Reform UK's policy chief and a Farage aide resign after a Channel 4 exposé
Reform UK's head of policy, James Orr, and Nigel Farage's long-standing aide, Dan Jukes, resigned after a Channel 4 News undercover investigation showed them arranging for a US company to pay for party-commissioned opinion polls, a scheme electoral law bars. Britain's Metropolitan Police said it was aware of the reporting, and Labour and the Liberal Democrats reported Reform to police. Farage denied any law was broken.
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Two Reform UK figures resign after the undercover exposé
James Orr, Reform UK's head of policy, and Dan Jukes, a long-standing aide to party leader Nigel Farage, said on Friday that they would step down after an undercover Channel 4 News investigation alleged that party officials had arranged for a foreign company to pay for opinion polling. The resignations came on the eve of Reform's annual conference, and the party said it would open its own inquiry into the allegations. Britain's Metropolitan Police said it was aware of the reporting about party donations and an alleged breach of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 relating to the polling, and both the governing Labour Party and the opposition Liberal Democrats said they had reported Reform to the police.[1]
Channel 4 shows a scheme to route a US company's payments through polls
The undercover footage, filmed by the investigative group Verbatim and verified by Channel 4 News, shows Orr and Jukes discussing three opinion polls that Reform UK commissioned and that a US company paid for, worth 32,500 pounds in total; two were reported in the Telegraph and one in the Times. On camera, Jukes says he would not breathe a word of the arrangement to anybody and that the party could easily get away with it, while Farage tells the undercover reporters the polling worked and calls the results amazing. A lawyer and former Electoral Commission chief executive who reviewed the findings said the material could amount to serious criminal offences, since a foreign company is not a permissible donor under British election law and such a benefit must be declared within thirty days.[2]
Farage denies wrongdoing as police confirm they are aware
Farage said in a radio interview that Reform had broken no laws, though he acknowledged that entrapped conversations do not look good, and Channel 4 News reported that the party denied the allegations in full when approached for comment. The resignations follow a series of funding controversies for Reform, the most damaging of which was the disclosure of an undeclared personal gift of five million pounds to Farage from the cryptocurrency businessman Christopher Harborne, who has given the party more than twenty-five million pounds in total; criminal and parliamentary inquiries into those donations are continuing, and the Electoral Commission has referred the new polling allegations to the police while the British Polling Council opened its own review.[1], [2]
