Chris Bruni-Lowe, a close adviser to Nigel Farage, played an influential role at the national polling company Redfield & Wilton Strategies despite having no public association with the firm, the Guardian has reported.
Bruni-Lowe, who has acted as Farage’s private pollster for many years, was involved in the company’s operations and used his position to develop potential campaign strategies, according to several sources who have worked at Redfield & Wilton.
The firm was established in 2020 and is owned by Bruno Rodrigues, a lawyer. Its principal public representative was Philip van Scheltinga, a Harvard graduate.
As the Covid pandemic spread and the UK entered lockdown, the company’s polls attracted growing coverage, even as the source of its polling expertise remained unclear. Former employees have now disclosed the scale of Bruni-Lowe’s involvement. He sometimes used the name “Chris Redfield”, and quotes were published under that name by the Washington Post.
Sources said that in addition to commissioning UK and US voter intention polls, Bruni-Lowe directed research on subjects including council spending. They said he appeared “obsessed” with producing a dossier that he suggested could be sold to political parties.
Bruni-Lowe’s role at the firm is likely to intensify scrutiny of transparency in the polling industry, given his long association with Farage at a time when the party’s use of polls to shape its political narrative is under close examination.
The British Polling Council’s rules do not oblige pollsters to disclose political affiliations, but they set out strict guidelines on how firms must declare who has commissioned and paid for 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 worked as a “consultant” from mid-2020 until late 2022, and returned “voluntarily” in the summer of 2025 to train interns. Rodrigues described him as “an important and highly valued member” of the team.
Sources said Bruni-Lowe, whom some employees knew as “Chris Redfield”, was deeply involved in the firm’s polling operations.
Rodrigues said the Redfield surname was used as an email account convention inside the organisation, pointing to other examples including “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.”
The arrangement nonetheless caused confusion. The Washington Post attributed quotes to that name, and notes taken by one former employee during an oral induction in the summer of 2021, 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 also reports that Dan Jukes, then a senior adviser to Farage, sought to promote Redfield & Wilton’s work in 2020, looking to place exclusive polls in outlets including the Guardian, which declined the offer.
Jukes recently stepped down as Farage’s chief of staff amid a scandal in which undercover reporters posed as prospective overseas donors to Reform UK. Footage published by Channel 4 News showed James Johnson, co-founder of the polling firm JL Partners, apparently acknowledging that Jukes had commissioned polling funded by an overseas donor.
That polling appeared in newspapers without any reference to the party, and JL Partners acknowledged “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 began producing polls in 2020 with little public 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 featured 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. He has produced private polling for Farage since at least 2014, apart from a brief period 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 regarded as part of Farage’s inner circle, and was close enough to the Reform UK leader to attend a trip to party donor Christopher Harborne’s Thai wellness retreat at Christmas in 2022 marking the crypto billionaire’s 60th birthday. Other guests photographed at the gathering included 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, Reform UK’s 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 the firm’s published polling concerned voter intentions in the UK and the US, sources said Bruni-Lowe had its staff assemble 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. Employees carried out freedom of information requests to councils to establish expenditure on translation services.
Rodrigues said the FOI project was a “commercial research project” and that translation services were only 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.
Other work by the company, sources said, included polling in Montenegro, Hungary, Hong Kong and the Bahamas, as well as research into UK attitudes towards gold and cryptocurrencies.
Employees were not always told precisely how their work would be used. One former employee said 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.
In an unusual piece of work, the company submitted evidence in October 2021 to a House of Lords economic affairs committee inquiry into central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). It cited polling that it said “was self-funded internally by Redfield & Wilton Strategies Ltd for the purpose of this submission”.
The submission argued that public scepticism 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, “all of the crypto stuff came down from Chris [Bruni-Lowe]”.
An online profile for Rodrigues, a solicitor based in London, refers to him holding a directorship of an “innovative market research firm”. Former employees, however, said he played a limited part 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 the Telegraph.
He 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. That prompted demands from the BPC for a representative of the group to appear before it. The person who ultimately did so was 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.
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