A longtime adviser to Nigel Farage had a significant but previously unpublicised role at a national polling company whose surveys were regularly cited by major British news outlets, according to new reporting.
Chris Bruni-Lowe, who has produced private polling for Farage for more than a decade, worked closely with Redfield & Wilton Strategies between 2020 and 2022 and later returned to help train interns. Former employees told The Guardian he was deeply involved in the firm’s polling operation and used the research to develop potential campaign strategies.
The revelation is likely to raise fresh questions about transparency in the polling industry, particularly because Bruni-Lowe’s longstanding relationship with Farage was not publicly associated with Redfield & Wilton while the firm’s surveys were appearing in Politico, The Times, the New Statesman and other influential outlets.
Redfield & Wilton’s owner, Bruno Rodrigues, strongly denies there was any institutional relationship between the company and Farage or Reform UK. He said Bruni-Lowe worked as a consultant and that none of the firm’s research was supplied to Reform or Farage.
Bruni-Lowe was sometimes known as ‘Chris Redfield’
Redfield & Wilton was founded in 2020 and quickly became a familiar name in British political polling during the Covid pandemic, despite relatively little public information about the people behind it.
According to former employees, Bruni-Lowe played an important role inside the company and was at times known internally as “Chris Redfield”. The Washington Post even published quotes under that name. One set of notes from an employee induction in 2021 described him as:
“boss – Chris Redfield is COO essentially”
Rodrigues disputes that description and says Bruni-Lowe was never presented to staff as chief operating officer. He said the “Redfield” surname was simply part of an internal email convention also used for other staff and was not designed to conceal Bruni-Lowe’s identity.
He nevertheless described Bruni-Lowe as an “important and highly valued member” of the team who worked as a consultant from mid-2020 until late 2022, before returning voluntarily in summer 2025 to train interns.
Bruni-Lowe declined to comment to The Guardian.
He had worked with Farage for years
Bruni-Lowe’s political relationship with Farage long predates Redfield & Wilton.
He ran Farage’s 2015 general election campaign in South Thanet, helped test political messaging around the creation of the Brexit Party and advised on its 2019 local election strategy. He has also produced private polling for Farage since at least 2014, apart from a brief period when he worked for Rishi Sunak before the 2024 general election.
He has been described as part of Farage’s inner circle and was photographed with him at donor Christopher Harborne’s Thai wellness retreat in 2022, where guests had gathered to mark the crypto billionaire’s 60th birthday.
Bruni-Lowe was also photographed in May 2023 drinking at a Mayfair restaurant with Farage, Reform deputy leader Richard Tice, George Cottrell and Redfield & Wilton’s Philip van Scheltinga.
Rodrigues said those social meetings did not establish any corporate relationship between Redfield & Wilton and Reform UK.
Polling was used to explore potential campaign tactics
Former employees told The Guardian that Bruni-Lowe ordered UK and US voting-intention polling and directed research into areas including local-authority spending.
One project involved developing a detailed dossier on council performance between autumn 2024 and spring 2025. Staff sent freedom of information requests to local authorities asking about spending in a wide range of areas, including translation services.
A former employee said Bruni-Lowe appeared particularly interested in the project and suggested the resulting research could potentially be sold to political parties.
Rodrigues said the dossier was a commercial research project led by Van Scheltinga, with translation costs only one of dozens of categories examined. He added that none of the work was provided to Reform UK or Farage.
The company also carried out polling in Montenegro, Hungary, Hong Kong and the Bahamas, along with research on attitudes towards gold and cryptocurrencies.
‘All of the crypto stuff came down from Chris’
Redfield & Wilton also made a formal submission to a House of Lords inquiry into central bank digital currencies in October 2021.
The company said polling used in the submission had been funded internally and argued that private-sector alternatives to a government-backed digital currency should also be given room to develop.
A former employee told The Guardian:
“all of the crypto stuff came down from Chris [Bruni-Lowe]”
The company’s work on crypto is likely to attract attention because Farage has long been a vocal supporter of cryptocurrency, while Reform has since received enormous donations from wealthy figures linked to the sector, including Harborne and Ben Delo.
There is no evidence in The Guardian’s report that the Redfield & Wilton crypto research was commissioned by Farage, Reform or any of its donors.
Dan Jukes also tried to promote the firm’s polling
The story has added significance because another senior Farage adviser, Dan Jukes, previously tried to promote Redfield & Wilton’s surveys to major newspapers.
The Guardian reports that Jukes approached publications in 2020 offering exclusive polling from the firm, including to The Guardian itself, which declined the offer.
Jukes later became Farage’s chief of staff and was recently caught up in a separate scandal involving undercover reporters posing as potential overseas donors to Reform.
Channel 4 footage showed polling-company co-founder James Johnson apparently acknowledging that Jukes had commissioned polling funded by an overseas donor. Those polls subsequently appeared in newspapers without any reference to Reform UK. JL Partners later acknowledged “weaknesses” in its procedures.
Jukes denies wrongdoing and Reform says the party itself did not commission the polling. Reform’s own internal investigation concluded last week that no laws had been broken, although it acknowledged failures in internal processes and conduct. The Metropolitan Police investigation into the underlying allegations is still ongoing.
What do polling rules actually require?
The British Polling Council does not require pollsters to declare the political affiliations of everyone who works with them.
It does, however, require transparency over who commissioned and paid for published polling.
That distinction is important here.
There is no claim in The Guardian’s report that Redfield & Wilton broke polling rules simply because Bruni-Lowe had a longstanding relationship with Farage. The issue is whether readers and journalists would have viewed the company’s work differently if they had known that one of Farage’s closest polling advisers was also playing a significant role behind the scenes.
Redfield & Wilton’s surveys were widely circulated during their most active period and were regularly included in political coverage, newsletters and polling averages.
The company became less visible after 2024.
Former employees describe an opaque operation
Several former staff members described uncertainty about exactly who controlled the company or how some of their work would ultimately be used.
One employee said they had been told research for a foreign election was intended for The Telegraph, although the polling never appeared there. Another believed crypto research had been commissioned for an external client.
Van Scheltinga was publicly presented as the firm’s main polling expert and frequently provided analysis of its surveys, including columns for The Times and Telegraph. He was also listed as the company’s contact with the British Polling Council.
An industry source told The Guardian that Van Scheltinga did not attend BPC meetings, eventually prompting demands for someone from the organisation to appear before the trade body. Rodrigues later attended but maintained what the source described as “total silence”.
Van Scheltinga did not respond to requests for comment.
Reform’s use of polling is already under scrutiny
The new disclosures arrive while Reform is facing much broader scrutiny over how political polling has been commissioned, funded and used to shape media coverage.
The party has denied breaking electoral law over overseas-funded polling linked to Jukes and says no illegal donation was ever accepted. Its internal report acknowledged procedural failings but cleared officials of criminal wrongdoing.
Farage is separately under investigation by Parliament’s standards commissioner over the £5m personal gift he received from Harborne, while the police inquiry into Reform’s donations controversy remains active.
The latest reporting does not establish that Redfield & Wilton was controlled by Reform or Farage, and Rodrigues explicitly denies any such relationship. What it does establish is that Farage’s longtime private pollster held a significant role inside a polling company whose political surveys were being widely circulated without that connection being publicly known.
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