Nigel Farage's supposedly "special announcement" about councillors defecting to Reform UK was dampened after his bumbling party made a major mistake on its YouTube channel.
The party had claimed it had a big announcement up its sleeve, which would be dramatically revealed at a press conference in London on Monday. But it turned out Reform UK's own team fumbled the big reveal by including the announcement in the caption of the YouTube stream set up ahead of the presser.
It turns out the "special announcement" was that 29 councillors have joined Reform UK. The caption said: "Nigel Farage welcomes 29 new Cllrs to Reform UK ahead of May’s local election campaign."
During the press conference, Mr Farage officially announced the 29 new councillors, who all filed one by one onto the stage. But he acknowledged the civil war plaguing Reform, with suspended MP Rupert Lowe having been reported to police by the party.
Mr Farage's party reported the Great Yarmouth MP to the Metropolitan Police on March 6 over alleged threats of physical violence against Reform chairman Zia Yusuf. The party also made separate claims about complaints of "serious bullying" by Mr Lowe against staff. Mr Lowe has strongly denied the allegations made against him.
Addressing the row on Monday, Mr Farage said: “You might notice that we have been through a little bit of turbulence over the course of the past couple of weeks. We’ve been increasingly concerned about the behaviour of one of our Members of Parliament and when we found out that some serious complaints had gone in, we thought you know what, let’s just suspend the whip and let’s find out what the truth is.
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“And we will wait, first we will get the report from the independent King’s Counsel who’s been appointed, I don’t know exactly when it’s going to be but some anticipation that it might happen during the course of this week, and later on perhaps it’ll take some time we’ll hear from the relevant parliamentary committee too.
“Has it caused some consternation? Of course it has. Any argument that’s seen to happen within the family does. But I can promise you that in terms of our progress and our planning, that upset is very much at the edges.”