Revealed: Nigel Farage adviser had unpublicised role at polling firm

A close adviser to Nigel Farage had an influential role at a national polling company despite not being publicly associated with the firm, the Guardian can reveal.

Chris Bruni-Lowe, Farage’s private pollster for many years, played an important role in the operations of Redfield & Wilton Strategies and used it to develop potential campaign strategies, according to several sources who have worked there.

The firm, founded in 2020, is owned by Bruno Rodrigues, a lawyer. Its main public face was Philip van Scheltinga, a Harvard graduate.

As the Covid pandemic grew and the UK entered lockdown, the company’s polls received increasing coverage, even while the source of the firm’s polling expertise was unclear. Former employees have now revealed the important role of Bruni-Lowe, who sometimes went by the name “Chris Redfield”, under which quotes were published by the Washington Post newspaper.

As well as ordering UK and US voter intention polls, sources said Bruni-Lowe directed research on issues such as council spending, and appeared “obsessed” with producing a dossier which he suggested could be sold to political parties.

Bruni-Lowe’s role at the company will amplify questions about transparency in the polling industry, given his longstanding association with Farage at a time of intense scrutiny over the party’s use of polls to shape its political narrative.

The rules of the British Polling Council do not require pollsters to state any political affiliations, but they have strict guidelines on how they must declare who has commissioned and paid for any polling.

In a statement, Rodrigues, the company’s sole director, said there had never been “an institutional, polling, research, commissioning or financial relationship” between Redfield & Wilton and Reform UK or Farage.

He said Bruni-Lowe had worked as a “consultant” from mid-2020 until late 2022, and returned “voluntarily” in the summer of 2025 to train interns. Rodrigues added that Bruni-Lowe was “an important and highly valued member” of the team.

Sources said Bruni-Lowe, who some employees said had been known as “Chris Redfield”, was heavily involved in the company’s polling operations.

Rodrigues said the surname Redfield was used as an email account convention within the organisation, citing other examples of “Philip Redfield” and “Bruno Redfield”. He said: “It was not a device created specifically for Chris and it did not conceal his identity from people working within the company.”

Nonetheless, the situation was confusing enough that at least one newspaper, the Washington Post, attributed quotes to that name, while notes taken by one former employee during an oral induction in the summer of 2021, and seen by the Guardian, described “boss – Chris Redfield is COO essentially”.

Rodrigues said: “He was never presented to staff as the company’s chief operating officer and staff were never instructed to treat him as such.” He added that Van Scheltinga, as director of research, led the “day-to-day operation”.

The Guardian can also reveal that Dan Jukes, then a senior adviser to Farage, sought to promote Redfield & Wilton’s work in 2020, looking to place exclusive polls in publications including the Guardian, which turned down the offer.

Jukes stepped down as Farage’s chief of staff recently over a scandal in which undercover reporters posed as potential overseas donors to Reform UK. Footage published by Channel 4 News showed the co-founder of polling firm JL Partners, James Johnson, apparently acknowledging that Jukes had commissioned polling funded by an overseas donor.

The polling had appeared in newspapers without any reference to the party, with JL Partners acknowledging “weaknesses” in its procedures.

Jukes denies wrongdoing and Reform UK has said the party itself did not commission the work. On Wednesday, Reform announced that an internal inquiry had cleared the officials of breaking the law. The matter remains under police investigation.

Redfield & Wilton started producing polls in 2020 with little information about the people behind the company. During its publicly active years before it became less visible in late 2024, its voter intention polls frequently appeared in politically influential newsletters from Politico, the Times, and the New Statesman.

Bruni-Lowe ran Farage’s 2015 election campaign, helped test messaging for the formation of the Brexit party and advised on the 2019 local elections campaign, as well as having produced private polling for Farage since at least 2014, apart from during a brief period of working for Rishi Sunak before the 2024 election. In his book on political strategy, he writes of having worked for “organisations and candidates of all political persuasions”.

He is considered to be part of Farage’s inner circle and was close enough to the Reform UK leader to have been present on a trip to party donor Christopher Harborne’s Thai wellness retreat at Christmas in 2022 to mark the crypto billionaire’s 60th birthday.

Other guests photographed at the meeting include Farage’s unpaid aide and convicted fraudster George Cottrell.

In May 2023, Van Scheltinga and Bruni-Lowe were photographed having drinks at a Mayfair restaurant with Farage, Cottrell and Richard Tice, the Reform UK deputy leader.

Rodrigues said: “The existence of personal or social meetings involving individuals associated with the company does not establish a corporate relationship between Redfield & Wilton Strategies and Reform UK.”

While much of Redfield & Wilton’s published polling related to voter intentions in the UK and the US, sources said Bruni-Lowe had its staff develop a “dossier” on local authority performance between autumn 2024 and spring 2025.

One source said he suggested the firm’s work could be sold to political parties, and that Bruni-Lowe appeared “obsessed” with the dossier. Research by employees included freedom of information requests to councils to find expenditure on translation services.

Rodrigues said the FOI project was a “commercial research project” and translation services were just one of “several dozen categories” examined by the company in a project led by Van Scheltinga. He added that none of the research was supplied to Reform or Farage.

The company’s other work, sources said, included polling in Montenegro, Hungary, Hong Kong and the Bahamas, as well as research about attitudes in the UK to gold and cryptocurrencies.

Employees were not always told exactly how their work would be used. According to one former employee, they were told their work on a foreign election would be for the Telegraph, but the polling never appeared in the newspaper. Another said they believed their work on cryptocurrencies was for a client.

One unusual piece of work by the company was an October 2021 submission to an inquiry into central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) carried out by the House of Lords economic affairs committee. The company cited polling it said “was self-funded internally by Redfield & Wilton Strategies Ltd for the purpose of this submission”.

The submission said the scepticism of the British public over the UK government’s capacity for innovation meant “it is strategically important that alternatives to a CBDC from the private sector, including those that are already in use, are also given the opportunity to be developed further”.

According to a person who worked at the company at the time of the submission, “all of the crypto stuff came down from Chris [Bruni-Lowe]”.

One online profile for Rodrigues, a solicitor based in London, refers to him holding a directorship of an “innovative market research firm”. However, according to former employees, he had a limited role in the day-to-day running of Redfield & Wilton. One source said that at a rare in-person meeting Rodrigues was “paraded around on a laptop on a Zoom call”.

Van Scheltinga was frequently quoted giving analysis of the company’s polling and wrote columns for the Times and Telegraph.

Van Scheltinga was the listed contact for the company with the British Polling Council, the trade body for pollsters, but one industry source said he never attended BPC meetings. This led to demands from the BPC for a representative of the group to appear before them: that was ultimately Rodrigues, the nominal director, who maintained “total silence”, according to the industry source.

Bruni-Lowe declined to comment. Van Scheltinga did not respond to requests for comment.