Don’t use social media while drunk, Reform chief warns candidates

REFORM UK leader Richard Tice has warned his candidates not to use social media while drunk after the party dropped seven of them for ‘inappropriate’ online posts.

Mr Tice – who hopes to stand a candidate in every seat at the next general election – defended Reform’s vetting process by saying it acted quickly and stressing that ‘every party has its fair share of muppets and morons’.

The insurgent party, which is polling just a few points behind the Conservatives, has already ditched a number of its candidates for a range of offences, including offensive comments about black, Jewish and Muslim people.

Mr Tice, pictured, said yesterday: ‘We’re very clear to all our candidates, “For heaven’s sake, if you’re going to have a glass of wine on a Friday night then don’t use social media, it’s not sensible”.

‘And that if someone lets us down hereafter then frankly, if it’s inappropriate, if it’s unacceptable, then we’re going to part company. You can have your freedom of speech and freedom of

‘Every party has muppets and morons’

expression, but that doesn’t mean you have the right to represent Reform UK as a parliamentary candidate.’

He also claimed it was more difficult for ‘a small, entrepreneurial fast-growing party’ to vet its candidates.

‘Every party has their share, frankly, of muppets and morons – you’ve seen it with the sexual weirdos going on in the Tory party, we’ve seen it with the antiSemitism in the Labour Party and George Galloway’s party,’ he said.

A Mail on Sunday investigation prompted Reform to drop two candidates and suspend a third after Amodio Amato, Pete Addis and Iris Leask were found to have made a series of offensive comments.

Mr Addis had called for Sir David Attenborough to be ‘killed off’ and made a racist joke about ‘ brown babies’, while Mr Amato said there will eventually be ‘ a Muslim army run by Sadiq Khan’.

Then last week Jonathan Kay and Mick Greenhough were dropped after historical derogatory social media posts were exposed. Mr Tice used a press conference yesterday to set his sights on ‘woke’ Labour, scrap Britain’s push for net zero and to use the money saved to cut NHS waiting lists.

The party reached its highest ever polling figure of 16 per cent last week, just four points behind the Tories. Nigel Farage, Reform’s honorary president, claimed yesterday they would get more votes than the Conservatives at the next election.

‘How that transpires in seats is absolutely anybody’s guess,’ Mr Farage said. ‘But I can see the momentum.’