Deputy heads have rolled. Reform UK, in the person of chairman Lee Anderson, announced this morning that Dan Jukes, Nigel Farage’s right hand man, and James Orr, the party’s head of strategy, have stood down and abandoned the party conference. ‘They have left the building and they won’t be coming back,’ Anderson said.

Footage screened by Channel 4 on Thursday night showed Jukes appearing to suggest a way to get around electoral law to secure a foreign donation of £500,000. A reporter posed as a UK-based son of an American father, who was to give money to the son to give to Reform after being wooed by both Orr and Jukes. Electoral law sets out that to be a permissible donor to a UK political party you must be a UK registered voter, or a company registered in the UK. In a statement, Jukes said: ‘I totally deny any wrongdoing but have stepped back from politics in order to clear my name.’

“It worked, boom.” That’s Nigel Farage celebrating a Reform UK plot to break election law – by having a US company secretly pay for three influential political polls that benefitted the party.Earlier in the investigation, Reform’s Head of Policy James Orr and senior advisor… pic.twitter.com/jJD7Xn1lLu— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) September 3, 2026

“It worked, boom.” That’s Nigel Farage celebrating a Reform UK plot to break election law – by having a US company secretly pay for three influential political polls that benefitted the party.Earlier in the investigation, Reform’s Head of Policy James Orr and senior advisor… pic.twitter.com/jJD7Xn1lLu

For a party exposed for apparently operating in a quite different fashion to conventional parties, this was a reassuringly traditional response to crisis, one which has governed British politics for a thousand years – kill the aides in the hope you can save the king.

Anyone who knows anything about Reform, knows what a big deal this is. Orr was one of the figures from the world of think tanks and ideas who gave the party intellectual credibility. Jukes is like a son to Farage, a prickly working class lad from Sutton Coldfield with Essex Boy vibes who has been with Farage for a decade and is effectively his guard dog. Given any choice at all there is no way Farage would ever have thrown him under a bus. That he has gone is a measure of the seriousness of the situation.

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Faces at their conference in Birmingham, themed around the first 100 days of a Reform government, are near universally ashen. Spare a thought for the director of communications, Ed Sumner, who spent his 30th birthday fire fighting this mess.

The initial reaction, of course, was to attack the expose as a ‘hoax’ on Reform perpetrated by a bunch of climate change activists. The undercover filming was carried out by Verbatim Investigations, founded by journalists from the Centre for Climate Reporting. But I’m afraid this is too serious to dismiss with a machine gunning of the messenger, as Reform’s actions this morning tacitly........

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