An undercover ITV investigation spanning a year inside Reform UK has produced footage of Nigel Farage personally intervening to keep Chris Parry — a retired rear admiral contesting the Hampshire and Solent mayoral election — as a candidate, even after Farage's own head of communications, Ed Sumner, declared Parry 'clearly a racist' and said 'he needs to go.' The footage captures Sumner telling Farage directly: 'You're protecting him.' Farage laughed. Parry's offences were not ambiguous. He told former Foreign Secretary David Lammy to 'go home to the Caribbean,' suggested at least eight politicians from minority ethnic backgrounds lack primary loyalty to the UK, described members of a Jewish neighbourhood watch group as 'cosplayers,' and likened them to 'Islamists on horseback.' Reform's internal apparatus flagged this immediately. Sumner wanted him out in December. Farage overruled him, proposing an apology text instead. Parry was not suspended until 26 March — three months later — and only after the Guardian published additional remarks. The documentary also captured Sarah Pochin, at the time Reform's sole female MP, describing the party's internal culture in unsparing terms: 'They are so fucking chauvinistic. They just exclude you if you are a woman. It's really tough being a girl with all of this alpha male shit going on.' Pochin told the undercover reporter she performed a different version for the cameras — 'Oh no, it's lovely, oh they're all so welcoming' — while privately experiencing systematic exclusion. Reform's response followed a now-familiar playbook: attack the messenger. The party accused ITV and Hardcash Productions of 'extreme methods of deception,' claiming the undercover journalist used false identification to access headquarters, computer systems, and sensitive security information. The party linked this to safety concerns around Farage and other members being 'targeted by individuals who wished them harm.' No specific rebuttal of the footage's content was offered. Parry, for his part, referred inquiries to a statement given to ITV in which he framed his remarks as criticism of 'anyone in power or the public eye whom I judge to be acting against the interests of the British people' — a defence that conspicuously avoids addressing why that criticism took an ethnic form. The structural pattern is what matters here. Reform's public line — 'There is no room for racism in Reform UK' — is directly contradicted by its own internal decision chain captured on film. The party's leader personally chose to retain a candidate his communications chief called a racist, treating it as a PR problem requiring an apology text rather than a values question requiring removal. The three-month delay between internal identification and suspension tracks with a calculation about political cost, not principle. This is the latest in a cascade of revelations from the same investigation. Multiple councillors have already resigned after earlier segments aired showing graphic threats of violence and racist and misogynistic views. Labour Party Chair Bridget Phillipson said the revelations 'go right to the top of Reform.' The full documentary, Undercover: A Year in Reform, airs Sunday. The question now is whether the volume of footage overwhelms Reform's messenger-attack strategy or whether the party's base treats institutional media investigations as confirmation of persecution rather than evidence of dysfunction.
