Reform MP Sarah Pochin secretly filmed saying the party has a ‘male issue’

Secretly recorded footage showed a Reform MP admitting the party has a problem with its attitude towards women.

Sarah Pochin, who represents Runcorn and Helsby, was seen talking to someone she believed to be an incoming female press officer, telling her the party ‘just exclude’ women.

She told the ‘party worker’ who was in fact an undercover reporter, ‘thank f*** for that’ when they said at a Christmas gathering they would be starting in January.

‘We so need women press officers. They are so f****** chauvinistic’, Pochin told the reporter.

The MP, who won her seat by just six votes in a by-election, said she was forced to put on a charade that the party is ‘welcoming’ towards women.

‘There’s a bit of a male issue going on’, she added.

The undercover reporter acting as a press officer was told she would have to be prepared to ‘defend the indefensible’.

Officials cited Reform mayoral candidate Chris Parry, who was investigated by the party after writing that then deputy prime minister David Lammy should ‘go home to the Caribbean where loyalty lies’.

Despite a recommendation from Reform’s director of communications Ed Sumner that Parry should be dismissed, Mr Farage ruled the candidate for Hampshire and the Solent could stay provided he made an apology.

Parry was later suspended after he made further controversial comments about Shomrim, the Jewish voluntary neighbourhood patrol service.

The clips are part of a year-long ITV undercover investigation into the insurgent party led by Nigel Farage.

During unprecedented access to Reform’s HQ, Millbank Tower in Westminster, footage was recorded of the party’s press department deliberating how to deal with another councillor found to have links to a white supremacy dating site.

Councillor Gavin Beales, from north Northamptonshire council, was not suspended, with the party insisting in January there was ‘no case to answer’.

Officials were heard dismissing that Beales’ connection to the site, which promoted Nazi publications, as ‘not great, but not a resignation issue’.

Another clip showed Alan Feeney, a councillor and deputy mayor of Solihull, labelling Asian homeowners ‘parasites’ and declaring that no more than one per cent of Britain ‘can be non-white’.

Feeney has announced he has left Reform for ‘personal reasons’.

Robert Jenrick, Reform’s treasury spokesperson, said he ‘didn’t like’ some of what he saw in the documentary, but insisted all parties have ‘bad apples’ and that the relevant councillors had been suspended.

He told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that Ms Pochin’s recollection was not his ‘experience’ of the party, adding that she could ‘rely’ on him.

The former Conservative cabinet minister said: ‘In all political parties there are bad individuals.

‘The test, actually, of a leader and a party is: how do you deal with these things when they arise? And you have to take them on a case-by-case basis. You can’t just throw people under the bus unfairly.

‘But the individuals that you’re referring to today were suspended or were asked to resign, and that has happened.’

A spokesperson for Reform insisted the party had improved its vetting processes and that there was no room for racism in the movement, but declined to comment on individual cases.

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