critic, UnHerd, GB News, TalkTV, and The European Conservative, in which she recently argued that ethnicity is “as fundamental as biological sex and perhaps as immutable”. 

Several academic sources at Cambridge University raised concerns that Orr’s declared aim – to recruit students – has brought individuals into the institution based less on their academic ability and more on their political affinities, and creates conflicts of interest over external funding. 

One student recruited by Orr received funding for their studies from the Edmund Burke Foundation (EBF), a US conservative non-profit. Orr, who chairs the UK branch of the foundation, personally facilitated the funding according to sources familiar with the arrangement. Byline Times was told that the same student, who lived with the Orrs, was also taught and supervised by Orr and assessed by his close academic associates.

The EBF is not a traditional academic funder. As Orr explained in an interview with the late Charlie Kirk, it is designed to help create a pan-European “Comintern” for nationalist populist parties, including far-right groups with direct fascist lineage or formal extremist classification, such as Germany’s AfD and the Austrian FPO.

“I’ve watched the student cohort in the faculty change over the last few years,” a member of the department told Byline Times. “We are seeing more and more young men, in particular, being recruited who undoubtedly affiliate with right-wing or even hard-right political views. And there are real questions about the quality of their work. This has never happened before.”

Beyond questions of conflict of interest, the arrangement at James Orr’s property – housing students in what he insists is his private home – appears to be a straightforward breach of university policy.

Adopted in July 2024 (and updated in October the same year), the policy sets out that staff in positions of academic authority should not enter into personal arrangements with students that could compromise the integrity of the academic relationship.

In particular, it instructs staff that they must: “Avoid inviting a student to their private home, room, or vehicle, especially if others are not present, or visiting a student in their home or room, including while at conferences, overseas trips, or on a placement.”

Students might be invited to attend “group social gatherings at an academic member of staff’s private home” only if they are “working as part of research groups”. This is distinct from housing them.

One Cambridge University graduate student source described a professor housing students at his personal residence as “deeply unusual and unacceptable”.

“Housing students at his residence is at best inappropriate and at worst a conflict of interest that could lead to serious problems for the Faculty and university,” a senior professor in the School of Arts and Humanities told Byline Times.

“Healthy boundaries are vital to good teaching and learning, and this situation clearly invokes safeguarding and student welfare issues, quite apart from the dangers of running a parallel institution to the university with clear danger of indoctrination rather than learning.”

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Thiel’s Anonymous Donation

James Orr’s recruitment drive for students at Cambridge University on behalf of Reform UK has been indelibly linked to Peter Thiel’s opaque involvement in the university, which has been ongoing for more than a decade. 

As Byline Times previously reported, the chief of staff at Thiel Capital began travelling to Cambridge regularly to convene a network of conservative academics across the university as early as 2016. 

Three years later, in 2019, James and Helen Orr purchased their rambling riverside property when it became clear that James Orr could secure a position as Associate Professor in the Faculty of Divinity. 

Byline Times can reveal that this coincided with a secret donation to Cambridge University from Peter Thiel.

University documents seen by Byline Times confirm that the Palantir co-founder made an offer of a five-figure donation to the institution through James Orr in November 2018, when he was under consideration for the role of University Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion. 

In January 2019, the donation appears to have been sent from Thiel Capital to ‘Cambridge in America’ – a 501(c) US tax-exempt organisation that raises money for the university in the US. While the documents seen by Byline Times suggest that it was Orr who requested the donation be kept anonymous, it is understood from Orr’s lawyers that Peter Thiel himself requested anonymity.

Thiel’s representatives did not respond to requests for comment. 

Cambridge University subsequently commissioned an investigation, conducted by internal auditor Deloitte, into the financial issues the donation raised. It found no evidence of bribery but concluded that “weaknesses” in “internal control” were putting university objectives “at risk”.

At risk is something wider: the independence of budget-strapped academic institutions and student societies in the face of ‘big money’.

Peter Thiel is not the only tech mogul in Orr’s orbit.

His Cambridge network also intersects with British crypto-billionaire Ben Delo, a donor to Reform, and co-founder of the BitMex exchange, who pleaded guilty to wilfully violating US anti-money laundering rules before being pardoned by President Trump. 

Among the groups underwritten by Delo is the ‘Cambridge Scrutonian Society’ (CSS), which hosts talks, seminars, and reading groups in both Cambridge and Westminster in the intellectual tradition of the late conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton. 

The CSS was founded by two of James Orr’s own students, and sources at the university suggest that Orr played a key behind-the-scenes role in helping set up the organisation. Byline Times can confirm that the CSS’ Westminster meetings take place in ‘The Sanctuary’, a venue near Westminster Abbey financed by Delo, which also hosts groups such as Rupert Lowe’s party, Restore Britain.

This is a tight circle. Delo first attended a lecture by Peter Thiel in December 2023 at an event at Oxford University, co-organised by James Orr.

In January this year, as part of a US and European tour, Thiel delivered four private, invite-only ‘Antichrist Lectures’ in the Ramsden Room of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge University – again hosted by Orr. Previous leaks from these lectures suggest that his version of the ‘Antichrist’ ranges from the climate activist Greta Thunberg to any regulation of AI.  

Sources who attended a dinner afterwards told Byline Times that Thiel – who named his surveillance company after the ‘palantír’, the “seeing stones” of JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings – believes that the epic’s characters, Saruman and Sauron, the two dark lords who used the stones in their struggle to dominate Middle-earth, are “deeply misunderstood”. 

No doubt Thiel, who also co-founded PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook, could counter that he has been misunderstood in his numerous remarks questioning women’s rights and whether “democracy is compatible with freedom”.

The tech billionaire has bankrolled key thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin, founder of the so-called ‘Dark Enlightenment’ or neo-reactionary movement which dallies with eugenic pseudoscience and calls to replace democratic governance with autocratic rule by corporate ‘CEOs’ with monarchical powers. He also spent an unprecedented $10 million on the Senate campaign of US Vice President JD Vance.

That volume of money is life-altering, and big tech has already had its impact on Cambridge.

In the past two decades, the university’s reputation for innovation in computing and genetics encouraged the growth of large, out-of-town bioscience firms and software companies. The once modest town centre has been colonised by expensive bars, shops, and private members’ clubs. 

Even the idea of money matters.

At the dinner after his ‘Antichrist Lectures’, Thiel asked several people present how they would feel if they woke up the next morning with $200 million in their bank accounts. Those present were not sure if the billionaire was testing them or joking, but still felt the need to decline. 

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Safeguarding and Foreign Influence 

There is no hiding the fact that the tech titans of Silicon Valley – and, along with them, the anti-democratic ‘Dark Enlightenment’ ideology – have been channelled through James Orr and his position.

Thiel’s ‘Antichrist Lectures’ were not formally affiliated with the university and, instead, went through an opaque private company called the Varsity Forum – which, like the Trinity Forum, sounds as if it has academic credentials and vibes off the name of Cambridge University’s highly-regarded student newspaper, Varsity. 

Academics have complained that Orr and his network are “Cambridge-washing” – privately hiring university venues for reputational credibility despite no formal affiliation.  

Orr’s various activities also have close institutional links to Viktor Orbán, the former authoritarian and “illiberal” Hungarian Prime Minister. 

In 2023, the Edmund Burke Foundation hosted a National Conservatism conference in Brussels which was part-funded by two Hungarian state-backed institutions: the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC); and the Danube Institute, where Orr’s friend Rod Dreher was a director. 

Another organisation, the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation (RSLF), which, like the EBF, features Orr as a director, has received £512,500 since 2023 from the MCC and spent more than £54,000 on Cambridge programmes in 2024. 

Both institutions are now implicated in a potential criminal investigation initiated by Hungary’s new Prime Minister Péter Magyar, who has accused the MCC and other organisations of misusing Hungarian public funds for “foreign influence operations in Britain”.

One Cambridge University academic told Byline Times: “I am worried that this is a case of soft foreign influence on the university.”

Another was concerned that the Hungarian funding of students and their societies could fall foul of the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme – a regulatory measure introduced under the 2023 UK National Security Act, which came into force in July 2025.

Cambridge University issued its own guidance warning that academics running foreign-funded activities intended to influence UK policy may be required to register under the scheme. Non-compliance, the guidance observes, “is a criminal offence”.

Several complaints about Orr to the pro vice-chancellors and even the vice-chancellor were made by senior staff across the university. Yet, in all cases, no action was taken.

Byline Times contacted Professor Kamal Munir, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for University Community and Engagement; and Professor Bhaskar Vira, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education, but did not receive replies.

A spokesperson for the Office for Students – the independent regulator for higher education in England – told Byline Times: “We generally wouldn’t comment on individual institutions, and it would be inappropriate for us to comment on individual members of staff. If students, staff, or members of the public have concerns that a university or college is not meeting our requirements, they can submit a notification to us.”

When Byline Times contacted Cambridge University’s press office with confidential enquiries relating to its own standards and policies, the queries were not merely ignored but forwarded on in full without notice to James Orr and his representatives at Addleshaw Goddard, a legal firm which also represents Ben Delo. 

Extraordinarily, given the issues raised by this investigation and Cambridge University’s world-class reputation, further enquiries from this publication were met with silence.

Cambridge University issued only one response in defence of its refusal to engage with substantive queries regarding institutional failures around the safeguarding of students, conflicts of interest, and breaches of confidentiality. 

It said: “In the past few weeks, Byline Times has sent the university a slew of unsubstantiated allegations, wilful mischaracterisations, and falsehoods, which we strongly reject. The volume of misleading claims and conjecture means we are unable to engage with the approach as a legitimate media enquiry. 

“We would encourage Byline Times to consider its position seriously if it intends to publish misleading or unproven claims… Media enquiries are not inherently confidential, and most enquiries need to be investigated and shared with the appropriate people relevant to understanding the enquiry.”

It also asked Byline Times to treat this statement as confidential – while claiming no such confidentiality existed in this publication’s extensive questions.

As a heady cocktail of transatlantic influence, race science, and far-right politics has converged on this proud university town through the abode of Reform UK’s policy chief, the university has steadfastly refused to explain why it has allowed itself to quietly become a vehicle of Peter Thiel’s ‘Dark Enlightenment’ in Britain.

Meanwhile, with staff and students feeling abandoned by the university authorities, and with Reform’s Leader Nigel Farage facing questions about his finances and connections with billionaire donors, the reputation of one of the most revered educational institutions in the world appears to be hostage to the fortunes of one highly politicised associate professor. 

The question that must be asked is: why?