A similar question is now being asked by those on the left of the Labour party who helped to make Andy Burnham Prime Minister.

Their question was brought into focus this week by reports that Burnham has now buckled to pressure not to make Ed Miliband his Chancellor.

According to multiple reports, Burnham has been persuaded that Miliband, would not “pass the sniff test” with senior City figures, who have long opposed him being elevated to Number 11.

Instead, Burnham has reportedly been persuaded to make Morgan McSweeney ally and Blue Labour favourite, Shabana Mahmood, his Chancellor instead.

The avowedly anti-immigration Home Secretary is not a popular figure within the Labour party, to put it mildly. 

A recent poll of Labour members found that she was the least popular member of Keir Starmer’s Cabinet by some distance, falling below even Rachel Reeves and Starmer himself. 

Miliband, by contrast, was the most popular.

In this, Labour members are the polar opposites of the consensus view among most of the British commentariat.

Indeed I suspect if you were to poll senior editors and proprietors at major newspapers about their favourite member of Starmer’s Cabinet, Mahmood would likely come first and Miliband last.

Of course the question of who Burnham should make Chancellor isn’t purely a left vs right, Labour vs business and the media, one.

Miliband’s commitment to a green economy meant he was opposed by a series of trade unions representing oil and gas workers, whilst a few city figures had actually backed him over the alternatives.

Related reading: Burnham Wins in Makerfield: Can the ‘Politics of Place’ Now Offer an Antidote to the Poverty of Possibility?

Also while Miliband was the favoured candidate of the soft left in the Labour party, one of his biggest champions over recent weeks has been Tony Blair’s former Political Secretary John McTernan, who originates from a completely different wing of the party.

McTernan told Byline Times that he believes Miliband is the only candidate for Chancellor with a chance of getting a grip of the Treasury and delivering for working people.

“The choice for Andy Burnham is whether the Labour Government runs the Treasury or Treasury runs the Labour Government, it’s as simple as that,” McTernan said.

“We're in the middle of the third heatwave in the UK this year and that demands a different economy… Either we stay addicted to the 20th century fossil fuel economy, or we're led into good jobs, well-paid jobs, union jobs of the renewable economy, and that's one which also cuts costs for households who use renewable energy, cuts costs for businesses and households that use electric vehicles or electric vans. 

“The choice is so obvious. If you want to end neoliberalism, then you need to have a chancellor who knows how to switch to a different political economy.”

The fear amongst those backing Miliband is that any other candidate would simply be pushed down the same road at the Treasury that Rachel Reeves was when she was persuaded to cut the winter fuel allowance - triggering a post-election collapse in Labour support. They fear that Mahmood would be similarly malleable.

“Shabana is very able, very bright, very hardworking, very politically imaginative, but I could not tell you what hers or any other of the people who are being briefed as potential chancellors, what their approach to running the UK economy would be, or what their approach to growth would be,” says McTernan.

“The truth is if you don't have your own political economy then you will get the Treasury’s and we know what the Treasury’s is. It is austerity. It is cuts for the most vulnerable, it is the reduction of local government to a shadow of its former self.”

Mahmood's allies have pushed back against the characterisation of her as being right wing, saying that she is much more left wing on economics than widely assumed.

It is true that little is known about Mahmood’s own economic views given that her sole experience in this areas was as a junior shadow Treasury minister under Ed Miliband more than ten years ago.

However, what we do know from her time at the Home Office is that she is an essentially anti-liberal figure, favouring a closed immigration system, which in turn necessitates a closed economy.

She has justified this ‘Blue Labour’ approach to politics by insisting that it is the key to fending off Reform and the far-right. 

Announcing what she described as “the most significant changes to our asylum system in modern times” last November, Mahmood declared that “the era of permanent protection for refugees is over”.

Justifying her decision to remove the right for refugees to remain indefinitely in the UK once their asylum application is approved, she declared that “If you don’t like this, you won’t like what follows me”.

Unfortunately this strategy of delivering right-wing policies in order to fend off Farage has been a highly unsuccessful one.

Although lauded by the press, the anti-immigration rhetoric and policy pursued by Mahmood and Starmer coincided with a collapse in support for the party amongst its more liberal and metropolitan base. And rather than try to stop that collapse, Mahmood has actively welcomed it.

One of the most revealing moments on this came in April when she boasted about how she had told “white liberals” heckling her about her immigration plans to “f*** right off”.

Two months later and many of those same liberal voters did exactly as she instructed, voting heavily for the Greens and Liberal Democrats instead, and delivering Labour one of its worst local election results in its history.

Of course Burnham was able to reverse much of that collapse during his Makerfield by-election campaign. Yet he did so, not by campaigning against immigration, whilst telling liberal voters to “f*** off”, but by being a unifying figure, who focused on issues like the cost of living, whilst offering progressive alternative to the agenda pursued by the Starmer Government.

There have been some encouraging signs since then, most recently in Burnham's appointment of the brilliant former 38 Degrees and Hope Not Hate campaigner Matthew McGregor as his new head of Political Strategy. McGregor, unlike some in the Labour party, understands that Labour's loss of voters to the Greens has been the biggest cause of the party's recent collapse, rather than a simple transfer over to Reform.

Yet if Burnham does push ahead with the appointment of Mahmood, then much of the progress Burnham has made in undoing the damage caused by Starmer and McSweeney over the past two years will be undone. It would risk, as the Times' well-connected Labour chronicler Patrick Maguire put it this week, leaving Burnham's Government looking like "Mcsweeneyism in an Everton top".

This would be good news for Zack Polanski and the Greens, but it would be bad news for those hoping for a Prime Minister who will unite the progressive vote and lock Nigel Farage out of Downing Street for good.

If that is where we're heading then it would be the second time, following the victory of Starmer in 2020, that Labour left-wingers would feel duped by a leadership candidate promising left wing policies, only to deliver the complete opposite once in power.

Ever feel like you've been cheated? Some in Labour now believe that they might just have been.

Siân Berry’s bill to amend the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act, introduced this Tuesday, would end the outright exemption for the King, the heir to the throne and the "wider royal family" from the 2000-era transparency law.

Berry wants to open up the royals to Freedom of Information requests – something almost every public body is subject to and which allows researchers, journalists and the public to ask for documents in the public interest.

Section 37 of the Freedom of Information Act means the Sovereign (i.e. King Charles) and the two nearest heirs to the Throne are totally exempt from Freedom of Information requests.

There is no ‘public interest test’ that can override this. The rule also covers all communications with them, sweeping up communications with ministers and officials, even if they relate to politics and public spending.

Communications with the wider royal family are also exempt from FoI, but are subject to a public interest test – so if there is an overriding public interest in releasing, for example, communications between a minister and Prince Harry, theoretically that information could be released. However, many researchers and historians frequently find that officials block these requests too.

After this article's publication, a Government spokesperson told Byline Times: “The Government is not currently considering removing the exemption at section 37, or bringing the Royal Household into the scope of FOI Act.”

Royal biographer Dr Andrew Lownie, whose recent book on Andrew, Entitled, exposed wide-ranging allegations of cronyism and misconduct, told Byline Times: “From my experience — and I've now used this over ten years on members of the Royal Family — that public interest test has never once come down in favour of disclosure.”

He has been told material on then-Prince Andrew's role as a trade envoy won't be released until 2065 – a timeframe he says has no basis in law. It would be 105 years after Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s birth.

That’s despite the then-Prince’s role being officially separate to royal titles, and was instead an official Government appointment.

The Foreign Office and the Department for Business and Trade have used a scattergun of exemptions, seen by Byline Times, to block requests on who accompanied Andrew on trade trips – including claiming it would harm law enforcement, national security, health and safety, and even describing Lownie's efforts as "vexatious."

A separate FoI fight with Southampton University and the Cabinet Office over Lord Mountbatten’s diaries in 2021 left the historian out of pocket by £500,000 in legal costs. He eventually won his battle, but believes many times his own costs in public money were spent fighting the requests.

Even when material is released on the royals it is often heavily censored. Lownie says of the Lord Mountbatten case: “They tried to redact every single mention of the Royal Family in those three thousand pages. Really innocent stuff — 'Prince Philip came for tea,' 'Princess Elizabeth had her birthday party today' — nothing remotely sensitive.”

“They were even redacting names that had already appeared in the published version of the diaries.”

Brighton Pavilion MP Berry is now attempting to scrap some of the exemptions used to try and block the release.

Her bill – which stands little chance of succeeding without Government backing – would omit section 37 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000; to “provide that the sovereign, the Royal Family, the Royal Household, the Royal Archive and the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster” are treated like any Government department or quango when it comes to FoI requests. The Royal Archive is currently, officially, a "private collection" and and the Government claims it would not be in scope of Freedom of Information law.

In 2023, researchers from Index on Censorship surveyed 28 historians and journalists about their experience requesting archive materials on the royal family – much of which is publicly-funded.

It hinted at the extent to which the Palace holds sway over every archive in the UK.

One respondent, reportedly working for the Lambeth Palace Library archives, told the anti-censorship group they were instructed, at the Royal Archives’ request, not to provide documents from the 1940s–50s related to the royals when a researcher requested them.

And the non-profit group found that a 2023 policy change at the BBC required unseen royal-related BBC material to be vetted and sensitive content relating to the royals redacted before researchers could see it, apparently after a request from ‘Royal Liaison’. It suggested a direct channel of Palace influence over the national broadcaster's own archive.

‘Archaic Rules’

Berry told Byline Times: “Throughout the whole Andrew [Mountbatten-Windsor] saga, there was a prohibition on criticising members of the royal family in Parliament, which then got relaxed by the Speaker just ahead of him being stripped of his royal status.

“Now he's not royal, which is why I mentioned him several times in my speech. But these are archaic rules, and we do need to treat the royal family much more like a normal public body.”

When Berry learnt about the royals’ FoI exemption, she says she was “outraged that it existed.”

Related reading: Andrew Mountbatten Windsor’s Daughters Are Still Receiving Rent-Free Royal Accommodation

“I started talking to people who'd been trying to get information that way for a while, and had just hit a wall,” Berry says.

She argues the Palace authorities are “reaching out to stop other royal-related information being released, at their own discretion, in places that have nothing to do with them.”

“None of that's right.”

The Green MP says that “knowing you're completely protected, beyond what any other public servant is, probably doesn't encourage good behaviour.”

Berry believes that, if materials relating to former-Prince Andrew’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein had been put in the open earlier – without the need for Parliament to issue a ‘humble address’ demanding their release – potential wrongdoing could have been prevented. Mountbatten-Windsor is currently under police investigation over allegedly leaking confidential Government documents to business associates (he denies all wrongdoing).

Commons Gagging Order

Berry, who is a republican, is also incensed by Parliament’s own rules against discussing the royals.

“We were reminded just today by the Speaker's Office that we mustn't criticise the current monarch…I had to make it very clear I wasn't obliquely referring to the King, because I'm not allowed to…

“It was very, very clear I couldn't criticise the King, or even imply it, in my speech.”

Asked if she feels hamstrung by Parliament’s limits on criticism of the royals, Berry said: “No one in Parliament likes it. The Speaker, and particularly some of the Deputy Speakers, will stand up and call "Order" and tell you off for something you've said – and that makes you nervous. It makes you want to hold back.

“You've no idea what it's like being told off in front of the whole Chamber. The first time it happened to me…The shock of it was such a throwback, like literally being five years old and told off at school. It's such a weird feeling.”

Related reading: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor: How Power Protects Itself Through Contempt

Outside of Parliament (itself part of the Crown Estate), Berry says the royal family is able to “curate which historians get access [to royal-linked archives] and which don't.”

“They're protecting the royal image right back through history, and that means we don't have a true picture of our own history. I think that's really wrong.”

A Call From the Palace

The issues go beyond law and into convention and culture, too.

In 2008, when she was the Green Party’s de facto leader, Berry provided a quote to the Daily Mail criticising then-Prince Charles’ air travel.

She was working at Imperial College at the time, and says she got a phone call from the Palace press office the next day “telling me off”.

“They were saying how disrespectful I was being, that I should be more grateful, that he was actually very green and was promoting organic farming and environmental causes, and that I shouldn't be criticising him.”

She describes it as “a bit of a bollocking”.

“At one point I did say, ‘Well, I am a republican’ – because he kept going on about respect, and I said there's a limit to how deferential I'm going to be.”

Berry’s Freedom of Information Act 2000 (Amendment) Bill has the backing of the National Union of Journalists as well as a cross-party group of MPs, including Conservative David Davis MP and Your Party leader Jeremy Corbyn MP.

A government spokesperson said in a statement that "claims around the release of archival information, the scope of the FoI and Public Records Acts, and the handling of files related to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor" in this story were "categorically untrue" but did not provide specific examples.

MPs sponsoring the Bill:

• Ian Byrne (Labour)
• Rachael Maskell (Labour)
• Hannah Spencer (Green)
• Tom Gordon (Liberal Democrat)
• Pete Wishart (SNP)
• Kirsty Blackman (SNP)
• Claire Hanna (Social Democratic & Labour Party)
• Jeremy Corbyn (Independent)
• Ellie Chowns (Green)
• Liz Saville Roberts (Plaid Cymru)
• David Davis (Conservative)

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

Reform's deputy leader has been accused of being "cavalier with the truth" after the party withdrew a denial that it had tried to make a profile of every voter in the UK.

Richard Tice MP signed a High Court defence which contained a denial that the party aimed to use personal data in order to build a profile of every voter in the UK – something the party's lawyers later retracted.

The revelations are part of a looming trial over a campaign from thousands of Good Law Project supporters who joined the legal campaign group's '#StopTargetingMe' efforts ahead of the 2024 general election. The voters demanded that all major political parties "level with them about their personal data – as the law requires."

Over 1,700 individuals used Good Law Project's tool to ask Reform to provide a copy of all the data Reform held on them, and stop processing it.

But Reform ignored the requests, missing the one-month legal deadline to tell the voters what personal information it held on them. It finally replied just days after Good Law Project sent a legal letter threatening action. The party only narrowly avoided a default judgment against it after ignoring subsequent legal letters.

Fifty one voters are taking Reform to court. A GLP spokesperson said: "Reform failed to comply – and so we sued." The party has been refused permission to throw out the case, but is now seeking permission to appeal, Byline Times can reveal.

Sworn Denials, Later Withdrawn

Reform UK's privacy policy cited by Good Law Project stated an ambition "to create and maintain a profile for each registered voter in the UK".

But when the party responded to the complainants, Nigel Farage's officials claimed to have no data on any of those who requested it, something Good Law Project argues is highly improbable.

Reform's defence did not address either point directly but said "the Defendant denies every allegation" in two paragraphs of GLP's claim.

They contained both the quoted privacy policy wording – "Reform Party UK aims to create and maintain a profile for each registered voter in the UK. We will do this by merging the Electoral Register(s) with other data that may be lawfully available to us…" – and the assertion that Reform uses NationBuilder.

The defence was signed by Tice in his capacity as a director of Reform UK Party Limited.

A statement of truth carries a warning that contempt of court proceedings may be brought against "anyone who makes, or causes to be made, a false statement in a document verified by a Statement of Truth without an honest belief in its truth."

The party's lawyers later withdrew both denials, in a response to a request for further information in July 2025. Reform's original sworn case was therefore contradicted by its own later admissions to the High Court. There is no suggestion Tice knowingly made a false statement, and the court has made no finding on that point.

Reform maintains that its response to the voters asking for their personal data "was correct", and that at the time it received the requests it was not processing the personal data of any of the individuals who sent them. Those are the questions now heading for trial.

However, the claims from the party to voters that Reform had "no record of you", in GLP's view, look far less believable after Farage's party confirmed their privacy policy stated that Reform aimed to create a detailed profile of every voter in the country, and that it uses the NationBuilder campaign software.

'Cavalier With the Truth'

GLP argues the retractions show that Richard Tice "originally swore a statement to the contrary which he then admitted was wrong."

Jolyon Maugham, founder of Good Law Project, told Byline Times: "Richard Tice has never explained how he came to swear a central fact – denying Reform's use of NationBuilder – which turned out to be simply untrue. The Civil Procedure Rules talk about this stuff being contempt of court – and at the very least it is cavalier with the truth." (For clarity, the defence was submitted by Reform's counsel, and Tice signed the statement of truth verifying it.)

Reform's May 2025 defence also appeared to contradict itself. At one point it states the party "denies that it has failed to answer, or that it has delayed answering, any of the Emails".

Five paragraphs later, the party "admits that it did not answer the [data] request within one month of receiving that request and admits that it did not extend the time required for its response". Both statements are verified by the same statement of truth from Richard Tice.

Related reading: Reform Wrongly Claims Party’s Elections Language Ban ‘Would Not Apply To Gaelic’ – Before Saying They’ll Rewrite Plans

According to GLP's account of Reform's barrister's submissions for the party, Reform also floated the idea that it was entitled to answer the subject access requests using only the data it held at the moment it had to comply, rather than when the request itself came in.

In other words, they could delete a voter's data after receiving a request for the information the party held on them – and then claim to have no data on them.

A spokesperson for GLP stated: "[The] KC for Reform mooted his client was entitled to delete data it held at the time a subject access request was made and provide only the data it held at the time of compliance. If this is Reform's position it would be remarkable – and almost certainly wrong," a 19 June 2026 statement from GLP said.

Into the Long Grass

Reform sought permission to appeal its rejected efforts to have the case thrown out. But on the same day the judgment was handed down (19 June 2026), High Court judge Mr Justice Murray refused it, saying they had no real prospect of success.

Now the party has gone to the Court of Appeal in a long-shot move that could drag the case out for years. Backers of the claimants are understood to believe it is an attempt to kick the issue into the long grass.

Reform had attempted to argue that, since part of Good Law Project is now legally based in Jersey (as of this May), the case should be thrown out. But a High Court judge dismissed GLP's location as "irrelevant".

Mr Justice Murray added: "The claim sets out a clear allegation of a breach by the Defendant of relevant data protection rules and non-material damage suffered by the Relevant Individuals. There is therefore a proper dispute for resolution at trial and not on this application."

The case is at an early stage, with the High Court judge finding GLP's case is "arguable" and fit for trial. No date has yet been set and Reform's latest Court of Appeal efforts could mean it is a long way off yet.

If Reform fails again to get the case struck out, the party must pay Good Law Project and the Access to Justice Foundation's costs, totalling around £180,000.

Reform UK and Richard Tice were contacted for comment.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

The first point is that it makes no financial sense to axe this group of journalists. They don’t get sick pay or paid holidays. They don’t get paid a retainer, but base themselves in interesting parts of Europe, make themselves experts on their patch, and then get paid only when they are commissioned to do a piece. 

When they do one, they almost always do it without help from camera operators, producers or safety advisers, increasingly doing everything themselves on their smartphones, saving the BBC colossal sums of money. They are effectively one-man-bands performing symphonies to orchestral standards.  

It’s also a very poor editorial decision. These are journalists who have decades of experience and are soaked in the values and culture of the BBC. They are flexible, creative, and willing to put themselves in harm's way (they are all required to be trained to work in hostile environments). This last point is something that I’m certain the BBC’s most senior managers do not appreciate - how many Google employees, for example, would risk endangering themselves for their company?

The BBC recently issued a press release proudly proclaiming that it has “grown its global audience to reach over half a billion people every week for the first time since contemporary records began.”

Related reading: BBC Laura Kuenssberg Show Accused of Anti-Green Bias After Cancelling Zack Polanski Interview

Jonathan Munro, Interim CEO, BBC News and Current Affairs, added “people come to our journalism in record-breaking numbers for the breadth and depth of BBC reporting. We have consistently delivered distinctive and impartial coverage and, importantly, retained our position as the most trusted news provider in the UK and around the world.”

It has been able to do all that because it has expert, dedicated journalists in places like the Balkans, Poland and Switzerland who know their regions backwards, have spent years building up contacts and can “consistently deliver distinctive and impartial coverage” and outstanding value for money. So why are they first for the chop?

The answer lies with the people making the decisions, who opted to go for “low-hanging fruit” - correspondents who are easy to get rid of because they are not members of staff and don’t need to be given pay-offs. 

It’s an old BBC joke that it has always been true that you could sack a third of the BBC’s workforce without anyone noticing. The problem is, the wrong third would always be selected.  It is the useless and bloated layers of management that need to be chopped - but those are the people who decide who goes, and there is no culture of self-sacrifice for the greater good among this group. 

In the recent BBC press release I mentioned above Jonathan Munro took the time to “thank BBC teams across the world for delivering outstanding journalism just when the world needs it most.”

However, the thank yous were entirely absent when the five freelance correspondents were told they were being cut, and there was no thought at all about “delivering outstanding journalism”.

By my reckoning there are at least three distinct layers of management between Munro and the correspondents who are being cast aside, and there are also several more layers of senior management above Munro (making him either a lower-upper-level manager, or possibly an upper-middle-level one).

I have been told by someone who took part, that a conference call was held two days after the correspondents received the terse emails telling them they would be out of jobs in six weeks’ time. 

In the course of the call one of these lower-middle managers said “the reality is that, you know, the BBC has been told to cut a huge amount of money. On the other hand, I would also point out that there is absolutely no strategy here”.

They continued, “so that is a kind of fundamental problem with what we're dealing with… we haven't had the senior leadership clearly that would have driven that kind of decision-making process. What I would hope is that managers do realise that with a more concrete vision of where we're going, then perhaps some of what we're doing is not the most efficient way forward.”

If it was serious about saving, the BBC would (and should) cut its self-interested management, not its dedicated and trusted field journalists. The performance of the corporation’s “leaders” does not merit current levels of remuneration, so managerial pay levels should also be cut.

And this stuff really matters, because while its domestic political coverage has often been substandard in recent years, the BBC’s international coverage has indeed helped it grow its reputation as one of the world’s most trusted news providers. Casually cutting the journalists who have built that trust has to be an act of self-harm. 

Of  course, the BBC’s Director General, Matt Brittin is new in the job, and brings with him his experience as a Google executive. He will have to quickly prove that he fully values the organization he now has to lead. 

It’s also worth saying that the cuts would not be necessary if the government woke up to how valuable the BBC is to the UK’s soft-power influence around the world and adequately funded it.

In reality, the BBC just needs more money, and then secure funding for the future. But if it has to make cuts, the place to wield the axe is among the managers who prioritise their own advancement and survival above the interest of the corporation and its audiences.

The Reform amendment to the Government's elections bill, as first reported by Byline Times, would see campaigners and candidates who use languages such as Scottish Gaelic, Cornish, Scots, Irish – or Urdu and Punjabi, facing up to six months in prison.

Reform UK ignored this outlet's request for comment. But following our story, The Scotsman quoted Highlands & Islands MSP for Reform UK, Max Bannerman, denying it would affect Gaelic or Scots, saying: "This amendment was drafted for application in England and Wales, not Scotland and Northern Ireland."

However, that is untrue.

The amendment signed by every sitting Reform UK MP states: "A person shall not print or publish, or cause to be printed or published, any [election-related] bill, placard, poster or printed document…unless the material is in the English language or the Welsh language…

"A person who commits an offence under this section is liable on summary conviction— (a) in England and Wales, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 6 months, to a fine or to both; (b) in Scotland or Northern Ireland, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 6 months, to a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale or to both."

In correspondence seen by Byline Times, a Reform spokesperson later told Concubhar Ó Liatháin, Gaeltacht Correspondent of Ireland's The Journal: "The amendment was drafted for application in England and Wales, not in Scotland and Northern Ireland. It aims to preserve the integrity of elections by ensuring that they are fought in domestic languages, including English and Welsh, and not Urdu or Bengali as we recently saw in Gorton & Denton.

"Similarly, our MSPs in Scotland are currently exploring introducing a Bill to the Scottish parliament to ensure that future Scottish elections can only be fought in Gaelic, Scots and English."

However, when pressed by Ó Liatháin on why the amendment included prison sentences for those in Scotland and Northern Ireland, Reform UK appeared to blame the Commons authorities, saying: "This was essentially an administrative error. The Table Office changed the amendment to explicitly mention Scotland and Northern Ireland which was not in our original draft."

Pushed again on why they hadn't therefore dropped the amendment, the Reform spokesperson added: "The Bill we amended has now been dropped. If it's brought back we will submit another amendment that explicitly clarifies these measures would only apply to England and Wales."

It is not true that the bill has been dropped. It has been postponed to September to give time for the Hillsborough bill, creating a duty of candour for public officials.

Excluding Scotland and Northern Ireland in a new amendment would still have the effect of banning Cornish-language election materials in England. British Sign Language and Braille would also appear to be at risk, and (as intended) all other non-English or Welsh languages.

However, there is no indication in the text of the amendment, as written, that it applies only to England and Wales, and the sentencing language is clear it would apply to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Identities Dismissed

Reform's Max Bannerman added: "As a highlander who is a keen supporter of the Gaelic language and Scotland's rich cultural heritage, I can guarantee that Reform UK is committed to protecting the linguistic heritage of Britain."

He claimed the amendment "was about preserving the integrity of elections and ensuring that they are fought in domestic languages, not Urdu or Bengali."

"This is not about diminishing Scotland's identity or heritage," he told The Scotsman.

But the reaction from voters in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Cornwall has been intensely opposed.

Welsh governing party Plaid Cymru's Westminster Leader, Liz Saville-Roberts responded to Byline Times' story, saying it was "outright discrimination from Reform."

"It shows a stubborn ignorance of the advantages of bilingualism and multilingualism, and exposes Reform's politics as a tyranny of the majority when it comes to use of language."

A top comment on a Scottish forum said: "Reform claims to champion free speech until it's speech they don't like." Another called it "unhinged culture-war bilge." One thought that Reform believed the real target was Arabic or Hindi material and Reform simply forgot Scottish Gaelic, Irish and Cornish existed.

On a Cornwall forum, one noted the policy was a "guaranteed way to alienate Cornish voters." Another commenter added: "Farage wants to jail people that speak indigenous British languages... What a patriot."

And in Northern Ireland, one voter noted the amendment would apparently stop Sinn Féin using its own party name on election material, since it is in Irish. The same could be said for Mebyon Kernow, the pro-independence party with three councillors on Cornwall Council.

The Scottish National Party has strongly condemned the move, branding it “anti-Scottish”. SNP MSP for the Highlands and Islands, Maree Todd, said: "Reform must now do the right thing - apologise to the people of Scotland for attempting to criminalise election materials written in Scottish languages and immediately withdraw this outrageous amendment."

Irish language campaigners are also irate at the proposals and believe it would breach the Good Friday Agreement.

'As Disgraceful as it is Delusional'

Responding to Byline Times' story, Irish Fianna Fáil MEP Barry Andrews, said: "Even for Nigel Farage, this is crazy. It would clearly contradict the Good Friday Agreement. The amendment must be withdrawn."

Dr Pádraig Ó Tiarnaigh, spokesperson for Irish language community campaign network "An Dream Dearg", echoed the fears over Ireland's peace process, telling this outlet: "Reform's attempted legislative attack on the Irish Language is as disgraceful as it is delusional. The Good Friday Agreement and indeed the recent Identity and Language Act (2022) afford official recognition to the status of Irish here, and since 2001, the British Government has ratified the European Charter for Regional Minority Languages for Irish up to Part 3.

"Only last year we succeeded in repealing a Penal-era (1737) ban on the use of Irish in Courts and after many decades of activism we have finally seen the appointment of the State's very first Irish Language Commissioner."

Related reading: Reform UK Plans To Jail Candidates For Using Irish, Gaelic Or Cornish On Election Leaflets

Dr Ó Tiarnaigh believes Reform MPs "clearly have zero understanding of the history of the Irish language in this part of Ireland, where over many centuries, the language was banned and outlawed."

"Its community of speakers were oppressed, imprisoned and marginalised. Any effort to re-criminalise Irish speakers will be resisted and let there be little doubt, those efforts will fail."

He said that despite all efforts from British parliaments and courts to "erase the Irish language," Irish has "survived, revived and [is] now thriving."

"The future for the Irish language is very, very exciting, and we urge the narrow-minded, draconian policy drafters behind this bill to embrace a diverse, pluralist, multilingual and multicultural society where language rights support citizens who chose to live their lives through their indigenous tongue," the Irish language campaigner added.

Reform's Bannerman claims he is "exploring introducing a Bill to the Scottish Parliament to ensure that future Scottish elections are fought in Gaelic, Scots and English only."

This would appear to directly clash with his own MPs in Westminster.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

New Clause 107 to the Representation of the People Bill – tabled by Reform UK's deputy leader Richard Tice and co-signed by every sitting Reform MP (including Lee Anderson, Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman) – would require all election publications material to be "in the English language or the Welsh language" only.

Publishing campaign material in any other language would become a criminal offence – punishable on summary conviction by up to six months' imprisonment and/or a fine, and becoming an illegal practice for candidates, agents and parties.

The penalties are drafted to apply across the UK – including in Northern Ireland, where the Irish language and Ulster-Scots are protected in law and under the Good Friday Agreement designed to end the decades-long civil war.

The ban on languages other than English or Welsh would appear to criminalise election material published in Irish, used in parts of Northern Ireland, and Scottish Gaelic – including the bilingual leaflets routinely used in constituencies such as Na h-Eileanan an Iar – while exempting Welsh.

Five of six Cornish MPs (four Labour and one Lib Dem) have signed a joint statement at the bottom of this piece, exclusively published by Byline Times, condemning Reform's proposals.

And the Cornish nationalist party Mebyon Kernow says it is "unbelievable" that MPs from Reform UK have tabled the amendment to the Representation of the People Bill in the House of Commons.

The Scottish National Party has also come out strongly against the proposals. SNP MSP for the Highlands and Islands Maree Todd said: "This despicable anti-Scottish amendment reveals exactly what Reform really thinks of Scotland – and would threaten anyone publishing election materials in Scots or Gaelic with up to six months in prison.

"It's not even as if this amendment was introduced by one rogue MP – it was tabled by Reform's Deputy Leader, and co-signed by a number of their MPs.

"Reform must now do the right thing – apologise to the people of Scotland for attempting to criminalise election materials written in the Scottish languages, and immediately withdraw this outrageous amendment."

An SNP source said "plenty of our election material would fall foul of this – lots of SNP campaign literature, especially in the Western Isles, features Gaelic, even if the materials are not written exclusively in the language, though some are."

Lots of SNP literature also uses Scots words and phrases, with Scots identified as a distinct language under the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages. The UK ratified the charter in 2001.

Since there is often overlap, Reform would then presumably have to increase funding for police to identify what they deemed English versus what was Scots.

The SNP has previously offered Gaelic translations of party manifestos, something which would likely be illegal under Reform's amendment.

'Plainly Discriminatory'

Sophia Smith Galer, a language expert and author of How to Kill a Language, told Byline Times the move was "plainly discriminatory."

"It's discriminatory not only to the other indigenous languages of the UK affected by this — the ones that aren't English and Welsh — but also to individuals who could be publishing political literature in any of the migrant languages that also have a home here."

She added that Reform UK wants to "frame languages as a problem, and as part of a wider problem — multiculturalism."

"This is part of a broader vilification of languages other than English."

Britain is a signatory to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Smith Galer said it was the defining "instrument we have that protects and promotes language diversity, and minority languages especially… They would take a very dim view of this too."

A law like this would be "unique in Western Europe," the linguistics journalist noted. "It's not something any of our peers has done."

"What's funny is that, to police this, you'd probably need multilingual policing. You'd actually require language skills to enforce it. I don't know if Reform were planning on creating multilingual jobs — I wouldn't recommend this as the way to go about it — but that's accidentally what they've created."

Related reading: The Walls Are Closing In Around Nigel Farage’s Crypto Insurgency

'Send Anyone Using Cornish to Jail'

Noah Law, Labour MP for the Cornish seat of St Austell and Newquay, told Byline Times: "The fact that Reform would even think of tabling this amendment, just goes to show how ignorant they are to left-behind parts of the UK with their own distinct cultures and languages. They are ignorant of Cornwall".

Speaking on behalf of Cornish party Mebyon Kernow, Cllr Loveday Jenkin said: "It is ludicrous that Reform UK are seeking to outlaw and criminalise the use of Celtic languages such as Cornish, Irish and Scottish Gaelic (as well as Romani) on election materials.

"I also find it extremely worrying that Reform MPs have such little respect for the Cornish language and the national minority status of the Cornish people. Instead of supporting one of the UK's historic Celtic languages, they want to send anyone using Cornish on an election leaflet to jail. Madness!

"The clause is so daft that it would even ban Mebyon Kernow activists from campaigning as we would not be allowed to use our party name on election materials – as it is in Cornish." Mebyon Kernow means 'sons of Cornwall' in Kernewek/Cornish.

Conservative MPs have also moved an amendment to "ban election materials published in a foreign language," though, unlike the Reform UK amendment, it states that this "would not ban campaigning in native languages of the British Islands such as in English, Welsh, Cornish, Ulster Scots, Irish, et al. Nor would it prevent campaigning via the likes of BSL or Braille."

Mebyon Kernow opposes any amendments to specify which languages can or cannot be used on election leaflets, saying: "All inhabitants of the UK should be able to read about party policies in the language that they speak."

Related reading: ‘There’s No Money In Politics If You’re Straight’: How Farage’s Words Are Coming Back To Haunt Him

'Against the Good Friday Agreement'

Julian de Spáinn, Ard-Rúnaí (General Secretary) of Conradh na Gaeilge, the leading Irish language body in Ireland, told Byline Times the move was "very small minded."

"It really is a sad reflection [on Reform] that they are not taking the official languages of the UK on board — Northern Ireland included. It goes against the Good Friday Agreement, which called for resolute action to support linguistic diversity. That was agreed by the British government and the Irish government, and you would expect that the language — now recognised in the north of Ireland — would be included in any bill going through Westminster…

"Maybe they're simply not aware of the progress on the Irish language in the north of Ireland. I'd call on them to update their knowledge of what's going on and to ensure they're not taking language rights away — they should be adding to language rights. Many people have been educated through the medium of Irish; many people use Irish as a daily language in the north of Ireland. The language itself is thousands of years old and part of the heritage of these islands. It's a language for all — it doesn't belong to any one group."

Irish language election materials are on the rise across Ireland, de Spáinn said. "It would be very unwelcome if [Reform] were to take away that opportunity to have the language seen more, which is what's happening in Northern Ireland."

"We're seeing Irish included more in daily living… [The amendment] creates such serious legal jeopardy for people who use the language."

"The language shouldn't be used as a political tool. It's a language for all… It would lead to problems in the north of Ireland if legislation like this went through. [Reform] should make themselves aware of this and make sure they don't create conflict."

On Monday, reports emerged that the Representation of the People Bill would be delayed until September, giving new PM Andy Burnham time to rewrite it if needed. It was due to be debated again this Tuesday (14th July).

Sophia Smith Galer added: "One sure way to stand against freedom of expression is to police language use — and that includes a multilingual person's choice between the languages they speak. I don't know what Reform's justification is, but this is not the activity of a party that wants to defend free speech…

"When they have greater political power, politicians who hold myopic linguistic attitudes will try to enact legislation limiting the population's language rights. That's very dangerous."

Reform UK and Richard Tice were contacted for comment.

This article has been updated to note that Scots is recognised as a distinct language under the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages.

Joint Statement from Five Cornwall MPs

"Reform UK has tabled an amendment to the Representation of the People Bill that would make it a criminal offence to publish election material in Cornish, carrying a penalty of up to six months' imprisonment.

"As five of the MPs representing Cornwall, we fundamentally disagree.

"Amendment NC107, tabled by Richard Tice MP, and backed by all Reform MPs, would permit election material to be published only in English or Welsh.

"This is a direct attack on Cornish language, identity, and culture. We Cornish MPs are exceptionally proud that in January 2026, the Government officially recognised Kernewek under Part III of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. As a result, Kernewek now has the same status as all other Celtic languages across the UK, including Welsh and Scottish Gaelic.

"The inclusion of Welsh, and not Kernewek, in Reform’s ill-intentioned amendment is demonstrative of their complete lack of understanding of Cornwall’s unique identity and heritage.

"We will wholeheartedly oppose this amendment in Parliament."

Signed by:

• Perran Moon MP, Camborne and Redruth (Labour)
• Noah Law MP, St Austell and Newquay (Labour)
• Jayne Kirkham MP, Truro and Falmouth (Labour)
• Anna Gelderd MP, South East Cornwall (Labour)
• Ben Maguire MP, North Cornwall (Liberal Democrat)
  

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

You might be able to find a couple of centre-left politicians - when Byline Times checked at the Relay in Paris CDG, there was a book by former PS presidential candidate Ségolène Royal and current Place Publique presidential hopeful Raphaël Glucksmann - but the majority of portraits on the covers of the books will be those of far right presidential candidate Jordan Bardella, the right wing former president Nicholas Sarkozy, the leaders of far right microparties like Marine Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal, Nicholas Dupont-Aignant and Éric Zemmour and a handful of Macron’s right wing ministers.

Far-right media mogul Vincent Bolloré bought the Lagardère group, which owns Relay, in 2023, and since then, the chain's shopfronts have become part of his political project. They were  recently described by the Observatory of Multinational Corporations as the “front line” of Bolloré’s "political crusade”, and evidence of declining pluralism recently became apparent when an order of 400 copies of a new book titled Bernard Arnault: His Ruthless World, which was critical of Bolloré’s friend and fellow media oligarch, Bernard Arnault, was cancelled by the chain without explanation.

Bolloré adheres to an identitarian Catholic worldview that understands France as experiencing a clash of civilisations as a result of Islamic immigration. According to a 2021 investigation by Le Monde, he is surrounded by “yes men”, including some who spent their youth as members of ultranationalist groupuscules and were close associates of Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Relay is not the only front in the multipronged culture war being waged by Bolloré and like-minded billionaires such as Pierre-Édouard Stérin, who funds a small conservative theme park and hosts charity events that critics argue reinforce a moralistic, right-wing Catholic worldview.

Related reading: How Far-Right Billionaires are Destroying French Politics – and What the UK Must Learn

Bolloré controls an empire of media outlets, including the far-right television channel CNews, and formerly moderate newspaper the Journal Du Dimanche, as well as streaming services and publishers, including a publisher that produces school textbooks, which he puts in service of his worldview .

This does not always mean straightforwardly backing the National Rally; often, it means using the media to advance the preferred political themes of the far right.

Victor Mallett, a Financial Times journalist and author of Far Right France, told Byline Times that Bolloré is engaged in a concerted move “to push the far right, though he’s not always narrowly focused on Marine Le Pen and Bardella. He’s also given time to Éric Zemmour [a far-right politician and journalist who has been convicted multiple times for racial hatred] and Sarkozy and anyone else on the hard right that he’s quite keen on. You could say that he’s hedging his bets”.

In 2023, he bought the Hachette group, including the prestigious publishing house Grasset, which sparked fears about political control among the authors. These fears came to pass earlier this year when, in April, Olivier Nora, the beloved editor of Grasset who had headed up the publishing house for 26 years, was fired without warning.

His firing ignited a wave of protest, prompting over 100 authors as diverse as the feminist author of King Kong Theory Virginie Despentes and Bernard-Henri Lévy, the philosopher with neo-conservative leanings, to quit the publishing house in solidarity with Nora.

Laurent Binet, the author of several books including HHhH, was one of the authors who quit Grasset following Nora’s exit.

He told Byline Times that there were no questions of Nora’s competence before he was fired.

“Bolloré wrote an extremely petty and small-minded article in the Journal du dimanche, raising the question of his competence because Grasset supposedly had very poor financial results. This is false in relation to the wider world of publishing. Grasset was profitable and not loss-making, which in the current climate of publishing is a result in itself”.

“Grasset is an old publishing house with a lot of symbolic capital… Its great claim to glory is that it published Proust for the first time. For the three years after Bolloré bought Hachette, the threat was plain. We all had the impression that what protected us was Olivier Nora, and as long as he was there we felt that the publishing house continued as before. With the same editorial policy as before”.

He added that once Nora had been fired, the decision of the authors to quit was “fast and unanimous” because they knew what was coming.

“There was a precedent with Fayard [another publishing house under the Hachette umbrella]. Bolloré really decided to make that a propaganda tool, the books he publishes now are mostly by far-right or hard-right authors like Sarkozy, Zemmour, Bardella, etc.”

The process of “Bollorisation”, as the radicalisation of cultural institutions has become known, has extended well beyond the left. “What’s interesting”, Binet said, “is that neoconservative authors left with us. Even for them this was too much”.

The Grasset affair was not the only instance of cultural workers starting to push back against Bolloré’s increasing control of culture. The Bolloré family took a controlling stake in Canal+, France’s biggest sponsor of cinema, a decade ago, but it was previously understood to be insulated from the politics of its owner, until this summer at the Cannes film festival, a row broke out when Maxime Saada, the head of Canal+ threatened to blacklist over 600 artists who had signed a petition warning against French cinema’s reliance on the far right mogul.

Canal has committed almost half a billion euros to fund films until the end of 2027; after that, filmmakers fear that Bolloré may start applying political pressure and only finance films that are ideologically aligned.

Canal has already made steps in this direction, distributing the documentary adaptation of far-right politician Éric Zemmour’s book French Suicide, which famously downplayed the role of Vichy France in the Holocaust.

Bolloré’s offensive in cinema is occurring alongside threats from the far right party the National Rally to cut state subsidies to the art form.

Archibald, a campaigner with the Earth Uprising group against Bolloré’s media dominance, told Byline Times that the result of Bolloré’s consolidation of media is that “racist ideas are now available in every venue”, pointing to the fact that earlier this year CNews defended the right of one of its contributors to compare Bally Bagayoko, the black mayor of Saint-Denis, to a monkey.

A backlash to Bolloré is starting to emerge.

According to Archibald, Bolloré’s hostile takeover of cultural institutions has largely happened by stealth, but groups like his are banding together to raise awareness of what the billionaires Bolloré and Stérin are doing to culture, and trying to support alternative institutions.

In the political sphere, the left parties have started to hit back against the far-right billionaires.

Olivier Faure, the leader of the centre-left Socialist Party, accused Bolloré of trying to “lobotomise publishing” in response to the Grasset affair, and the populist left party France Unbowed has vowed to break up media oligopolies if leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon becomes president.

There has also been something of an institutional backlash. One of Bolloré’s channels, C8, was closed down for breaching broadcast rules. “That was pretty interesting”, Mallet said: “There’s no sign of that sort of spine in the British system”.

Although CNews has been fined several times for breaching broadcast rules, including for broadcasting discriminatory outbursts, Mallet doesn’t think that Arcom, the broadcast regulator, will “dare” to act ahead of the election despite an outstanding case against CNews, because “it would be like a red rag to a bull” allowing the far right to claim political interference.

According to Laurent Binet: “The cultural battle against Bolloré taking place in France is the mirror of the global political battle. It’s important to say that Grasset was not a left-wing publishing house. We are trying to defend the very notion of pluralism”.

The newfound scrutiny this week centres around ‘Posh George’ Cottrell, a convicted fraudster, crypto entrepreneur and Reform insider that Byline Times revealed as the Brexit Party’s de facto treasurer back in 2019. Are we beginning to see the broader picture?

In recent days, authorities have confirmed that there are ongoing investigations into Cottrell’s financial relationship with Reform UK. The Met Police have reportedly spent over a year now probing at least £500,000 in donations from Fiona Cottrell (mother of George) to the party, following suspicions that she could be a proxy for an impermissible source of funds. 

On top of that, the National Crime Agency (NCA) has reportedly received multiple suspicious activity reports relating to millions of pounds in transactions to organisations operated by deputy leader Richard Tice. Cottrell himself is reported to have loaned Tice’s company Tisun Investment £80,000, and Fiona Cottrell gave £1 million to Tice’s think-tank ‘Britain Means Business’ in June 2024 – just over a month before Farage ran for Parliament in Clacton.

Pressed with questions about the Met’s investigation, Tice has presented himself and his party as being victims of a “politically motivated smear campaign.”

While arguing that “this is about the establishment trying to kill off a disruptive political party,” Tice ironically pivoted to touting the blue-blooded lineage of the Cottrells. "My family have known the Cottrell family for 50 years,” he said. “They're a very successful aristocratic family."

According to the Guardian's City Editor Anna Issac, Tice also threatened to injunct the paper to stop it publishing details of the NCA flagging. He appears to have swiftly sent over the newspaper’s allegations put to him – without answering any queries – directly to The Telegraph, who promptly wrote them up as an apparent spoiler of their story.

Isabel Oakeshott, Tice’s partner and the international editor of Murdoch-owned Talk TV, looked very uncomfortable live on air when she was informed of the Met investigation. Describing the revelations as “concerning,” Oakeshott was hesitant to comment. She reiterated Tice’s same line that “Richard has said that he has known the Cottrell family for some fifty years.” 

This week’s bombshells follow on from explosive revelations in The Times about Cottrell secretly providing security accommodation and staffing for the Reform leader. Back in 2019, Byline Times exposed the convicted fraudster Cottrell as a key fundraiser for Farage’s Brexit Party – also revealing that the party was flagged as "high risk" by the elections watchdog for receiving illegal and untraceable foreign donations via PayPal.

In truth Cottrell – described in The Sunday Times as a "fixer-cum-financier to the ultra-rich in Mayfair" whose wealth “derives from crypto” – is just one tile in a much larger dark money mosaic. 

The other five-alarm fire for Reform is the Parliamentary investigation into Nigel Farage’s undeclared £5 million tax-free gift from Christopher Harborne, which coincided with a massive pro-crypto policy push from Reform and apparently an effort to directly lobby the governor of the Bank of England towards policies that would benefit the crypto industry.The standards investigation looms over Farage’s abrupt resignation and decision to stand again in Clacton (against Count Binface).

Another non-dom crypto billionaire, founder of BitMEX trading platform Ben Delo, has also given Reform UK £4 million. Delo pleaded guilty to wilfully violating US anti-money laundering rules before being pardoned by President Trump. As this newspaper revealed in an exclusive special investigation this week, he’s also wrapped up in the tight circle of Reform policy architect James Orr and his intellectual ‘dark enlightenment’ pipeline at Cambridge University. 

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

Navigating the labyrinth of influence and financial connections beneath the surface of Reform UK, cryptocurrency really does seem to appear at every turn. The industry on its facade promises to usher in the utopian and democratic future of finance, but in practice it has become a magnet for opaque wealth, regulatory arbitrage and clandestine political influence.

Earlier this year, Farage invested £215,000 in Stack BTC, a UK-listed bitcoin treasury firm where former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng serves as executive chair. Farage took a 6.3% stake, later fronting a £2m corporate bitcoin purchase in a promotional video, which prompted the Liberal Democrats to demand a Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) probe.

And of course Nathan Gill – Farage’s confidante sentenced to ten and a half years in prison for taking pro-Kremlin bribes – was arrested en route to a conference of “political technologists” in Moscow. Byline Times exclusively revealed that Gill had prepared a presentation about the electoral role of cryptocurrencies for his Russian sponsors. 

A political movement promising to take on “the establishment” has become unusually reliant on an industry built around borderless capital, fragmented regulation and financial opacity. 

While Reform is a stand-out example, Britain has more broadly been inundated by a flood of money into our political system. Over the last decade, private donations from companies and individuals giving more than £1m have surged, from 1% of the total in 2015 to more than 33% in 2024. According to Transparency International, one in every ten pounds comes from unknown or questionable sources. 

It’s having a real impact on public trust. According to new polling from YouGov, 77% of the public feel British governments are generally sleazy, and 73% of Britons describe Nigel Farage as sleazy, including 56% who think he is very sleazy. Even 40% of Reform UK voters now see Farage as sleazy. 

Off the back of the Rycroft review, the Government has announced what they say are “tough new rules to crack down on foreign money in UK elections.” It includes a new timebound cap on donations from those who move to the UK from overseas (potentially impacting donors like Harborne and Delo who may seek to return to Britain in light of other rules limiting donations for non-doms), tougher checks on company donations to ensure only “legitimate UK-linked” businesses can donate, and new requirements for candidates to prove funding comes from legitimate sources. 

Campaigners have concerns, however, that this whack-a-mole approach of targeting specific donors and types of donations (while welcome) will still allow money to slip through the cracks. The Good Law Project, Transparency International, Unlock Democracy, and other democracy orgs are endorsing Stella Creasy MP’s amendment to the Representation of the People Bill that would holistically cap all donations from any one individual in a calendar year at £100,000. 

Andy Pryce, a recently retired diplomat who spent a decade tracking Russian influence operations, warned in Byline Times that it would only cost roughly £25 million for a hostile foreign state to buy an election.

Reform has so far raised more than £30 million in declared donations since 2024. It is vital that the party should be able to demonstrate exactly where all of that money originated from.

It follows a string of lobbying scandals in recent years, with former ministers who've broken the rules by lobbying former contacts or taking up privileged roles after leaving office facing zero sanctions.

The recently-established Ethics and Integrity Commission has published a review with recommendations into Lobbying, Business Appointment Rules and Disclosure.

The EIC report proposes a centrally published register of individuals and companies found in serious breach of the rules, as well as far tougher punishments when the law, and appointments advice, is broken.

The much-criticised revolving-door regulator ACOBA was abolished on 13 October 2025. It was meant to stop former ministers taking advantage of their privileged contacts and knowledge of Government for profit after leaving office, but was roundly slammed as toothless. But the system does not appear to have improved since then.

Its functions were split across eight different bodies — Independent Adviser on Ministerial Standards, Civil Service Commission, MOD, Scottish and Welsh governments, GCHQ, MI5, MI6 — with no central coordination.

The report finds that current enforcement is essentially non-existent. Legal advice has found any sanctions would currently be unenforceable "unless the government committed to instituting criminal sanctions", meaning the entire system currently runs on reputational risk alone.

Britain has a lobbying register, but it is estimated that it covers less than five per centof lobbying activity.

Just 249 organisations are registered with the Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists. In Canada, the figure is 7,957, the EU 17,067, and in the US it's 13,699. Even in Scotland, with a population a tenth of England, the figure is over 1,400.

The maximum penalty for organisations breaching lobbying rules is just £7,500, compared to Germany and the EU £50,000, Canada £113,000 and the US £154,000. That's despite there being a circa £1,000 registration fee in the UK, compared to none in those states.

The report itself recommends a tenfold increase in the maximum fine for rule-breaches, to £75,000.

Since the Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists was established, only 31 penalty notices have ever been issued – all for lobbying without being properly registered.

The maximum fine has been used just once in that entire period.

And no criminal prosecution has ever been brought under part one of the Lobbying Act, despite that route existing on paper.

'A Quick Win' for Burnham

Labour's Baroness Hayter, who has her own backbench bill in the Lords now to attempt to tighten up lobbying rules, told Byline Times: "Before I met the Ethics and Integrity Commission, I'd hoped my bill might actually become law — that the government would say, 'We need to do something; this is a quick and dirty one, let's give it some time.' It would have been difficult for them to argue against it, since it was our policy in opposition.

"But given what's happened, and the [EIC] report, I'm now, in a sense, quite happy if the government says, 'We like your approach, but we want to do the bigger job and do the whole lot.'"

Hayter was involved in passing the original Lobbying Act in 2013. She said: "What I think the government, and everyone else, would like is for me to remove the existing exemption in the Act for consultant lobbyists who aren't registered for VAT. That exemption was originally meant — with no hostile intent — for small organisations. But in practice it means lobbyists based overseas don't have to register, not because they're small, but because they're not VAT-registered here."

But she urged the next PM, Andy Burnham, to look at her bill. "This would be a quick win for him. My bill needs no public money."

Related reading: A Hostile Foreign State Could ‘Buy A UK Election For Just £25m’

Baroness Hayter also backed proposals for sanctions if former ministers break lobbying rules after leaving office, saying the current system "clearly isn't working."

"There are no real sanctions… Boris Johnson took the Daily Mail job [in 2023] without going through the process properly, and all they could say was, 'You're a very naughty boy'.

"He just shrugged it off. Perhaps we should take away their pension or something, but we really do need to say something much stronger than that."

"I'm worried about democracy. There's too much suspicion of dirty money, of undue influence, of people appointing their friends, and that's bad in itself… I also worry that any whiff of cronyism at the top makes people think all politicians… are the same.

"We need to put our house in order… Let's not wait for lessons to be learned — let's stop it happening in the first place."

Labour's Phil Brickell MP told the inquiry that without higher fines, non-compliance is treated as "nothing more than a risk that individuals are willing to bear... it drives a culture of impunity."

Broken Promises

The lack of transparency over who is lobbying who was meant to be fixed by now. In July 2023 the then government committed to building a single searchable database of departmental transparency releases, following a recommendation from the then-Committee on Standards in Public Life (now the EIC).

The EIC report reveals that no funding was ever allocated and no work was ever commissioned to build it under the Conservatives.

At present, independent research for the EIC found 114 transparency declarations – such as ministers' meetings with major firms – in the sample period still used banned vague descriptions like "introductory meeting", despite explicit Cabinet Office guidance against it. Manually collecting one quarter's transparency data across up to 72 files would take 11–18 hours, given it is split up into hundreds of PDFs and webpages.

The Commission backs a single centralised Lobbying Register to make disclosures easier to track and report. It also calls for making lobbyists and government departments submit transparency returns on a monthly basis, instead of the current quarterly one.

Related reading: Parliament’s Standards Watchdog Rejected Complaints About Farage’s ‘Hidden Property Empire’ Months Before Times Exposé

The current lobbying register also only requires VAT-registered entities to register, meaning a minimum threshold of £90,000.

But because non-UK organisations don't have to register for VAT, this inadvertently exempts foreign-based lobbying firms entirely. It is effectively an incentive for lobbying to come from overseas.

Despite covering government lobbying in detail, the review explicitly declined to bring MPs, peers or local authorities into scope – meaning Nigel Farage's lobbying of the Bank of England boss for crypto deregulation would likely have gone unreported, even with these reforms, without media digging.

The Government has just launched a separate independent review into the use of non-corporate communications channels, such as WhatsApp, in government.

In a side-note, the EIC publication also reveals that the Independent Adviser on Ministerial Standards is reviewing how to handle ministers' cryptocurrency holdings in public declarations.

More To Do

Doug Chalmers, Chair of the EIC, said: "Lobbying is a good thing and an important part of the democratic process, but it must be open. The current lack of transparency and openness around lobbying fails the Nolan principles.

"A key theme of the recommendations in this report is openness. Transparency is one of the key drivers of public trust. This report provides the Government with an opportunity to build a more trustworthy system, one that the EIC believes will increase confidence in its decision making, however this requires early and positive action to our recommendations."

He added: "Openness in lobbying cannot be achieved without primarily legislation, but much can, and should be done, whilst a new Bill is being drafted."

The APPG on Anti-Corruption and Responsible Tax has welcomed today's Access to Government Decision Making review by the Ethics and Integrity Commission.

The review into lobbying activity in UK politics follows a lengthy consultation process in which the APPG was a key participant. The newly published review contains 37 recommendations, many of which are policies the APPG has long campaigned for.

Spotlight on Corruption, Transparency International and Unlock Democracy have also welcomed the Ethics and Integrity Commission's (EIC) recommendations to overhaul the UK's lobbying rules, but say ministers should go further by closing the remaining loopholes and creating a truly comprehensive transparency regime.

The groups are urging ministers to consider introducing a mandatory code of conduct on lobbying, following the example of Scotland, Ireland, Canada, and the EU, to govern lobbyists' behaviour.

Sue Hawley, Executive Director of Spotlight on Corruption, said: "It is critical that the new Burnham government adopts these recommendations in full, including through legislation at the next King's speech. In the meantime, however, the government should crack on with quickly implementing the measures that do not need legislation, including ensuring transparency releases are made monthly, as well as including meetings with special advisors and informal communications in these releases."

Related reading: The Missing Part Of Keir Starmer’s Plan To Clamp Down On Foreign Election Meddling

Hall of Shame

James Heappey (former Conservative Armed Forces minister) signed a contract with defence firm HPO Technologies in September 2024 without first seeking ACOBA's advice. ACOBA told him he was "unambiguously in breach" of the rules, noting an "obvious overlap" between his four years as a defence minister and his new role at a firm operating in the defence sector. They had no powers to sanction him or the firm.

Huw Merriman (former Conservative rail minister) had his appointment as chair of the Liverpool to Manchester Railway Partnership Board announced in October 2024 before ACOBA had given advice — a "clear and unambiguous breach" of both the rules and the Ministerial Code, though the committee judged it low-risk given the role was unpaid.

Ruth Edwards (former Conservative whip) set up a public website and updated her LinkedIn for a new venture, "10 Years Ahead", before ACOBA had responded — again a breach, with ACOBA declining to give advice at all once the role was already public.

Lord Harrington (former Conservative business minister) failed to notify ACOBA of two roles — with law firm Stephenson Harwood and with Regal Holdco — only coming to light after a member of the public made an FOI request. ACOBA called it an "unambiguous breach and clear disregard" of the rules.

Boris Johnson has a string of rule-breaches under his belt. The most recent involved a trip to meet Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro alongside the co-founder of hedge fund Merlyn Advisors, where ACOBA said he had "avoided answering specific questions" and "refused to be open about his relationship" to the firm.

Anne-Marie Trevelyan (former Conservative Foreign Office minister) took a strategic adviser role at defence contractor Babcock in September 2025, then contacted a serving defence minister in ways deemed to have breached the no-lobbying condition attached to her appointment. She described it as a "naïve mistake" done out of personal friendship rather than deliberate lobbying, but ACOBA regarded it as a breach. Again, they had no powers of sanction.

Peter Mandelson — the case that directly triggered this whole EIC review — retained a roughly 21% stake in Global Counsel, the lobbying firm he co-founded, while serving as UK Ambassador to Washington, a stake worth around £6 million at its last valuation before he was bought out in February 2026, long after he was fired (he was not alleged to have broken lobbying rules).

These are just a smattering of rule-breaches that went unpunished over the past few years. The EIC will be hoping that, at some point in future, actions have consequences.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

The party, currently polling around four per cent, was set up in February with startup cash of £2.5 million. It's a huge amount for a party with just one sitting MP, ex-Reform politician Rupert Lowe. However, due to a gap in electoral law, Lowe does not have to declare where that money came from, because assets belonging to a party at time of registration are not subject to standard rules around donation transparency.

While there is no suggestion of any financial wrongdoing on the part of Lowe or Restore, this represents a blind spot which could allow for "dark money" to flow into British politics.

What is known so far, however, paints a picture of a party accepting membership and/or donations from a string of extreme or scandal-hit individuals, as well as from property developers, management consultants, and members of the cryptocurrency community.

The 'Cromwell Club' Money Men

Central to this is Restore's exclusive donations vessel, the 'Cromwell Club', which people can join for an annual fee of £2,500 per year. The club appears to be named after Oliver Cromwell, the 17th century republican leader responsible for the direct killing of thousands in Ireland during his conquest there. The Restore Britain Page makes clear that "All donations will be used to support political campaigning and the operations of Restore Britain".

The Cromwell Club page reminds potential contributors that "If you donate more than £11,180 to Restore Britain in a calendar year, we are legally required to report the donation to the Electoral Commission, which will publish the donor's details."

Because the membership list is not published, what is known so far about the Club's membership is patchy, but several individuals on social media have made a point of stating that they have signed up for entry into the elite tier of Restore's donor base.

Businessman and political activist John Mappin has said that he has joined the Club, stating on X: "We are proud to support Rupert's vision and proud to have donated to Restore's Cromwell Club". Mappin, owner of the Camelot Castle Hotel in Cornwall, was an early backer of Turning Point UK, and along with his wife Irina hosted the launch event for the offshoot of the US right-wing student activist organisation.

Mappin was involved in anti-vaccine campaigning during the pandemic, and in 2022 The Times reported that the 'leading conspiracy theorist' was offering a discount to guests who could prove they had posted anti-vax comments.

Jonathan Wong, an organiser of "Abolish Asylum Day", also made his donation known. An associate of the far-right UK influencer Carl Benjamin (AKA Sargon of Akkad), and contributor to the 'anti-woke' media outlet Vox Populi, Wong congratulated Mappin under his post claiming membership, writing "Welcome to the Cromwell Club" – with a saluting face and a Union Flag emoji.

Another self-described Restore donor is – or was – English far-right YouTuber Miles Routledge (AKA Lord Miles), a Restore activist and supporter who has called Steve Laws a "liberal" for wanting to deport millions of people from the UK, saying: "I have better solutions".

In a post last July, he wrote: "What brings me joy and hope in this world is that by 2039 we'll have another Hitler to lead another great uprising."

In the case of Routledge/Miles, it seems he later fell out with the party over the donation, tweeting that he "donated £2.5k to Restore and was promised a simple thank you call, never happened, no email either. Was going to donate substantially more".

Also announcing himself as a Cromwell Club member is James Holmes, a property developer from an affluent area of Sheffield behind the "Fly the Flag" campaign, who caused controversy in the local area when he draped a 100-foot-wide, £3,000 Union Flag over a large former council building he owns in the area. He announced that he had become a member of the 'exclusive' donors club in a post on Facebook.

One Ashton Ward, co-founder of management consultant firm Eton Bridge Partners, has also indicated that he has joined the Club.

Related reading: ‘There’s No Money In Politics If You’re Straight’: How Farage’s Words Are Coming Back To Haunt Him

Crypto Comrades

Finally, members of the cryptocurrency online community have also donated to join Cromwell. An account going by the name "Walshy", reportedly belonging to the co-lead of 'Neiro', a cryptocurrency inspired by Elon Musk's Dogecoin, has stated on X that he became a member of the Club. The account posted that it had donated in excess of £11,000 to Restore Britain and Rupert Lowe.

Another crypto account, 'WhaleFUD', likewise tweeted that "The crypto community supporting Restore Britain $BRITAIN has joined the Cromwell Club and will soon have a call with Restore Britain leader", and another crypto-linked poster, "KROP", posted on X that it has "just exceeded +$20,000 in donations" to Restore Britain.

However, with these crypto donations in particular, Restore recently refunded the '$Britain' project, according to the party. Donations made from the cryptocurrency project, referred to as the "Britain Token", made by these largely anonymous creators, were a "memecoin" which claimed to have donated tens of thousands to Lowe's Party. Those involved said they were not affiliated with Restore but supported it.

Written evidence given to Parliament at the time by campaign organisation Spotlight on Corruption stated that researchers for the group had "seen evidence of at least one case so far where the creator fees paid for by investors in a $BRITAIN token affiliated to the Restore Britain Party have been donated to a political party.

"The source of these donations, 'Britain Token', which amount to over £35,000, is impermissible as it is an entity that has no legal standing," a Spotlight on Corruption spokesperson said.

After concerns were raised about the project with the Electoral Commission, a Restore spokesperson said that the party had "already refunded every single penny received from this organisation, going above and beyond any necessary rules to ensure that we are fully compliant".

Related reading: The Missing Part Of Keir Starmer’s Plan To Clamp Down On Foreign Election Meddling

It is not currently known to what extent crypto-supporters of the Cromwell Club, if at all, still retain membership, how many were deemed impermissible, or how many of those who are or were members were involved specifically in the Britain Token project.

The Labour Government recently placed a retrospective moratorium on all cryptocurrency donations to political parties, which is still in effect. It was not in place at the time of the Britain Token project, but the Electoral Commission had not published any substantial donations made in cryptocurrencies before the ban.

Lowe and the Musk Effect

Aside from membership of Cromwell, other donors have also given personally to Restore's only MP, many of whom have done so in support of the 'Rape Gang Inquiry' that he initiated. This includes two donors to Reform, collectively behind £65,000 in donations to Nigel Farage's party. Derek Holder and Margaret Hepburn have donated to the Inquiry.

Hepburn, a resident of Monaco, has donated both personally and via her company, Hepburn Bio Care UK Ltd, the vehicle she also uses to back Reform. These donations were received after Lowe's expulsion from Reform UK. The donations for this total £33,000.

Further recorded donors to Lowe personally include Munish Sharma, whose website states: "Like many in my generation my parents immigrated to the UK, had little wealth, but worked hard, tirelessly and selflessly for me and our family." He donated £2,000 to Lowe last June. The other is Christopher Newman, believed to be the man who represented the MP in his failed bid to block a parliamentary watchdog investigation into him. Newman gave support of £5,000 to Lowe last July, likely to be a donation-in-kind for his time.

Related reading: A Hostile Foreign State Could ‘Buy A UK Election For Just £25m’

Perhaps the most globally prominent vocal supporter of Rupert Lowe is Elon Musk, the world's richest man, who has repeatedly amplified Restore's presence on the social media platform X, which he owns. Musk has previously posted for people to "Join Rupert Lowe in Restore Britain, because he is the only one who will actually do it!", and has on multiple occasions posted about the party and shared content from Rupert Lowe.

Two days after Restore was launched, Musk posted on his platform that, "It will win. It must win. To Save Britain". To date, Rupert Lowe has earned £85,534 from X Corp and his monetised presence on the platform since the 2024 election.

In terms of reach on the platform, it has previously been reported that on X, Lowe has at points been the most popular British politician in terms of post 'likes', far outstripping Farage and Green Party leader Zack Polanski. Ahead of the Makerfield by-election, it was reported that Lowe had 10 posts with 10mn views each on X, with Farage having none, despite having three times as many followers on the platform.

As of this week, Musk has welcomed "Britain's last hope" to America. As part of a trip to the US, Lowe has said he would meet the world's first trillionaire on Sunday.

There are suggestions that the Government will amend the current Representation of the People Bill to ensure the sources of donations received by a party before they are formally registered with the Electoral Commission will have to be declared on registering as a party.

Speaking to Byline Times, Naomi Smith, Chief Executive of Best for Britain, which campaigns against the radical right, said of the party:

"Restore Britain's increasing popularity is a chilling reminder that, even if Reform UK stumbles, there is always something lurking in the wings, even further to the far-right.

"Rupert Lowe's party, and its mysterious funding sources, make one thing clear: we urgently need PR in place ahead of the next election as a firewall to ensure populists and dangerous extremists don't control the balance of power, and to protect our democracy and rights from those who threaten them."

Restore Britain and Rupert Lowe were contacted for comment.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

ARC sits Reform UK’s only MP on its board and counts one of the party’s biggest donors among its funders. Nigel Farage was a speaker at its third conference, which closed at London’s Olympia on 25 June 2026, appearing on stage in conversation with ARC co-founder Philippa Stroud.

That same network has platformed former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who over his career has demanded that the West declare its superiority over Islam; was accused by UN officials of “racism” for claiming the Government should not “endlessly subsidise lifestyle choices” of remote Indigenous residents; and attempted to repeal Australia’s part of Racial Discrimination Act for being “un-Australian”.

Abbott, with ministerial colleague Alexander Downer, previously advised the Tories on replicating Australia’s asylum seeker policies and strategies of demonisation.

He sits on ARC’s advisory board and advises Advance Australia, the campaign group that claims credit for defeating the Indigenous Voice referendum. He is a director of Fox Corporation; and, this year, he was elected president of the collapsing Liberal Party in Australia.

Mining billionaire Gina Rinehart funds both Advance and One Nation, the previously fringe party led by Pauline Hanson that now leads Australia’s first-preference polling.

Newly published donor records show the ARC conference backed by fossil fuel executives, coal magnates and donors to US President Donald Trump. Seven Australians sit on ARC’s advisory board, including two former prime ministers – and a February proposal to steer the Liberal Party through its succession crisis was built around three of them.

Out of the sweltering June heat, right-wing actors from a range of nations networked to extend what has been described as a “messianic MAGA alliance”. Aiming to create a “new narrative” to “save the West”, the conference brought together fossil fuel corporations and think tank representatives, including those promoting “anti-gender” policy. Politicians representing Reform UK and European far right parties mix with those who claim to be conservative.

Reform UK donors including Lord Anthony Bamford and crypto billionaire Ben Delo contributed funds to the event, joining hedge fund billionaire Paul Marshall. Delo – who donated £4 million to Reform UK earlier this year - has been added to the body’s Advisory Board since June 2026. Several of the donors have close ties to the Trump administration, many representing the coal and oil sectors in both the US and Canada.

ARC has had Australian involvement from the outset with former Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson around the table when it was founded. Australia, in particular, has a high-profile presence on the Advisory Board. Former prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott sit alongside Andrew Hastie, the Shadow Defence Minister, and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, a Northern Territory senator, both identified with the party’s “national right” faction and both seen as future leadership contenders. The remaining two Australians are the former Senator Amanda Stoker and Robin Batterham, a former Chief Scientist of Australia.

By contrast, there are two Canadian politicians, one Austrian and four American officeholders, including the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. The British contingent is three peers – Labour’s Maurice Glasman and two Conservatives, co-founder Philippa Stroud and Helena Morrissey – plus Reform UK MP, Danny Kruger, in the Commons.

Who Funds ARC?

The ARC is a culture war conference organisation overlapping with the National Conservatism (NatCon) circuit, with some key personnel and organisational connections. The two organisations position themselves as the intellectual faction of the ethnonationalist and socially conservative movement that dominates the transnational Right.

ARC is an offshoot of the think tanks of Tufton Street, which the Guardian columnist George Monbiot has labelled “junktanks”. They function as comms operations for extreme free market policy positions and controversial industry sectors, packaged as fact-based policy research. Tufton Street’s front groups are both official partners of, or closely linked to, the Atlas Network based in Washington DC. Their role is to create an apparently independent chorus of voices for policy goals sought by wealthy elite donors.

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship was co-founded by the Legatum Group. The Atlas Network – a global network of hundreds of extreme free market lobby organisations - has claimed that body as an official partner.

Legatum’s website declared that ARC was an “international movement with a vision for a better world where empowered citizens take personal responsibility, working together to bring flourishing and prosperity to their families, communities and nations”. Its ambit is to promote “free enterprise”, “inexpensive, reliable” energy and “realistically pliable” environmental stewardship.

The original “think tank” of the Atlas model was the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), founded in London in 1955 by Antony Fisher. The IEA shaped Margaret Thatcher, who founded a partner think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, in 1974, and the model was replicated in Washington by Heritage, which set out more than 1,000 pages of policy for Ronald Reagan’s administration. The Atlas Network’s now-secret list of partners reveals close to 500 entities in more than 100 countries.

A related body, the US Council for National Policy, links the anti-reproductive rights and anti-LGBTQIA bodies Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council, both represented at ARC; a third, Focus on the Family, was listed as an ARC donor.

Baroness Philippa Stroud, ARC co-founder, is one of several “think tank” alumni placed into politics through the House of Lords by friendly Tory leaders: Liz Truss elevated 32 people to peerages during her month in office.

Anti Islam network activists Douglas Murray and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are also both on the ARC Advisory Board.

The Money and the Local Machine

Gina Rinehart, West Australian mining magnate, has been a long-term donor to the Liberal Party but has expressed her frustration at its brief recent resistance to becoming the local MAGA party. She appeared to transfer her support to Queensland senator Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. She has been flying Hanson in her private plane around Australia, on a Thai holiday and to her home in Florida near Mar-a-Lago. Hanson spoke at an “elite” CPAC event at Trump’s resort. Rinehart and her company donated a plane and A$1 million to One Nation in April.

The original Australian “free market” think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), was co-founded in 1943 by Rupert Murdoch’s father. The IPA has been abandoned by its corporate sponsors, after its climate-denial and culture wars became embarrassing. The Murdochs continue to support the IPA, if only by providing media platforms. The only known donor in the current era is Rinehart. The billionaire is dedicated both to Ayn Rand and to Donald Trump.

Rinehart is also funding an Atlas Network offshoot, Advance, with a recent A$900,000 donation. This is an astroturf operation, faking grassroots activity. It takes credit for having flipped Australia from majority support for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament consultative body to majority opposition. Advance, advised by Tony Abott, generates propaganda online and through interlinked front groups of an abrasively right-wing populist nature.

Climate denial and Islamophobia pervade the emerging messaging. Advance brought figures like Benjamin Harnwell, Steve Bannon’s anti-Muslim sidekick at his War Room podcast, to Australia for its secretive 2026 conference. One Nation’s Senator Malcolm Roberts said at a theocratic conference recently that the party would work for a “blanket abortion ban”.

Tony Abbott has been an Advance advisor since its founding, and remains listed at Orbán’s Danube Institute.

Australian Atlas partner affiliates expressed fervent admiration after the first ARC conference in London in 2023. The local “chapter” was headed up by John Anderson and run by a former employee of Philippa Stroud, Gerard Holland.

They had earlier hosted a conference in Australia in 2024. The organisers rebranded themselves for their 2026 conference, calling the religiously dominated committee FORM (Freedom, Opportunity and Responsibility Movement) Australia and the new iteration of ARC Aspire, perhaps to fend off accusations of foreign interference. It took place a week after the Advance conference and its nationalist language was much more coded than the astroturf body’s event.

Murdoch’s mastheads share the ARC and Aspire speeches and use the logos.

Related reading: The Trumpian Power Worship at the Heart of Jordan Peterson’s ‘We Who Wrestle With God’

One Nation’s Surge

Echoing the UK, Australia has recently seen a shock surge in the popularity of its previously marginal nativist populist party. Pauline Hanson, 72, has led it since winning a parliamentary seat in 1996 on a platform objecting to Australia being “swamped by” Asians, then Muslims, and spent time in prison for electoral fraud (conviction overturned).

Hanson has been described locally as an early model for the far-right women leading political parties in the Global North more recently. While Hanson was considered a fringe outsider for most of her career, she dragged Australia’s politics toward the far-right regardless. Now her party is polling as leading on first preference votes with Hanson as preferred prime minister (although her place in the federal Senate makes that impossible currently).

Hanson continues to face charges of electoral irregularities and a failure to carry out her parliamentary role.

Hanson and her candidates have repeatedly attracted scandal over racism, antisemitism and Neo Nazi sympathies, and Hanson herself recently expressed disgust at being forced to sack a staffer who had served prison time for rape and violent assault of a woman.

All the facets of the Rinehart-funded Right have begun amplifying Islamophobic rhetoric, and One Nation Senator Roberts has used the far right term "remigration.” Recent meetings with “Tommy Robinson” and Rupert Lowe by Pauline Hanson have encouraged ethnostate politics as key to her campaign. 

The apparently sudden shift of “battler” Hanson from the unsavoury fringe of Australian politics to the lead reflects the behind-the-scenes support of a transnationally-connected radicalised Right.

Related reading: Murdoch: ‘Thug and Bully is Terminal Trouble for Democracies’, Says Former Australian Prime Minister

High Stakes

Rupert Murdoch and son Lachlan have long been accused by both major parties of having a dramatically outsized impact on Australian politics and civic discourse in a media market judged the second most concentrated in the world. Tony Abbott, who has just been named president of the collapsing Liberal Party, is also on the board of Fox News. He is reputedly “thick as thieves” with Lachlan Murdoch. The pair will likely decide whether, in Australia’s ranked choice voting system, Liberal Party preferences will be funnelled to One Nation.

The pair will no doubt also decide if they are willing to unite Australia’s old Liberal and National party coalition in a minority government with the fringe right One Nation. Another Liberal Party politician who emerged from the IPA has left this course open.

Massively-funded strategic operations in Australia match Farage’s surge in popularity. How much of this constitutes foreign interference remains unclear.

A February proposal for a “Council of Elders” to steer the Liberal Party through its collapse was built around three of ARC’s own board members – Howard, Anderson and Abbott. Australia’s political realignment, on both the Liberal Party’s future and One Nation’s rise, now rests substantially with men who sit simultaneously on ARC’s board.

The same three men sit on the board of a movement built to remake Reform UK’s Britain in its own image while steering Australia’s realignment – both the Liberal Party’s succession crisis and whether its remnants fold into government alongside One Nation. Australia’s shift to the far right and Britain’s, on the evidence, run through the same boardroom.

ARC did not respond to a request for comment.

The piece was updated on 13 July 2026 to incorporate details regarding Tony Abbott and the Rinehart-financed right.

I realised that we are defending our democracy through arbitrary definitions of categories of activity that our adversaries do not recognise. We generally define things as narrowly as possible, and do very good work within it across the civil service and elsewhere — precisely because we've defined it narrowly enough to achieve political moments, summits, and to expose adversaries in a fairly limited way.

But that's not a way to win if you're subject to cognitive warfare. We did not ask for cognitive warfare. We are subject to it.

We separate out electoral finance, misinformation, cyber activity, corruption, media influence and subversion. I was looking at the range of parliamentary activity that would amount to cognitive warfare — there are around twenty different lines of effort in this space.

The issue is: if you're sitting in the presidential administration in Moscow, you are not running your activity on the basis of how we bureaucratically divide our work. You don't run "a disinformation campaign" or "an influence campaign" — you want an effect, and a great deal of activity goes into achieving that effect.

Think about the case of the individuals sentenced a few weeks ago who were funded by cryptocurrency and committed an act of sabotage against our Prime Minister — that activity was accompanied by a disinformation campaign [about supposed 'Ukrainian rent boys'].

We are looking at multiple vectors and channels, working toward one effect. There's a mismatch in how we conceptualise this. We have the capability, in many different areas, to deal with these threats — what we lack is scale of response, and some of the legal permissions needed to respond adequately.

Ministers and the Chiefs of Defence Staff talk about a "whole of society approach" to this conflict, but I don't think many people in this building actually know what a whole-of-society approach looks like in practice. Look at how it's done in Finland, and in Estonia. Ukraine has developed exceptional resilience to what's happening to that country.

Siloed and Split

I have three propositions. First: our threat is an integrated influence ecosystem, not a collection of separate acts. My suggestion is: build an integrated ecosystem to defend ourselves, which we currently lack.

A minister who appeared before a parliamentary select committee recently was unable to list every Government department that counters disinformation — which tells you how divided, antiquated and unresponsive our current set-up is.

Second: the Government's proposed election-finance reforms are necessary, but they only protect one part of this ecosystem. Time and again we put patches on individual areas.

Third: Britain needs a democratically-governed national capability that connects detection, disruption, public explanation and local resilience. We need a Cognitive Defence Agency.

It needs to be funded. It needs to be empowered. Some elements will still need to sit within Government departments and relevant agencies — including the ability to disrupt adversaries — but we need that national capability, and we need it now.

Sun Tzu wrote that supreme military excellence lies in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting. That plays out in practice through finance, media, technology and so on.

Russia has built a mature influence architecture across the whole of Europe: state institutions, intelligence services, commercial contractors, media outlets, and a whole series of proxy think tanks.

Given our role in NATO, our nuclear capability and our support for Ukraine, it's prudent to assume Britain remains a priority target. Recent evidence from BBC Monitoring, and my work with the Centre for Information Resilience, shows the UK is being cast by Russian state media as enemy number one right now.

That's a real problem, because the full scale of operations directed specifically at the UK isn't well understood, and the Government isn't communicating adequately about it relative to the rest of Europe. There's a way to do that without panicking people.

Civil society organisations have insufficient funding to match the scale of defence needed. Part of the answer is funding researchers and civil society groups who can provide independent evidence and push back against bad actors.

Ukraine has organised itself around decentralised civil-society resilience since the full invasion began.

The way to do this here would be to have, in every town across the country, some form of civil-society organisation with the credibility to investigate bad actors.

And if the next Government devolves more power to local Government and local politicians, that resilience needs a local foundation. Our strategic importance is well understood in Moscow, and there are real gaps our adversaries exploit.

Related reading: ‘There’s No Money In Politics If You’re Straight’: How Farage’s Words Are Coming Back To Haunt Him

The £25m Playbook

I imagined myself as someone working in the Russian presidential administration, thinking through how I'd buy influence in the UK. My conclusion was that it would cost around £25m to do it properly.

The first thing I'd do is fund think tanks, because I'd want to intellectualise my arguments and build support that friendly political parties could rally around. I wouldn't be foolish enough to fund [the likes of] Nathan Gill directly — I'd fund relatives, companies, and other routes designed to get around existing legislation.

I welcome the Government's recent proposals on election law, but the point is: we're tightening the lock on the front door while leaving the windows and the back door wide open — the whole range of cognitive-influence activity that stronger, more joined-up legislation, a Cognitive Defence Agency, and proper funding for civil society could address.

Trust in central Government is low in the UK right now. So we need well-funded local and regional media able to tell these stories impartially, since that's often where these narratives first take hold.

A couple of case studies. Firstly, the Tenet Media case and US indictment. US prosecutors set out evidence of around $10m passed through intermediaries to an ostensibly independent American media company, which funded social-media commentators who already had large, trusting audiences, used to inject Russian-aligned narratives into their content.

It's easy — any company worth its salt does something like this to sell a product, so if you're running propaganda, you buy influencer time and use influencers as a channel, because they have loyal audiences.

I've also covered Nathan Gill. Our work at the Centre for Information Resilience on a related crypto-funded network shows the range of activity that can sit behind a single operation. This kind of activity is simultaneously criminal, it's about narrative. And if you only look at what's happening around elections, you miss the point: this is constant, not seasonal.

In one case there's strong evidence of cross-funding — political parties, ostensibly civic organisations, paid activists, paid voters — a full range of activity funded through one network. There are a lot of very wealthy backers behind this kind of activity, and if we have strong evidence of one or two of them running these operations, you can assume there's a great deal more that we haven't yet identified.

Related reading: Matt Goodwin’s Lucrative Hungarian Fellowship Could Be in Line for the Chop Following Orbán’s Defeat

There's also a Brussels-based case in which investigators showed Viktor Medvedchuk and other associates secretly financing political activity.

All the cases I've quoted are high-confidence cases which have been actively prosecuted by the relevant authorities — this isn't sketchy open-source material, this is proven.

The last one I'll mention: a Hungarian think tank, MCC, that ran a fairly open operation. There may also be parallel, less visible channels of influence that Viktor Orbán's Government was running while in office.

There are members of the House of Lords who reportedly received funding through that initiative and are now in quite prominent positions, which shows how a state-supported ecosystem across Europe can run conferences, secure media exposure, and sell ideas that are then artificially amplified.

Part of my £25m estimate was this: I'd fund a think tank to get an intellectual argument going, then I'd fund digital amplification. Anyone with £20,000 could stand up a troll farm to push whatever narrative they wanted.

If I were pushing a particular argument in Parliament, I'd have a think tank make the legislative case, then get my troll farm to amplify it, so that everyone in the UK starts seeing it in their feeds. These ecosystems need to be met with an equally joined-up response.

Government cannot prevent every lie or every act of hostile influence. The real test is whether our institutions can understand the scale of what we're facing, communicate that to the public effectively, build resilience and understanding, and construct an ecosystem capable of responding in kind.

Andy Pryce is Senior Non-Resident Fellow with the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He previously served as Head of Public Diplomacy at the British Embassy in Washington and at the UK Mission to the EU in Brussels.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on news@bylinetimes.com 

One complaint concerned Nigel Farage's conflicting statements about a Clacton property he claimed to have bought in his constituency during the 2024 campaign.

The Reform UK leader had told Sky News in November 2024 that he had "bought a house in Clacton" and had "exchanged contracts". But Land Registry data and reporting revealed that the home is in fact owned solely by his partner.

When revelations emerged in September 2025 that it was in fact his partner who officially owned the property, Farage said he was "wrong" to claim ownership.

A voter asked Parliament's Standards Commissioner to investigate. But the Commissioner replied that November to say they would not examine whether he contributed funds or held any form of beneficial interest.

The Commissioner told Byline Times reader Leon Kings that the standards rules were not triggered because there is no publicly-accessible documentary evidence showing that Farage holds a financial or beneficial interest in the house.

Without that, the office said it could not compel disclosure or examine the circumstances of the purchase. Yet it remains unclear how the £885,000 cash purchase was funded.

In other words, the standards system could not, or would not, verify the Register for Nigel Farage when a citizen and then an MP asked it to.

Byline Times then investigated other properties linked to Farage.

We found that Thorn in the Side Ltd, which Nigel Farage controls, owns at least two properties in the Folkestone area, in Romney Marsh and in New Romney. We also found a home owned directly by Farage, not in Tandridge (a property declared on his Register of Interests) but in nearby Westerham. The Times' reporting suggests they are two separate properties.

But the Standards Commissioner ruled that Thorn in the Side's assets did not need to be registered, as they were owned by a company, not Farage directly – raising a potentially glaring loophole that an MP can simply put their property empires within a company and not have to declare any of it. Farage is the sole director and 'person of significant control' for Thorn in the Side. The Commissioner refused to investigate the Westerham property.

'The Onus Is on the Complainant'

In December, the complainant wrote to his MP, Lib Dem Steve Darling, who in turn pressed the Commissioner for answers.

Darling's office set out two questions: how a private citizen is supposed to obtain extensive evidence proving wrongdoing, and which body investigates where someone has suspicions but little evidence.

Kings supplied Land Registry titles setting out more information on Farage's allegedly undeclared property portfolio.

And the Commissioner was not convinced that Kings had provided enough evidence to show Farage owned undeclared properties, despite Kings having provided deeds for the Westerham home.

And finding every property Farage owns is an option out of reach to voters, since name-based Land Registry searches are not available to the public.

In December, the Commissioner effectively closed the complaint down, telling him: "You will understand that the Commissioner does not comment on a Member's entries in the Register of Members' Financial Interests outside of a formal inquiry."

This May, the Commissioner's office replied to Steve Darling MP, again rejecting the complaint and restating the 'Procedural Protocol', writing: "It is not sufficient to make an allegation and expect the Commissioner to look for supporting evidence. The onus is on the complainant to ensure that their allegation is suitably evidenced."

'Five Homes Farage'

At the start of July, the Times published more information on what Labour dubbed 'Five Homes Farage' and his 'hidden property empire'. The paper independently established much of the same factual territory from Land Registry records, triggering national coverage and a wave of condemnation and contributing to Farage's decision to trigger a by-election in his Clacton seat.

The underlying facts surfaced only once a national title did extensive research that would be unfeasible for an ordinary voter, but which Kings expected the Commissioner to investigate – in his eyes reasonably.

Every element was declined without, apparently, even an email from the Commissioner to Farage for clarification. When the complainant escalated to his own MP, who put the matter to the Commissioner directly, the response was the same: it is for complainants to evidence allegations, despite them having sent Land Registry records setting out Farage's company-ownership of at least two undeclared properties via his Thorn in the Side Ltd.

Leon Kings, founder of FarageExposed.co.uk, told Byline Times: "My experience was extremely frustrating. I repeatedly reported what I believed were serious issues, providing evidence where I could, but my concerns were largely dismissed or passed between organisations without any meaningful investigation. It felt as though nobody was prepared to take responsibility.

"What is particularly frustrating is that some of the same matters now appear to be receiving proper attention, but only after significant media coverage and MPs became involved. It raises the question of why similar evidence wasn't taken seriously when it was first reported by members of the public.

"I think there needs to be greater accountability and a clearer process for ensuring credible reports are investigated properly, regardless of who raises them."

Kings believes his experience shows that "the Commissioner has confirmed the system cannot ensure accuracy," and that "the public has no mechanism to scrutinise property declarations."

The Standards Commissioner is now investigating the undeclared £5m crypto donation from Christopher Harborne. The Commissioner has also been asked to investigate undeclared support from ally and convicted fraudster George Cottrell in the year before Farage was elected.

A separate complaint has been made over Farage's allegedly hidden property portfolio, one of five referrals covering four issues now in front of the Commissioner.

The Standards Commissioner and House of Commons authorities declined to comment.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

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.

This special investigation reveals:

• James Orr has housed students at his ‘right-wing mecca’ alongside race science advocates and hard-right political figures, in clear breach of Cambridge University’s safeguarding rules.
  
• Orr’s appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion in Cambridge University's Faculty of Divinity in 2019 was accompanied by a clandestine financial donation from the pro-Trump Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel.
  
• Thiel went on to offer ‘life-changing’ sums of money to Cambridge University scholars in Orr’s network.
  
• Academics and students have consistently raised concerns about Orr’s conflicts of interest over funding, and dangers of breaching ‘foreign influence’ legislation.
  
• Orr’s lawyers threatened to injunct Byline Times over any mention in this investigation of the name of his “Conservative Kibbutz”– the premises where he houses students and which has already been named in the public domain.
  
• Cambridge University has consistently ignored Byline Times’ confidential queries about the concerns raised by James Orr's activities. Instead, its press office has passed them on directly to Orr’s lawyers. The University has offered no explanation of, or comment on, the extensive findings of this investigation – including, extraordinarily, concerns of safeguarding in relation to its students. 

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?

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. It is understood Bentley-Astor denies Orr has helped her media career.

She has written for and appeared in right-wing media such as the Telegraph, The Critic, UnHerd, GB News, TalkTV, and The European Conservative, and 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."

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. 

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?

Read the first part of our investigation here

Related reading: James Orr and the Messianic Transatlantic MAGA Alliance Trying to ‘Save’ Britain

The speaker was James Orr, Reform UK’s philosopher-in-chief. The setting was picturesque Hay-on-Wye in Wales. The event was HowTheLightGetsIn, a festival of philosophy and ideas. The audience was sceptical to say the least. 

Orr was trying to make a distinction between “good” and “bad” law. 

“Too much law today is about disagreement resolved through democratically unaccountable, technocratic, opaque, inaccessible procedures,” he continued. 

When pressed on what precisely he meant, Orr fell back on a familiar populist shibboleth: the “will of the people”, which he contrasted favourably with unelected judges and bureaucrats.

The murmuring in the audience – punctuated at times by the odd heckle – made clear that Nigel Farage’s favourite philosopher had a different conception of democracy from the rest of the room. 

Nevertheless, it wasn’t hard to see why Orr’s profile has risen in recent years. 

He cut a dashing figure on stage – his outfit consummate old Wykehamist: blazer, cream trousers, casual loafers. He spoke in polished tones that betrayed a classical education. 

Unlike so many others on the populist right, it is not a performance that comes with an array of pseudo-working-class affectations. Orr prefers literary allusions to dropped aitches or hard-knock stories about growing up on a council estate. He doesn’t purport to be a man of the people. Instead, he is an elite anti-elitist: a much more interesting proposition. 

It is hard to get away from the sense that, for Orr, democracy means the ability of the majority to do as it pleases. 

As anybody who has tussled with the Reform set in the years since the Brexit Referendum will be aware, any deviation from this line leaves one susceptible to accusations of elitism – that most unfashionable of monikers in these populist times. 

It’s, by now, a familiar schtick. 

It is also fundamentally at odds with what most of us – and most of those in the audience in Hay, judging by the hooting and hollering that greeted many of Orr’s remarks – take to mean by democracy. And yet, it is central to the Reform worldview. Orr is, after all, the party’s Head of Policy.

At least two members of the panel informed Orr that there is more to democracy than elections every five years. Indeed, one speaker – the lawyer Philippe Sands – likened Orr’s arguments to those of the German political theorist Carl Schmitt in the 1930s. Schmitt, who joined the Nazi Party in 1933, became one of the regime’s most notorious legal theorists, offering a justification for emergency rule and the subordination of law to political authority. 

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. One doesn’t need to indulge in overblown comparisons between the Britain of today and 1930s Germany to recoil from loose and irresponsible talk of the ‘will of the people’. The Nazis, to be sure, ruled by decree rather than majoritarianism. 

But it seems incontrovertible that majoritarianism can lead to some dark places. And one need not draw on Nazi Germany to find them: the recent example of Hungary demonstrates how an elected government can use democratic mandates to hobble pluralistic institutions.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that, before Viktor Orbán was ousted in April, leading figures in Reform treated the country as a shining city on the hill. 

“I’ve just spent four days in Hungary, a conservative country criticised by elites across the West,” wrote Reform politician Matthew Goodwin in 2024. “I saw no crime. No homeless people. No riots. No unrest. No drugs. No mass immigration. No broken borders. No self-loathing. No chaos.” 

Orr’s intellectual hero, the late philosopher Roger Scruton, was a regular guest of the regime in Budapest: he accepted ‘honours’ from Orbán in 2019 and was canonised following his death in 2020. 

Some of these intellectual fellow travellers have been associated with institutions benefiting from Budapest’s largesse. The Good Law Project has reported that Goodwin received a salary of up to €10,000 a month from a Hungarian-based pressure group (Reform has disputed the figure).

Meanwhile, Orr sits on the board of the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation. According to the Good Law Project, the foundation received more than £512,000 from the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) – Hungary’s largest government-backed private educational network – representing more than 90% of its funding.

Learning and Breeding

Born in November 1978 in Brussels, Belgium, Orr’s CV is establishment to the marrow. Winchester, Balliol, City law, Oxford, Cambridge. But he has since become one of the more important intellectual operators around the insurgent right. 

He chairs the Edmund Burke Foundation, the organisation behind the National Conservatism movement. In 2025, he became involved with the Centre for a Better Britain, the Reform-adjacent outfit based in Millbank Tower. Orr has suggested that the CBB will work with “any promising young person who is dedicated to a politics of national preference”.

Like a number of national conservatives, Orr appears to have passed through two stages of radicalisation. 

The first followed the EU Referendum of 2016. 

In Orr’s telling, this marked the end of what he calls the “long 20th Century” – a play on a phrase used by historian Eric Hobsbawm to describe the period that fell between the outbreak of the First World War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In a 2025 interview with The House magazine, Orr described this as “the twilight of liberalism”. He believes that we now live in a post-liberal epoch in which the old certainties are being swept away. 

He may well be onto something. 

If the people have lost faith in the ‘technocracy’ (of which Keir Starmer is perhaps the standard bearer) then that may be because competent stewardship of the system is no longer a priority for many voters. 

How could it be when so many believe that the present system is decrepit and failing to deliver? 

Managerial centrism is merely the latest in a long line of gods that failed. And so the door has swung invitingly ajar for those, like Orr, who hold out the tantalising promise of national renewal if only we extricate ourselves from the tyranny of these technocratic elites.  

Many of Orr’s arguments will be familiar to anyone who has followed politics closely over the past decade. They are not especially original; what matters is the function they serve. 

He believes that the Brexit Referendum shattered old tribal loyalties and represented a revolt against global elites. He espouses a politics that, in his own estimation at least, is beyond left and right. 

The second stage of Orr’s evolution arguably came in 2020, when the George Floyd protests both here and in the United States convinced many on the right that liberalism had hardened into a rival faith. 

It is here that Orr’s writings betray a lopsided and tendentious conception of politics: liberals seek radical change while the right merely reacts to it. 

In this account, Trumpian lawfare is a response to liberal judicial overreach. Islamophobia is a blowback linked to rapid demographic change. The insurrection of January 6 was a product of the disorder of the George Floyd protests. 

Every outrage of the right is an outgrowth of the radicalism of the left. 

Orr is far from the first to attempt to tie up right-wing radicalisation into a neat and tidy ‘equal and opposite’ formulation. As the historian William Hogeland has argued, the claim that political violence migrated from left to right after the Floyd protests requires a convenient amnesia about the American right: its militia movement, the standoffs with government, the paramilitary fantasies, and the anti-government violence that long predated 2020. 

What is undeniable is that 2016 and 2020 were pivotal moments for post-liberals or national conservatives or whatever else one prefers to call them. This is the world inhabited by Orr and his Reform UK stablemate MP Danny Kruger, not to mention their mouthpieces in the media such as GB News.

There may also be something else going on of course. 

As has been observed by Orwell and others, English public life has a peculiar tolerance for people who look and sound as though they were born to rule. Give a man the right accent, the right school, the right tailor, and a booming voice and ascension is all but guaranteed. 

James Orr has these things in abundance – which might explain some of the obsequious profiles that have appeared in recent times. 

Amol Rajan recently introduced Orr on the BBC podcast Radical as the “intellectual architect of Britain’s new right”. Politico has described him as “the philosopher king”. Other media outlets have referred to him as Nigel Farage’s Svengali.

This appeal extends beyond the corridors of the establishment media. 

During the event in Hay, I was struck by one conversation I overheard as the event wrapped up, in which one audience member said quite plainly that he was almost taken in by Orr’s polished prognostications. “First of all I thought he was alright,” the man told his friends. “He talked quite well, but then I realised his politics are horrific and he’s just trying to get me on side.”

The feeling was shared by several others I spoke to there. 

They ultimately saw through the veneer of learning and breeding – though one wonders how much this matters when so much of Westminster media culture remains credulously susceptible to the penumbra of Oxford rooms and old school ties. 

Liberalism After Christianity                                            

James Orr has described himself as “functionally atheist” as a student at Oxford. Having earned a reputation for partying during his student days, he later rediscovered Christianity via the Holy Trinity Brompton Church in London’s South Kensington and its ‘Alpha’ course. From there, in Orr’s telling, “the politics followed”.

That sequence is important. 

Orr’s reactionary politics is not merely a set of positions on Brexit, judges, immigration, or ‘wokeism’. It is downstream from a recovered metaphysics. 

“Can we still have an ethos if we don’t have an ethnos?” Orr asked Reform MP Kruger during a recent podcast appearance. Kruger defected from the Conservatives to Nigel Farage’s party in September.

For Orr and his allies, the post-Floyd backlash is evidence that secular liberalism has generated its own surrogate religion: wokeism is “liberalism on steroids” for Orr. In common with others on the radical right, he considers left-wing progressivism to be a surrogate faith. 

John McWhorter’s book Woke Racism was subtitled How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. Andrew Sullivan has described wokeness as a creed for a post-Christian age, filling the spiritual hole once occupied by Christianity. In the Spectator, the response to Floyd’s killing was cast in explicitly religious terms: rituals, hymns, almsgiving (though more excitable pundits preferred the comparison to Maoism). 

The point, made with varying degrees of hysteria, is always the same: liberalism, having abolished God, has ended up reinventing sin.

If woke is the name given to liberalism after Christianity – a substitute creed of guilt, purification, and moral discipline, untethered from the nation and hostile to inherited, not to say hierarchical, forms of belonging – then a healthy politics, according to Orr, must be grounded in the “pre-political”. Otherwise secularism creates a vacuum filled by ideological substitutes. 

Orr blames secularism for “all of the nightmares of the 20th Century”, including Stalinism and fascism. It is a familiar argument among apologists for religion, and not a persuasive one. 

The horrors of the 20th Century were not simply atheism with banners. But the historical crudeness matters less than the political function of the claim. 

If secularism is at the root of modern tyranny then liberal neutrality becomes the gravedigger of the open society. Indeed, Danny Kruger has described liberalism as a “false faith”. 

‘Politics of Community and Home’

Orr is that rarest of beings: an intellectual of the radical right. This is not to elevate him to the role of “philosopher king” of British populism, as the BBC seemed to. But, up to now, Reform has been so intellectually barren that a fluent political theologian can begin to look like one. 

In Orr’s hands, Reform’s familiar complaints – about borders, judges, quangos, woke institutions, and liberal elites – are folded into a larger narrative about metaphysical disorder. Britain is not merely badly governed, but has lost the sacred canopy under which government, law, and belonging once made sense.

This is also why Orr’s language so often sounds less like ordinary conservatism than a species of political restorationism. The object is not simply to win elections or trim the size of the state, but to resurrect a moral order that liberalism is said to have dissolved. 

It is also perhaps why he gets on so well with spokesmen for the ‘Blue Labour’ tradition such as Maurice Glasman. Both operate through the prism of nostalgia, harking back to a vanished post-war order that valued hierarchy, continuity, and tradition. Liberalism is accused of having washed all of that away, whether via Thatcherite economics or woke identity politics. 

It is Orr’s contention that “no society can be free if its members are free to do as they please”. As he writes: “Loyalty, honour, obedience, humility, responsibility, moderation, trust: none of these virtues can take root in a society of individuals who refuse to fetter their egos and their appetites or who insist that the bonds that stitch any commonwealth together should be severed rather than strengthened.”

And yet, Nigel Farage will strike most observers as an unlikely agent of community and moral virtue. 

The Reform Leader is an unrepentant Thatcherite who wants to see more, not less, privatisation. He has been married twice and built his public persona around pints, cigarettes, and the accumulation of wealth. Farage’s thoughtless past remarks about everyone from Romanians (he would be concerned if a group of men moved in next door) to British Muslims (a “fifth column”) hardly smacks of Christian charity. 

Orr and Kruger may talk a good game when it comes to communitarianism, but any future Reform government with Farage at the helm would almost certainly seek to go the other way. For all of his highfalutin theological prognostications, Reform’s resident theologian has yet to adequately explain how tax cuts for the rich and the privatisation of state assets will strengthen the “commonwealth”. 

It is very well to rail against the “atomisation of modern society” and “the shattering of civic and economic harmony”, it is quite another to throw your lot in with a policy offering that precludes any reversal of such trends. 

It wasn’t the phenomenon that Orr belittles as “wokus pokus” that flayed the bonds between citizens, nationals, and residents – it was the market, whose ‘invisible hand’ Farage threatens to unleash still further. 

Last year, Farage said that a Reform government would prioritise deregulation and “free businesses to get on and make more money.” This vision of a minimalist state would leave many of the things that Orr professes to care about to the winds of fate. 

Indeed, charismatic self-confidence can only take the Reform coalition so far. 

It doesn’t take a soothsayer to predict which ideological tendency is more likely to get what it wants from a Reform government. For all of Orr’s woolly talk of the politics of community, it is hedge funds and speculators who will surely be cheering a Reform victory the loudest. 

The contradiction becomes still more apparent when Orr turns from the UK to Ukraine. 

For a thinker so invested in sovereignty, nationhood, and the moral claims of ‘home’, Russia’s invasion ought to present an open and shut case. Here, after all, is a smaller nation defending its borders, its language, its institutions, and its right to exist against an imperial aggressor. 

But among the post-liberal right, Ukraine has often become not a test of national sovereignty but a proxy for globalism, liberal interventionism, and the hated European order. 

Orr has dismissed the war as a “regional Slavic conflict” and urged Reform to prioritise “Kent over Kyiv”. He has also accused those who demur of suffering from “Ukraine Brain”. The language of national sovereignty, it seems, stops at Dover. 

This is why the Hay exchange matters. 

Orr’s majoritarianism belongs to a larger vision in which the people, England itself, and the moral order are imagined as one; meanwhile the institutions that restrain power are depicted as the enemy. 

The danger does not come from a well-bred ideologue indulging in intellectual peregrinations from the sidelines. It comes from the veneer of respectability he provides to a politics that seeks fewer restraints, fewer mediating institutions, and less liberal democracy – all in the name of restoring England to past glories. 

As Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University, James Orr is no doubt familiar with the biblical injunction to beware of false prophets. Those tempted by Reform might usefully reacquaint themselves with it too.