Nigel Farage’s fascist-adjacent Makerfield candidate

Back in 2024, Nigel Farage made an admission about his Reform candidates for the local elections that year. “Half of these people simply haven’t been vetted,” he said. “That’s got to change.”

He was responding to the unfortunate news that Reform’s leader on Bexhill and Battle council had said that Britain would have been “far better” if it had “taken Hitler up in his offer of neutrality.” Even Nigel could see that pro-Nazi talk wasn’t good for the party’s brand.

So, how’s that beefed-up vetting process working out? Step forward Robert Kenyon, a “plucky plumber” and the Reform candidate to stand against Andy Burnham in the Makerfield byelection, one of the most consequential constituency votes of recent times.

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Such a high profile gig would of course lead to serious scrutiny of the candidates, and so – of course – Reform would naturally have fielded a candidate with a spotless record. Right?

Wrong.

Rats in a Sack conducted its own investigation into Robert Kenyon’s history by typing his name into Google. A thorough vetting process of around five seconds revealed that Kenyon was friends on Facebook with a notorious neo-fascist leader.

Kenyon’s social media history revealed his online association with one Gary Raikes, the founder of the New British Union, a neo-fascist organisation. It seems that Farage’s crack, in-house vetting squad failed to notice this wrinkle in their candidate’s backstory.

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As its name suggests, Raikes’s political party was an attempt to revive the British Union of Fascists, founded by Oswald Moseley. Before setting up this 1930s-themed party, Raikes was leader of the BNP in Scotland. Just the sort of chap you want palling around with prospective MPs.

It really is remarkable how these fascist-adjacent candidates like Kenyon just keep popping up in the Reform party like this. While we wait for Farage to come round to confronting that strange phenomenon – he won’t – perhaps in the meantime he might give his vetting process a bit more of an overhaul. If this is what happens at such a high profile byelection, just imagine what might slip through the net when it comes to the general.