Jenrick Defends Farage Over Reform Racism Claims
Robert Jenrick has said Nigel Farage had "probably done more than almost anybody" to stand against racism and the far right.
Jenrick, Reform UK's Treasury spokesperson and MP for Newark, made the remarks defending Farage and the party on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, a morning news and interview show, according to The Guardian.
The defence followed a year-long undercover investigation by ITV Exposure into Reform. The investigation showed Reform councillors and election candidates making threats of extreme violence and expressing racist, Islamophobic and misogynistic views. ITV Exposure sent an undercover reporter inside the party's Westminster headquarters in January, according to ITV News.
The footage included Alan Feeney, a Reform councillor and deputy mayor of Solihull, a town in the West Midlands. He was filmed calling Asian homeowners "parasites" and stating that "no more than 1% of [the] British population can be non-white".
Much of the footage centred on Chris Parry, a retired rear admiral who was picked to contest the Hampshire and the Solent mayoral election for Reform. Parry said former foreign secretary David Lammy should "go home to the Caribbean" and suggested at least eight other politicians from minority ethnic backgrounds did not have primary loyalty to the UK. Reform suspended Parry in March after The Guardian revealed other remarks by him.
ITV footage showed a senior Reform official warning Farage that he was "protecting" Parry. Reform's head of communications, Ed Sumner, told another press officer in the filmed material that Parry was "clearly a racist". In a conversation recorded by the undercover reporter, Farage said Parry "must apologise to Lammy".
The investigation also recorded Reform MP Sarah Pochin, one of two female MPs for the party, saying party officials "are so fucking chauvinistic" and "just exclude you if you are a woman". Farage has suggested that Reform councillors filmed in the investigation were provoked, according to ITV News.
