Could it be true?
Every day between now and the election, Tortoise's Alexi Mostrous will examine a claim from the campaign trail. Some will be outlandish, some believable. Some might even be true.
To what extent do people voting for Reform today know who they are voting for? Aside from Nigel Farage and other (semi) well-known figures such as Richard Tice, large numbers of the party’s candidates don’t seem to have an external profile. I’ve counted 115 “ghost candidates” on Reform’s own webpage: men and women standing at the general election who have no profile picture or biography on the site. In several cases, it’s almost impossible to find anything about them. How do voters in Manchester Central, for example, learn about David Brown, Reform’s candidate there? With such a common name, and no information provided by the party, it’s almost impossible to even identify who he is. Even candidates like Amanda Napper, who some predict will edge the Tories out of second in Hartlepool, have no biographical details on Reform’s site. What this opacity demonstrates, perhaps, is that Reform’s campaign is less about electing a cohort of new MPs and more about the man at the top: Farage. A Reform spokesman said: “These candidates are not ghosts. This is just an issue of institutional capacity, the sheer quantity of work involved in making everything work.”
