LONDON — Nigel Farage has appointed James Orr as head of policy at his populist outfit Reform UK — a move which further bolsters the party’s links to U.S. President Donald Trump. A leading figure in the national conservative movement in the U.K., Orr has been described by JD Vance as his “British sherpa.” The associate professor at the University of Cambridge, who has advised Reform since last fall, was handed the top policy role Tuesday as Farage unveiled his shadow Cabinet team. “As senior adviser to Nigel Farage, I have seen up close just how determined he and Reform are to fix broken Britain,” Orr said in a statement. “Working alongside [Reform UK MP] Danny Kruger in his role as Head of PrepGov, I will help to build the most serious policy operation in British politics — and give our shadow Cabinet the support they will need to govern,” Orr added. VANCE CAMARADERIE Orr was among a handful of senior U.K. political figures who met Vance when he visited the U.K. last summer. David Lammy, the U.K. foreign secretary at the time, and Robert Jenrick, now Farage’s shadow chancellor, who was then a Conservative Party politician, also met Vance during his trip. In an interview in 2024 Orr claimed to have a “kind of camaraderie” with the now U.S. vice president in “trying to work out what the new right should look like in the 21st century.” He first met Vance, who he describes as a “mentor,” in 2019. Orr defended Vance’s provocative comments about “childless cat ladies” before the 2024 presidential election, telling POLITICO’s Power Play podcast the then vice presidential candidate saw himself as an anti-establishment figure, meaning he “can’t play nicely.” Farage’s new policy chief also has strong links to other Trump allies. Last month he organized a series of lectures in Cambridge with Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and an early Trump donor. UNRAVELING BLAIRISM At Reform UK’s conference last fall, Orr suggested a significant part of Reform’s policy agenda would overturn former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s “catastrophic and extremely consequential” Labour government. Blair was prime minister from 1997 to 2007. “They completely overturned the constitutional, legal, political and cultural landscape of the United Kingdom for 25 years. We’re going to spend the best part of the next 15 years trying to unravel it,” Orr said during a panel discussion at the Birmingham gathering. At the same event Orr also backed a “British ICE” equivalent of America’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Trump’s flagship immigration policy has since come under heavy criticism after two protestors against its operations were killed in Minneapolis last month. “Don’t underestimate how much effect a small band of dedicated people in the cockpit of the nation can do,” Orr said at the time. Orr also suggested Farage would run a minority government if Reform fell short of an overall majority and “dare” opposition parties “to continue ruining the country by voting against the policies that it clearly needs and wants and we’ll have another general election at Christmas.” ‘WHY ARE WE WORRYING ABOUT KYIV?’ Orr’s foreign policy stance is likely to come under heavy scrutiny. Last summer, Reform’s new head of policy described Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “regional Slavic conflict …. happening in the world that I don’t care very much about.” Orr said he was more worried about protecting Kent from irregular migrants crossing the English Channel, whom he called “illegal invaders.” “Why are we worrying about Kyiv? Let’s fix Kent first. Then we worry about Kyiv,” he said. The rhetoric will only deepen existing skepticism about Reform’s support for Ukraine, even though Farage pledged to shoot down Russian jets invading NATO airspace if he became PM. Dan Bloom and Esther Webber contributed to this report.

BRUSSELS ― Welcome to the real start of Ursula von der Leyen’s second term as European Commission president. On Thursday, the German politician easily defeated a vote of no-confidence brought by far-right politicians, convincing a comfortable majority of EU lawmakers (among those present) to reject the motion and keep her in office. The center-right European People’s Party “has shown again today that we are the stability factor for the EU project,” Manfred Weber, von der Leyen’s main conservative ally in Parliament, crowed after the vote. And yet the victory comes at considerable cost for the Commission president. Not only was she forced into publicly defending her actions in the so-called Pfizergate scandal, she also had to grant considerable concessions to the Socialists and Democrats group — her purported allies — to fend off a threat that their lawmakers would abstain in Thursday’s vote. “I think that she [von der Leyen] finally understood what is happening in Parliament,” trumpeted MEP René Repasi, head of the German SPD delegation in Parliament. Other groups are watching — and drawing conclusions. One is that it’s surprisingly easy to bring a vote of no confidence that has the potential to bring down the European Union’s most powerful institution: only 72 votes are needed. The other is that one doesn’t necessarily need to go as far as bringing down the Commission president. A well-formulated threat to inflict political damage and impede her wider agenda will do the job nicely. There was nothing, in theory, to stop parties from engaging in this sort of power play prior to Thursday’s vote. But the spectacle of seeing von der Leyen so vulnerable has unleashed something in her rivals and allies alike, emboldening them to criticize her in ways they would not have done before and normalizing a form of power politics that’s more common in national parliaments than it is in Brussels. In that sense, Thursday was a milestone: the true political start of von der Leyen’s second term in power. “The Commission must stop rolling back the Green Deal under the fallacy of cutting red tape and deliver on promises made,” Bas Eickhout, president of the Greens/EFA Group, warned. WHO WILL MOVE AGAINST HER NEXT? The motion of no-confidence came from a branch of the populist right, including some lawmakers who lean toward Russian President Vladimir Putin, and was thus easy to dismiss by all mainstream parties. But the next one may well come from a Left-Green bloc furious over the fact that von der Leyen is unwinding much of her green agenda. With a combined 99 seats in Parliament, they would have no trouble meeting the threshold to bring a no-confidence vote. Even so, the most serious threat to von der Leyen comes from members of the coalition that helped her win power in 2019 and 2024, namely the liberal Renew and S&D groups. Neither of these groups — which both lost considerable ground in the last election — has an interest in toppling von der Leyen as she remains their best hope of getting at least some of their policy wishes into law. But they will have learned that quiet, behind-the-scenes negotiations with the Commission may not be the best way to get what they want. If anything, the lesson from the past few weeks is that the opposite is true: Those who shout loudest and threaten the most effectively get their way. Once learned, that lesson may prove impossible to unlearn for a typically meek European Parliament. Max Griera and Sarah Wheaton contributed reporting.