Reform UK is providing TV documentaries with some of their spicier moments this year. Tonight, ITV’s exposé Undercover: A Year in Reform brings yet another wave of taped conversations of extremist views held by some working for the party.
From the eyrie of Reform’s HQ high up in Millbank Tower, it also brings the question of those outlandish and cynical views creeping closer to leadership. So far, the party has deployed the “bad apples” defence to explain why so many elected councillors and supporters have used or tolerated hateful language and far-right tropes on race and women.
Speaking at an event thrown by Reform for volunteers who helped Nigel Farage’s Clacton re-election campaign in the summer by election, aspiring MP Jason Powell told an undercover reporter: “Anyone who comes across on a boat – in the first week of election – build concentration camps, and everyone who comes across on the channel, you’re in there.” He has since been suspended by the party.
Geographical distance is no bar to similarly appalling attitudes. Alan Feeney, a prominent Reform councillor in Solihull, is polite on the doorstep to British-Asian voters but then privately described the area as “infested” with Asian families and called them “absolute parasites”. Feeney has stepped down from Reform, offering “sincere and unreserved apologies” while saying his comments do not “reflect my true beliefs or opinions, particularly of the communities mentioned in the report”.
These are not simply one-off comments for effect – though there are plenty of those, including some bizarrely misogynistic thought-spirals from a fellow councillor, Chris Whelan, leering about female candidates. The party’s own operation in Wales is rocked by accusations of sexism from Sarah Pochin – one of only two female Reform MPs – who lambasted “chauvinism” deep in the party’s DNA. Never mind bad apples – this is quite a delivery of rotten fruit on the Reform doorstep.
Pretty much everyone caught off-guard making strings of hateful comments insists that this is not what they really think – but offers no real accountability for what was said or why they were able to make their way through a vetting process. Did their views really only emerge after they were locally elected? It seems unlikely they were paragons of restraint before.
When the revelations are put to Reform, resignations are quietly solicited and the reprobates simply slink away. Great credit to ITV for a thorough investigative documentary – but it was not short of targets.
Reform has, like it or not, attracted people whose views it says it reviles. In which case, Farage – who sets tone, culture and pretty much everything else at the top of his political tribe, now needs to grip this problem or be seen to run a party that cannot decide where its right flank ends, and so cannot adequately police it or wield authority over its members.
He has often said that there is no place for “bigots” in the teal army, and that he will tighten procedures to exclude them. So what has gone wrong? Another senior figure refers to the “scumbag tendency” – but argues that all parties have lunatic fringes.
From Reform’s perspective, it has been unfairly targeted. One of its most senior spokesmen tells me the party has created a more independent vetting system since the start of the summer – but most of the anger on its top team is directed at broadcasters and the media, rather than examination of what is going wrong.
“I don’t believe that Reform’s membership or councillor base is worse than the Tories,” texts a senior figure. “I suspect you would find many bad apples if you spent a year on that. Nigel has held back the far right across his whole career.”
Farage has indeed drawn a line against ethno-nationalism and flirtation with the intimidatory street-level politics of Tommy Robinson.
But when so many people of the kind of views noisily espoused by the dark stars of this documentary want to forge a career in Reform, it is up to the leadership of a party that has a strong figurehead in Farage to say more clearly that he does not want these views representing his brand.
As for the argument that the Tories also have a fringe of unacceptable views, this feels like whataboutery. Persistently rancorous comments – and many with an undertone of violence, like talk of dragging Muslims from their homes and onto planes, and machine-gunning grooming gangs – are a way of thinking, not just a barroom lapse.
Where I have more sympathy for Reform is that its senior figures are exposed to threat levels which have shaken Nigel Farage, who has lived under threats of a particularly serious nature. Treasury spokesman Robert Jenrick and his Jewish wife have also been separately targeted – leading to a conviction in court earlier this month of a man who sent communications threatening death or serious harm to both of them.
But when Farage refers to “intolerance” in the public debate, as he did in some genuinely stirring comments last week commemorating the murdered Tory MP David Amess, the question rebounds – what does a man who, more than any other, has created a disruptive force on the right in British politics want to tell his supporters is the limit of hard-right rhetoric and views?
Right now, Reform’s conduct risks it losing traction with voters who want a harder cutting edge to their politics than Labour or the Tories, but do not want to be associated with racists and misogynists. This story has been a potential gift to the Kemi Badenoch revival. In her party conference speech, she foregrounded her opposition to any form of racist or white-nationalist tinge to politics as a direct challenge to Farage.
And Reform has also proven uneasy at dealing with the bedrock of “further right” opinion among ex-Reform activists who have defected to Rupert Lowe’s Restore party. With the aid of Elon Musk’s support amplifying his message on X, Lowe can position himself as “real Reform” candidate and peel off voters who dislike the arrival of so many ex-Tories in the Farage camp. That is costing it somewhere between two and three percentage points in the polls – a significant dent if it continues towards the next election.
This feels like an unstable compound. The more so since the “grown-ups” on the leadership team, notably Jenrick and Richard Tice, have spent a summer on a project intended to professionalise Reform’s economic offer, only to end up with the distraction of representatives sounding like ideological Neanderthals. Powerful voices like Zia Yusuf, the home affairs spokesman, also need to take on the view that people from immigrant backgrounds are “not British” – whatever the retrograde views on the matter of his Reform comrade Suella Braverman.
In short, if there is indeed no room for “bigots”, then that message is not getting through to a lot of people marching under the turquoise banner. Dare Farage and co take on the rot in his own ranks – or skulk in the of excuses and deflections? It is high time they made that call.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor at Politico and co-host of daily podcast Politics at Sam and Anne’s