Shorter article:
The Curious Case of James Orr
21percent.org/?p=4327
An investigation by the Financial Times, published on 3 September 2026, sets out how Orr has combined his tenured Cambridge post with his Reform role. It also reports the outcome of a formal complaint made against him by one of his own PhD students. The particulars will interest anyone who has followed how Cambridge chooses which of its staff it disciplines, which it defends, and which it allows to make their own account of what has happened.
The piece goes on to detail how a complaint brought by a theology PhD student of academic negligence and bullying was partially upheld against Orr and the Divinity Faculty.
However although the university paid the student compensation and the Divinity chair of faculty, Professor Richard Rex, wrote a formal letter of apology on the faculty's behalf, Orr claimed not to even know about the outcome of the complaint never mind to have been subjected to any action.
The article compares this to the university's rather different handling of a number of other complaints.
It's instructive.
But even more instructive is this part (my bolding)
In 2024, Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity admitted Dóra Szűcs to a PhD programme under Orr’s supervision. Szűcs is the former chief of staff to Balazs Orbán, director of Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), Viktor Orbán’s flagship think tank in Hungary. She was also its former international director. She has no publicly recorded qualifications in divinity or the philosophy of religion.
Between 2022 and her application, Orr was speaking regularly at MCC events. During the same period, the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation, of which Orr is a director, received £512,500 from MCC , almost all of its income. That foundation in turn funds the Cambridge Scrutonian Society, an invitation-only discussion group founded at Orr’s request. A grant application from the foundation to MCC states that the Scrutonian model is “intended to spread throughout the United Kingdom and Europe” and that the foundation would develop a “detailed plan to effectively influence British cultural institutions”.