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With luminaries from Erasmus and Isaac Newton to Alan Turing to Stephen Hawking, Cambridge University has always framed itself as a centre of scientific advance, progress, and the Enlightenment.
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.
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.
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…