Two books stand out for Dr James Orr as having fostered his political spirit: JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Blue Labour by Lord Glasman.
Now the University of Cambridge philosopher, who is a friend of the US vice-president, will use them as a blueprint for a Reform UK government.
Orr has been appointed to oversee policy formulation for the Centre for a Better Britain (CBB), a think tank linked to Nigel Farage’s party. He said that Farage had his “pulse on the British electorate” and the Conservatives may be oblivious to the “existential risk” facing them.
Orr, who is also a theologian, mixes in the same circles as key figures in President Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement, including Vance. He denied that the CBB would be a “Maga tribute act” or that much of its proposed policy would mirror the Trump administration’s plans.
Orr spoke at the National Conservative Conference in Washington last year
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However, he was open about taking inspiration from Vance. “From the first time I met him, I thought, ‘This guy’s going places’,” he said. They were introduced by a friend in 2019, four years before Vance became a senator in Ohio.
They keep in touch but do not often talk politics, instead discussing their families, careers, books and religion. Orr hosted Vance and his wife, Usha, during a trip to the UK last year.
Vance has a “special concern” for Britain and follows political events in a “strikingly granular way”, Orr said.
One of the texts that influenced the vice-president’s view of the UK is by Glasman, the Labour peer who wrote a repudiation of Sir Tony Blair’s embrace of progressive modernism.
Of Blue Labour, Orr said: “Maurice is a dear friend and I loved his book. I chuckled to myself as I read it, because frankly I was looking for things to disagree with and struggled.
“On broad big-picture horizons, there wouldn’t be much disagreement between us … There’s a lot more convergence than one might think between the new right and the old left.”
Orr sees the CBB as a “very important and interesting disruptive start-up” in the policy world. The pressure to hit the ground running if Reform is elected would be acute because Labour did not have “a very clear agenda that you plan in opposition and implement from day one”, he said.
Immigration, energy security and the economy are the three issues that will be key to the CBB’s work and the next election. Family policy is also important to Orr, whose wife is a vicar. Orr, who is Belgian but went to boarding school in England, “selectively seeks inspiration” from overseas.
Trump’s energy plans are one area of potential imitation, given Orr’s preference for “sensible environmentalism” over the drive towards net zero by 2050. He also sees mileage in pushing back on pylons and solar farms being built in the countryside as a possible way to win over green-minded voters.
The CBB is seeking to work with figures across the right, and Orr said it was not impossible the Conservative Party could revive its fortunes.
But he compared the future facing Kemi Badenoch to that of the Liberals in 1923 before the party was wiped out. “The [Liberal] party didn’t grasp in the early Twenties the existential risk of party division and failure to listen to the electorate and to understand what they were for and what they were about.”
He warns about the dangers of focusing on foreign affairs at the expense of voters’ concerns by recalling a speech he gave to a Tory association after the party’s local elections wipeout in May.
He says the first question was about why Vance had publicly remonstrated with President Zelensky in the White House.
Orr said: “Why, on the day of one of the biggest electoral wipeouts the Tory party ever had, was I having a half-hour conversation about US foreign policy regarding a regional Slavic conflict over which Britain has fairly minimal influence? Why are we worrying more about Kyiv than Kent?
“It’s not that it’s not important, but in terms of the order of preferences for ordinary people, surely it’s about [the] cost of living; it’s about the economic risk of net zero; it’s about having that most basic power that any state could have, namely power over its borders.”
Orr said that Farage is now “spending a lot more time thinking about how to fix Britain than how to copy America”.