At Cambridge Ord was a close friend of Lord Henry Petty and espoused Whig politics. Heir to a respectable estate in Northumberland, he celebrated his coming of age with an onslaught on the borough of Morpeth against the 5th Earl of Carlisle, the absentee patron. Thanks to a rebellious mood there and a generous purse, he succeeded in seizing a seat. Thomas Creevey, who had just become his stepfather, seems to have had hopes that Ord would capture the other seat for him, but for the next 30 years, during which their politics became more congenial, Ord was content to share the honours with Carlisle. Although his mother’s marriage to Creevey had excited ‘some censure and some ridicule’, he ‘very handsomely’ settled £1,000 p.a. on her in addition to her jointure, and this on the eve of his own marriage to Lady Oxford’s sister.
Ord, who joined Brooks’s Club on 25 May 1803, voted steadily with the Foxite opposition during Addington’s and Pitt’s second administrations and did so only twice fewer than Creevey, whose attendance, as far as surviving divisions go, was perfect. In July 1804 he was a supporter of Burdett in the Middlesex election. He was absent on 30 Apr. 1806 when the Additional Force Act was repealed, though he had voted for repeal the year before. On 9 Apr. 1807 he voted for Brand’s motion following the dismissal of his friends from office and, in what was evidently his maiden speech, deprecated the abuse of the royal prerogative involved and deplored the alienation of Ireland likely to ensue from the lapse of the Catholic relief bill. Sheridan described it to Ord’s mother as ‘as neat and as spirited a short speech as ever I heard’.
Ord was staunch in opposition in the Parliament of 1807 and like Creevey acted with the Whig ‘Mountain’. He never cut a figure in debate, but his few contributions were forceful: on 21 Mar. 1808 he roundly condemned the British attack on Copenhagen. On 1 May 1809 he introduced the fourth report of the committee of public expenditure, reflecting on the honesty of the Dutch commissioners as accountants: his five resolutions of censure were opposed by ministers and defeated by 102 votes to 77. On 18 May 1810 he supported the opposition motion to expunge from the journals the record of the House’s exoneration of Castlereagh for corruption.
After the failure in 1813 of the Catholic relief bill, which he supported, Ord’s attendance dwindled. He was present in April and May 1814, when among other things he voted against the alteration of the Corn Laws (16 May). He then proceeded on a prolonged continental tour in quest, evidently, of a warmer climate.