Darren Grimes crafts a dodgy depiction

Darren Grimes, the former GB News man who is now Reform’s deputy leader of Durham Council, posted a striking image online last week as he whipped up anger over southern councils shipping “problem tenants, recent refugees and homeless families” to his area.

Writing on social media about how “people are being pushed to the back of the queue in their own communities”, his photo showed a group of apparently South Asian men, all curiously clad in identikit tracksuits and disembarking the sort of swanky coach usually used by football teams onto a suburban street.

“You don’t need a degree in advanced mathematics to see that the system is rigged against local people,” he wrote.

Noting there was something odd about Grimes’s photo – which southern council was hiring expensive coaches to ship migrants to Durham, and who dressed them all identically? – a BBC journalist quizzed the councillor. And surprise, surprise: Grimes had generated it with AI.

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“The image was obviously for illustrative purposes,” he sniffed, having absent-mindedly neglected to mention this when uploading it to his Substack, Facebook and X accounts. It was “entirely predictable” the BBC was “hyperventilating” over the image instead of the fact “southern councils are using the north as a dumping ground for their housing failures and mass migration”, he moaned.

According to Grimes, there are 10,000 people on Durham Council’s social housing waiting list while only 3,000 homes become available each year. In his social media posts he said Reform’s new policy planned to prioritise veterans, people fleeing domestic abuse, those in overcrowded homes and those with urgent medical needs, even though Durham Council’s current system already gives preferences to those people.

It’s the latest in a string of disasters for the former GB News man, who is very much the public face of Durham Council despite being only its deputy leader. He is currently embroiled in a row over leaders’ “belittling behaviour” at the authority, which has lost six Reform councillors since last May’s elections.

A freedom of information request last month showed that the council had spent £18,297 dealing with complaints against Reform councillors in the past nine months, many of them against Grimes. He has claimed the departure of so many colleagues was a “spring clean”. Maybe he could AI some fresh faces into the chamber?