Arrived home late last night in Birmingham, logged on, and saw that my dear friend James Orr, the Cambridge academic and senior policy advisor to ReformUK, had become embroiled in 𝕏a campaign finance sting carried out by a far-left climate activist. James and others were caught on hidden camera, James O’Keefe-style, soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions. Now James and another senior Farage aide in the videos have been forced out of the campaign, at least temporarily.
I had hoped not to write about this. James is dear to my heart, a man I love and respect. But given how often I have written in this space promoting James, and The Moorings (which is really a project of his wife Helen, but James is obviously a part of it), I feel that I can’t ignore it.
𝕏Here is James’s initial response to the sting. Yes, he was set up by some bad actors. Perhaps this was entrapment. Perhaps the video was edited in a deceptive way. And in any case, what’s at issue here is rather trivial. It’s against the law in Britain to receive campaign contributions from abroad. If only Reform had been able to slip some illicit funds into backpacks carried across the channel by “asylum seekers,” James and the other guy would still have their jobs today.
Still, the things he was caught saying on video are hard to square with the law, as I understand it. It’s painful someone who loves and admires James to see. I watched it last night and did not recognize the James Orr I know — the James Orr that I still believe, and always will, is the real man: a brave, decent, honorable soul. Politics, man. Can any good man or woman survive its temptations?
I can’t and won’t comment on what is happening here in terms of British law, because honestly, I don’t know. The amount of money we are talking about here is piddly; it’s the principle of the thing. All I really care about is my friend and his family. If he and his Reform colleagues have done wrong, then justice must prevail, as painful as that may be, for James, his family, and all of us who are fortunate enough to be his friends. What I would remind you all of is that James, in the recent past, has taken huge personal and professional risks at Cambridge to defend free speech and open academic inquiry. In so doing, he earned scores of enemies at the University of Arday. He did all those long before he became involved with Nigel Farage and his party.
I ask myself: How did a good man find himself in the position of asking for what appear to be illegal campaign contributions? To be clear, I haven’t spoken to James about any of this, and don’t plan to. I don’t know how the things he was caught on that video saying can be spun effectively. Sure, the people behind it are bad guys. But the law is the law, and nobody forced him to say those things.
It has been clear for some time that the British establishment would stop at nothing to stop Reform. In the video, James says what everybody who knows anything about UK politics at the moment knows: that Reform UK has been struggling for funding, even though it is the most popular party on the Right at the moment, in the polls. I don’t know enough about British politics to say why they are struggling, but it seems likely to me that the moneyed people on the British Right must know that at some level, if Reform comes to power, it’ll mean the end of their traditional privileges, to some extent. Surely they must know that Britain is in such a catastrophically bad way that things must change, and change radically, if the country is to be saved. But maybe they can’t accept that making that change, if it stands to hurt their own standing, is not something they are willing to do. I dunno, it’s just a theory.
There’s a film coming out in the US next week, “The Uprising,” about a medieval English peasants’ revolt. I had heard nothing of it until catching part of a radio interview with Paul Greengrass, the writer-director, who is English. He spoke of the “rage” now in Britain and in America. His movie comes out in this context. I parked my car, looked up the trailer, and my jaw dropped:
This movie seems very, very much of the moment, at least judging by the trailer — and far more so of Britain than of the US, though obviously it will land here too, in a political way.
Anyway, I can imagine how a patriot like James could see the crisis in his country as so extreme that cutting ethical corners to get into power the only man who seems capable of turning things around would make sense. More than one intelligent conservative Briton to whom I’ve spoken over the past couple of years has said that if “Nigel” (it’s always “Nigel”) fails to win power, then Britain will have wasted its last chance to save itself politically. This is more or less the same logic that many of us who have held our nose and voted for Trump, or otherwise supported him, have used. The cost of doing so mounts, but every time I look at the Democratic alternative, given how batshit crazy that party has become, I think: “What else is there?”
I keep returning to what that young Hungarian conservative voter, an Evangelical Christian, told me in 2021: that she knows that Fidesz, Viktor Orban’s party, is far too corrupt, but she was planning to vote Fidesz anyway. There are two kinds of corruption, she said: the ordinary kind (theft, graft, etc), and the kind the Hungarian Left stands for: a deeper intellectual and spiritual corruption (e.g., gender ideology, open borders, all the usual things that the contemporary European left stands for). In her view, Hungary would not survive surrendering to that kind of corruption. Given the real-world choice available to her as a voter, she planned to vote for Fidesz, with eyes wide open.
I understood it. It’s why I, a foreigner, supported Fidesz, and do not regret that support, even though I understand well why Hungarians finally got fed up with it. Well, the new guy, Peter Magyar, is behaving with far more authoritarianism than Viktor Orban ever did. But this is just fine with the EU elites; he might be authoritarian, but he’s *their *authoritarian.
Anyway, in the real world, politics sometimes forces these choices. An extreme version: if you lived in Spain in the 1930s, during the civil war, you would have had to choose between a Catholic form of fascism, represented by Franco, or Communism (the Republicans were supported by Stalin). There was no middle ground. If you were a Christian, you would have faced persecution, even death, by leftist forces. As disgusted as you likely would have been by some of the things the Nationalists (Team Franco) were doing, you couldn’t avoid the likelihood that a Republican victory would mean terrible, terrible things for you, your family, your church, and everything you love.
Civil war Spain is an extreme case, but you understand the principle. Damon Linker is an American liberal who despises Trump and Trumpism — but he remains clear-eyed about the stupidity and wickedness of the Democratic Party. He has made the judgment that the Democrats are the lesser of two evils. I understand that; I have made the same kind of judgment, but landed on the other side.
Back to the Orr thing. Unless exculpatory information emerges, I can’t and won’t defend what James was caught on camera doing, though I find it easy to understand why he may have done it. If you really thought your country’s survival was at stake, might you not have done so too? Make sure you understand me clearly: I’m not defending it, I’m just trying to understand it.
The James Orr I have known these last seven years would never have involved himself in politics for personal financial gain. By standing against the corrupt establishment in his own university — and standing almost entirely alone, at great professional risk — James became a traitor to his class. He had nothing to gain from all that, and everything to lose. But he did it, because it was the right thing for a patriotic, morally decent English intellectual to have done.
Even earlier, when he was teaching at Oxford, James was openly pro-Brexit, which made him widely hated among his colleagues. James is patrician by background, but during that struggle, the porters and other working-class people working at Oxford thanked him for his stand. I bring all this up to share with you the kind of man James Orr is. He will be portrayed in the British media in the days to come as a grubby politico, but whatever wrongdoing he might be guilty of, it would be out of character.
I’m sure Cambridge University, eager to change the subject from its Jason Arday corruption, will go after him. There will no doubt be people in the days and weeks to come who say, “James Orr? Never knew the man,” even though they were friends. **I am not and will never be one of them. **I don’t know what the fallout of all this will be for The Moorings, but if it’s destructive, then, well, the Enemy would have won a great victory. This is exactly the kind of thing I worried about when James got involved in high-level politics.
I genuinely believe that whatever happens to his nascent political career, that James will come out of this chastened, humbled, but stronger. This is the character bred into his bones. But it’s going to be hard.
Yesterday, J.D. Vance was asked in a press conference about his friendship with Tucker Carlson. He responded by saying that he strongly disagrees with Tucker on some things, but that he is not going to abandon a friend. You readers know what I think of Tucker Carlson — or at least the man Tucker Carlson has become these last two years — but I don’t fault Vance for not throwing his friend away. Loyalty is usually a virtue, but it can become a vice. I get that. I have never expected JDV to cut Carlson loose, but only for him to make strong, clear speeches repudiating the anti-Semitism and other noxious views Carlson has adopted. In my case, I didn’t cut Carlson off as a friend; he cut me off, after I criticized him publicly for platforming Nick Fuentes. It is Carlson, not me, who believes one should cast aside friends over political disagreement.
There are times when, and conditions under which, one has a moral obligation to sever one’s relationship with another. But they should, and they must be, rare. Many of us have experienced the pain of having old friends cut us off over trivial reasons. (You older readers will recall that a far-left friend of 40 years cut me off over a letter to the editor in which I defended Trump’s post-January 6 impeachment; what made her end our four-decade friendship was that I acknowledged in the letter that Trump had some some good things.) While recognizing that loyalty necessarily has limits, I feel pretty strongly that those limits must be difficult to reach.
If all you know about James Orr is what that sting video reveals, and the gleeful stomping of him and Reform in the UK media today, then you don’t know the real James Orr. Again, this is in no way a defense of what he appears to have said and done in the video, but it is a defense of the whole man. It seems to me that whatever the ethical breaches that may have been revealed here, that James made some careless moves here, as a newcomer to politics. It can’t possibly be a shock to anyone but the ladies of the altar guild that money and politics do not associate innocently. As Nigel Farage said today about all this:
“The Labour Party and the Conservative Party have been selling peerages for years in return for political donations. Political donations leading to big government contracts.
“In the world of political funding, all sorts of things have been done over decades that are wrong.”
I am confident that Reform is guilty here of a double standard in British politics. Then again, they must have known that the entire establishment was gunning for them.
Even though I have enjoyed similar stings made by operatives working for James O’Keefe, the American right-wing activist, there’s always been in the back of my mind a nagging worry about what these sort of things do to the fabric of trust in our society. If you cannot sit down for drinks with someone without fearing that you might be recorded, and the next day your life blown up when the audio and video is blasted all over the Internet, is that a good thing?
One more time: this is not a defense of James Orr seemingly trying to evade UK campaign finance laws in conversation with a phony donor, but still it seems to me that if political people of all parties and ideologies have to worry that someone they’re sitting with at a pub is wearing a wire, what does that do to the ability of a political system to function? True, you could say, “If you aren’t breaking the law, then what do you have to worry about?” But we all know that there are many things a political figure could say that are in no way illegal, but the exposure of which could be disastrous.
Remember my telling you about the young DC politico who told me this past summer that no one in his Zoomer circles use text messaging anymore, because they’re afraid that their own colleagues might one day use their words against them? There’s a word for a psychosocial environment like this, one in which you never, ever know who you can trust: totalitarianism.
Well, my dear friend James has learned a painful lesson here. I hope he recovers from this politically, but even if that’s not possible, a man as brilliant, as gifted, and as decent as he will always have a future. And in me, he will always have a loyal friend. I have seen for seven years, in his presence at his home in Cambridge and elsewhere, what kind of man he truly is. I watched that video last night with a sick feeling in my gut, but also thinking: I could see something like that happening to me if I involved myself too closely in politics. James is a Christian intellectual, not an operator. He also works — or worked — for a party that he believes (correctly in my view) is the last political hope to keep his beleaguered country from falling apart. If I were in his shoes, might I have made the same kind of mistake? Yeah, maybe. “Lead us not into temptation.”
James and his wife Helen are going to find out in the days and weeks to come who their real friends are. I will be in that number, and I encourage any of you readers who know and love the Orrs as I do to let them know that you are with them through this, come what may. Whatever mistakes James might have made in his political work, these are deeply good people, and as I’ve said, James has been incredibly brave against the academic mob. I’ve no doubt that very damn few of the people who will be coming after him the the days ahead have one-tenth of the guts that James Orr has shown in standing up to villains and mobs of villains.
Besides which, I know of personal generosity he has extended to people in trouble, people who have had no one to defend them, and who were not remotely in a position to help James. He (and Helen) came to their aid for no reason than that it was the right thing to do. I can’t talk about these things in detail, because they are private, but let me assure you that the courage and goodness of James Orr is who he is, deep down, even when nobody can see it.
As we await Lindsay Clancy verdict, let’s follow Nellie Bowles’s lead and check in on how Canada is doing:
The deeper idea being proposed here seems to be that moms should kind of be able to kill their kids. Like, if they’re really, really stressed. In Canada,…
