REFORM CAUGHT CONCEALING FOREIGN-FUNDED POLLING AND DISCUSSING A £500,000 PROXY DONATION - Reform Watch

For nearly a year, an undercover reporter from Verbatim Investigations posed as William Lockwood, the British-educated son of a wealthy American businessman. What followed was not idle speculation among peripheral activists. The people recorded included Reform UK’s head of policy, James Orr, Nigel Farage’s senior aide Dan Jukes and Farage himself. The investigators created a US company which paid JL Partners £32,500 for three polls organised for Reform. The results were then published by The Daily Telegraph and The Times without readers, or apparently the newspapers, being told who had commissioned the polling or that it had been financed by an overseas company. The British Polling Council has since found “clear breaches” of its transparency rules by JL Partners. Orr was recorded describing the arrangement as “totally legit” while boasting that “we could easily get away with it”. He said Farage “doesn’t know, won’t know” and would “rather not know”. When the supposed donor proposed giving Reform £500,000, Jukes discussed passing the money through the donor’s British son and claimed foreign donors routinely “donate through their kids”. The £500,000 was never transferred, but that does not erase what was said. At a later dinner in Clacton, Farage was told that the American father had financed the polling and celebrated its impact as “amazing”, declaring: “Bang for buck… It worked. Boom.” He now claims he “wasn’t even listening”. Reform initially denounced the investigation as a hoax by “foreign-funded climate-change activists”. It then suspended Orr and Jukes, launched an internal investigation and watched its conference descend into crisis. The Metropolitan Police is assessing the allegations, the Electoral Commission is considering the material and Cambridge University is examining Orr’s conduct. This scandal lands alongside the inquiry into Farage’s undeclared £5 million gift, questions over support supplied by convicted fraudster George Cottrell and more than £645,000 paid to the virtually invisible COR Research. Reform asks Britain to trust it with power while its own senior figures are filmed discussing secrecy, proxies and what they believe they can “get away with”. That is not reform. It is corruption in waiting.