Chris Bruni-Lowe, the private pollster behind Nigel Farage's election campaigns, held a significant position inside the polling company Redfield & Wilton Strategies while never appearing in public as part of it, several people who worked at the firm have said. The Nigel Farage adviser polling firm role has not previously been reported, and it raises questions about how the company operated behind its public face.

An unpublicised role

According to several sources who have worked at Redfield & Wilton, Bruni-Lowe used the firm to develop potential campaign strategies. Those sources said he ordered UK and US voter intention polls, directed research on subjects such as council spending, and appeared "obsessed" with producing a dossier which he suggested could be sold to political parties.

Bruni-Lowe's history with Farage stretches back years. He ran Farage's 2015 election campaign, helped test messaging for forming the Brexit party, advised on the 2019 local elections, and has produced private polling for Farage since at least 2014, apart from a 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".

The firm behind the polls

Redfield & Wilton Strategies was founded in 2020 and is owned by Bruno Rodrigues, a lawyer. Its main public face was Philip van Scheltinga, a Harvard graduate who was frequently quoted analysing the company's polling, wrote columns for the Times and Telegraph, and was the listed British Polling Council contact - although one industry source said he never attended BPC meetings.

An online profile refers to Rodrigues, a London solicitor, holding a directorship of an innovative market research firm, but former employees said he had a limited role in day-to-day running; one said that at a rare in-person meeting Rodrigues was "paraded around on a laptop on a Zoom call".

For a time the company's polls were everywhere in British political coverage:

• •Its voter intention polls frequently appeared in politically influential newsletters from Politico, the Times and the New Statesman before it became less visible in late 2024.
• •Its other work included polling in Montenegro, Hungary, Hong Kong and the Bahamas, plus research on UK attitudes to gold and cryptocurrencies.
• •In October 2021 it made a submission to the House of Lords economic affairs committee inquiry into central bank digital currencies, citing polling it said was self-funded internally by Redfield & Wilton Strategies Ltd for the purpose of the submission.

After the British Polling Council demanded a representative, Rodrigues ultimately appeared before the body and maintained "total silence", according to an industry source.

The 'Chris Redfield' pseudonym

One detail former employees flagged was the name Bruni-Lowe used inside the company: he sometimes went by "Chris Redfield", under which quotes were published by the Washington Post newspaper.

Notes taken by a former employee during a summer 2021 oral induction recorded how staff were told to view him. The note described "boss – Chris Redfield is COO essentially".

Rodrigues rejected that account. He said the Redfield surname was an email account convention within the organisation, citing other examples of "Philip Redfield" and "Bruno Redfield". He said:

Rodrigues also said Bruni-Lowe was never presented to staff as the company's chief operating officer and staff were never instructed to treat him as such, adding that Van Scheltinga led the day-to-day operation as director of research.

Owner's denials and unanswered questions

In a statement, Rodrigues 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 summer 2025 to train interns, calling him an important and highly valued member of the team.

Responding to photographs of social contact between the firm's people and Reform figures, Rodrigues said that personal or social meetings involving individuals linked to the company "does not establish a corporate relationship between Redfield & Wilton Strategies and Reform UK".

The photographs in question include a May 2023 occasion when Van Scheltinga and Bruni-Lowe were photographed having drinks at a Mayfair restaurant with Farage, Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice and George Cottrell, Farage's unpaid aide and a convicted fraudster. Bruni-Lowe was also present on a Christmas 2022 trip to Reform donor Christopher Harborne's Thai wellness retreat for the crypto billionaire's 60th birthday, where other photographed guests included Cottrell.

The sources' account of the firm's research work centres on a dossier on local authority performance developed by staff between autumn 2024 and spring 2025. 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, that translation services were just one of "several dozen categories", that it was led by Van Scheltinga, and that none of the research was supplied to Reform or Farage.

Questions about Bruni-Lowe's precise standing in the company have not been fully resolved. Bruni-Lowe declined to comment and Van Scheltinga did not respond to requests for comment; no further clarification has been given.

Context within the polling industry

The relationship between polling firms and the parties they serve is governed in Britain by the British Polling Council, whose rules do not require pollsters to state political affiliations but do impose strict guidelines on how they must declare who has commissioned and paid for any polling. The episode follows separate scrutiny of Farage-linked polling: Dan Jukes, then a senior adviser to Farage, sought in 2020 to promote Redfield & Wilton's work, looking to place exclusive polls in publications including the Guardian, which turned down the offer.

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

That polling appeared in newspapers without any reference to the party, with JL Partners acknowledging "weaknesses" in its procedures. Jukes denies wrongdoing, and Reform UK said the party did not commission the work. On Wednesday, Reform announced an internal inquiry had cleared the officials of breaking the law; the matter remains under police investigation.

What remains unexplained is how a pollster with Bruni-Lowe's record of work for Farage came to hold what former staff describe as an important operational role at a firm whose polls circulated widely in British political coverage - without his name ever appearing beside it.