Don't mention the photo: Reform man snapped giving Nazi salute bags plum job

When a photo emerged of a Reform candidate for Wales’s Senedd election this year giving a Nazi salute, one might have thought his political career to be over.

Corey Edwards, once Reform’s lead candidate for Pen-y-bont Bro Morgannwg – meaning he would have been all but guaranteed a seat under Wales’s new proportional electoral system (in the event they took two in the constituency) – was forced to stand down in March amid anger over the gesture, despite having the backing of Nigel Farage. Edwards cited “issues with his mental health”.

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The Reform leader initially supported the public affairs man, claiming he had been doing an impersonation of Basil Fawlty in the celebrated 1975 Fawlty Towers episode, The Germans. He said: “It was a Fawlty Towers impression. Maybe we should ban the BBC, I don’t know.” Farage later conceded: “It looks terrible. Things in isolation often do” before Edwards agreed to stand down.

Edwards, for his part, suggested he had been impersonating Wayne Hennessey, the former Wales international goalkeeper who faced an English FA investigation in 2019 after being pictured making what appeared to be a Nazi salute (he was cleared after saying he did not know what a Nazi salute was, the FA saying he “displayed a very considerable – one might even say lamentable – degree of ignorance”).

But now, the Senedd election over and Reform being the largest opposition party in the Senedd with 34 seats, Edwards has quietly appeared as a special adviser to his party’s leader Dan Thomas. Screenshots of an internal Senedd system obtained by BBC Cymru show his name among new advisers.

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Edwards had begun his political career as a senior parliamentary assistant in the House of Commons from October 2019, before later working for former Conservative MP and Wales Secretary David “Top Cat” Davies.

And Reform’s response to claims from Labour that this showed poor judgement on Thomas’s part? A quite magnificent piece of whataboutery: “The Labour prime minister appointed Peter Mandelson, known close friend of paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, to our most senior diplomatic role. They are in no position to lecture others about judgement.”

So that’s alright then!