Our work studies sequences of orthogonal polynomials of the Laguerre–Hahn class, whose Stieltjes functions satisfy a Riccati type differential equation with polynomial coefficients, which are subject to a deformation parameter t. We derive systems of differential equations and give Lax pairs, yielding nonlinear differential equations in t for the recurrence relation coefficients and Lax matrices of the orthogonal polynomials. A specialisation to a non semi-classical case obtained via a Möbius transformation of a Stieltjes function related to a deformed Jacobi weight is studied in detail, showing this system is governed by a differential equation of the Painlevé type P. The particular case of P arising here has the same four parameters as the solution found by Magnus (1995 J. Comput. Appl. Math. 57 215–37) but differs in the boundary conditions.