Senior Reform UK officials were secretly recorded admitting they sometimes have to “defend the indefensible” as part of their jobs, while Nigel Farage was directly accused by his own communications chief of “protecting” a candidate he had previously described as “clearly a racist”.
The extraordinary footage forms the second major instalment of ITV Exposure’s year-long investigation into Reform UK and takes the story far beyond offensive comments made by individual councillors.
An undercover ITV reporter secured a job inside Reform’s Westminster press office and secretly recorded conversations between senior staff as they dealt with accusations of racism, extremist links and failures in the party’s candidate-vetting system.
At a Reform Christmas party before she formally began the role, the reporter spoke to communications staff about what working for the party involved.
Reform’s director of communications, Ed Sumner, told her:
“You have to start defending the indefensible.”
The reporter repeated the phrase back to him.
“Start defending the indefensible?”
Another press officer replied:
“Oh yeah, many a time.”
When asked for an example, the official named Chris Parry, Reform’s then mayoral candidate in Hampshire.
Sumner said:
“He’s gone tomorrow.”
But Parry was not gone.
Three weeks later, ITV’s undercover reporter was inside Reform headquarters when the case was discussed directly with Nigel Farage.
Reform communications chief called candidate ‘clearly a racist’
Parry, a former Royal Navy officer, had posted online that British-born Labour politician David Lammy should “go back to the Caribbean” where his loyalties supposedly lay.
ITV reports that he had also questioned the loyalty of eight other black and Asian politicians.
At the Christmas party, Sumner described Parry as “clearly a racist” and indicated that he expected him to be removed from the party.
Instead, Farage decided an apology would be enough.
Secret footage from inside Reform HQ recorded Farage saying:
“He must apologise to Lammy… if David Lammy’s taken offence.”
When Farage was told Parry was unhappy about being required to apologise, he replied:
“He must do it and move on… Tell him that from me.”
Sumner then challenged the Reform leader directly.
“You’re protecting him.”
Farage replied:
“It’s showing a bit of sorrow.”
He then added:
“Trouble is he’s a Rear Admiral, that’s the problem.”
After Farage left the room, Sumner was recorded saying:
“If it was up to me, I’d have kicked him out months ago.”
Parry defended his comments to ITV and said people should examine the original context of his posts. He said they related to reparations and failures by government and police, and argued that he had the right to criticise public figures he believed were acting against the interests of the British people.
Reform councillor had registered on white-supremacist dating site
The investigation also shows Reform’s press operation dealing with the revelation that one of its councillors had been registered on WhiteDate, a dating site exclusively for white people which discussed the “survival of the white race” and promoted Nazi publications.
The councillor, Gavin Beales of North Northamptonshire, was not suspended.
Inside Reform HQ, officials were secretly recorded discussing the matter.
One said:
“It’s a visual thing.”
Another argued that other religions and ethnic groups also had dedicated dating sites, saying:
“You get Muslim dating sites, Christian dating sites, black dating sites, Jamaican dating sites. Yeah, it’s not great, but like…”
A Reform official then concluded:
“It’s not a resignation issue is it?”
Reform told ITV that Beales was not suspended because he had only been registered on the site for a short time.
Beales has previously said he was inadvertently linked to WhiteDate, would not have chosen to join it and “abhors racism”. He did not respond to ITV’s latest request for comment.
Candidate says he failed vetting twice, then was invited to stand anyway
Perhaps the most damaging material for Reform’s repeated claims that its vetting process has improved concerns Alex Lomas, who campaigned for the party in Greater Manchester.
Lomas told an undercover reporter that he had failed Reform’s vetting process twice.
According to his own account, the first rejection came because of the language and offensive material he had posted online.
He said:
“First time I applied, he said, we can’t [accept you], because you’ve used the word C-–-* too excessively…and [shared] ‘Keir Starmer’s a w*****’, loads of videos.”
He said his second rejection concerned his support for far-right activist Tommy Robinson.
“The second [rejection] was the Tommy Robinson posts. I was sharing all the Tommy Robinson posts. Too far-right.”
Robinson is explicitly barred from joining Reform.
Lomas said that shortly after being rejected for a second time, however, he received another message telling him that he had passed.
He recalled responding:
“Well, I think you better check with your paperwork mate, because I’ve just failed on Friday. Now, you’re saying I’ve passed it, I’ve not changed anything.”
Lomas said he was subsequently phoned and asked to stand for Reform.
He claimed the reason was simple:
“They needed someone to stand, because they basically just wanted to say we are standing a candidate in every single ward in Oldham.”
He did stand in the May local elections and came second, losing by about 200 votes.
Lomas did not respond to ITV’s requests for comment.
Prospective candidate told to delete Tommy Robinson posts
ITV found another problem with vetting during an undercover operation in Chester.
A reporter posing as a possible Reform candidate told Ian Frost, then chair of the party’s local branch, that he had previously shown support for Tommy Robinson on social media.
Rather than immediately telling him that such support would prevent him standing, Frost asked:
“Can you delete them?”
He added:
“Delete them ideally.”
Frost went on to say:
“I think Tommy Robinson is hard done to. And I think the bulk of what he says, I agree with, right? The bulk, not all.”
He then explained the political problem.
“But politically, it’s toxic, and what Nigel Farage has learned over 30 years being in politics, is… we’ve got to play the game a little bit.”
His advice was:
“Anything where you’ve got… Tommy Robinson, or anything like that, I would delete the account, and I’d start again.”
The undercover reporter was then encouraged to apply to become a Reform candidate.
Frost has since left the party for unrelated reasons. He told ITV he thought the reporter was a genuine potential candidate, had given him the benefit of the doubt and said it was unfair to judge somebody on the basis of one conversation.
Senior Reform figure linked to Portsmouth Patriots
ITV’s investigation also examined Reform links with the Portsmouth Patriots, an anti-immigration campaign group whose events have attracted people expressing openly racist and neo-Nazi views.
At one rally connected with the group, ITV filmed attendees chanting:
“Kill the p****. Burn them out like they do in Northern Ireland. Burn them out of every hotel.”
At another point, an attendee told an undercover reporter:
“I’ve got a Himmler ring on. An SS ring. Watch the f****** Hitler speech in English and watch how it changes your mind. It blew my mind.”
ITV found Reform’s Hampshire County Council leader and senior campaign manager George Madgwick among members of the Portsmouth Patriots’ private Facebook group.
Madgwick told the undercover reporter that activists associated with the group had campaigned for Reform during the 2026 local elections.
He said:
“Four of the Portsmouth Patriots literally come out flyering with us, as in the organisers of the Portsmouth Patriots literally flyer with us.”
Asked whether Reform activists could openly say they supported the group, Madgwick replied:
“Yeah, I do.”
He said he had been “really in with the Patriots” in the past, although not formally part of the organisation, and described them as “always sensible”.
Madgwick acknowledged incidents in which people at rallies had performed Nazi salutes and one person punched a police officer, but said those responsible were outsiders rather than members of the Portsmouth Patriots.
He told ITV that he had never hidden his previous support, said he had later been blocked from the Patriots’ Facebook group after criticising a post and stressed that he condemned violence and extremist behaviour.
Sarah Pochin says Reform has a ‘male issue’
The investigation also captured Reform MP Sarah Pochin criticising the culture inside her own party.
Speaking at the Reform Christmas party, Pochin told the undercover reporter that the party badly needed more female press officers.
“We so need women press officers,” she said.
“They are so chauvinistic.”
She added:
“They just exclude you if you are a woman. There’s a bit of a male issue going on.”
Pochin did not respond to ITV’s requests for comment.
Her comments come alongside the first part of ITV’s investigation, which revealed a series of racist and sexually explicit remarks by Reform councillors and candidates, including one councillor describing Asian residents as “parasites”, another referring to black children as “animals”, and a particularly disturbing comment about a female candidate:
“If she was my daughter, it would still be bath night on a Thursday.”
Farage promised the ‘bad apples’ would be gone
When Farage was elected to Parliament in 2024, he promised to professionalise Reform and remove people with extremist views.
He said at the time:
“Those few bad apples that have crept in will be gone, will be long gone, and we will never have any of their type back in our organisation.”
Farage added:
“You have the 100% promise on that.”
Reform has expanded dramatically since then and now has eight MPs and more than 2,300 councillors, controlling 23 local authorities.
The party says its vetting procedures have been strengthened and insists there is “no room for racism in Reform UK”.
In response to ITV’s investigation, it said:
“Not all individuals covertly recorded by ITV are members of Reform UK. Where members, activists and councillors have clearly behaved inappropriately, investigations have commenced. In some cases, there have been suspensions and due process must be followed.”
The party added:
“Reform UK has improved and prioritised its vetting procedures, but from time to time, a handful of individuals who do not share our values will initially make it through vetting. This is the same for all organisations.”
Farage has separately argued that vetting cannot predict what somebody will say in future, telling reporters:
“You can’t vet people for what they say in the future, especially if they’re provoked in conversation.”
But ITV’s latest footage raises a different problem for that defence.
Some of the material concerns people who Reform’s own officials already believed posed serious problems, people who say they failed vetting before being allowed to stand anyway, and prospective candidates being advised to erase potentially damaging social-media history before applying.
ITV Exposure: Undercover: A Year In Reform airs on ITV1 and ITVX on Sunday 18 October.
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