The homophobe at the heart of Reform

When an undercover investigation by Channel 4 News exposed Reform UK campaigners in Clacton making homophobic remarks last year, Nigel Farage was quick to distance himself from them. He appeared on ITV’s Loose Women the very next day, saying: “I’m incredibly tolerant. To be honest, I don’t care what people are. I judge them as human beings, whether they are good people or not.”

Which begs the question: why was a committed homophobe allowed to take to Reform’s stage at its annual conference at the weekend?

Lost amid the furore over one crackpot claiming Covid vaccines had given the Royal Family cancer was the appearance of Christopher Monckton – 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, former Ukip deputy leader and a man with a track record of making outrageously offensive comments about the LGBT+ community.

Back in 2014 Farage sought to disassociate himself from Monckton after he bizarrely claimed that “official survey after official survey had shown that homosexuals had an average of 500-1,000 partners in their sexually active lifetime, and that some had as many as 20,000”.

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Farage hit back in an article for the Independent, writing: “This sort of disruptive, crass and insensitive work serves to underscore why people with views such as these, openly mocking while seeming oddly threatened by homosexuals, should get no support from Ukippers.

“I’m delighted to say that LGBTQ in Ukip is growing and thriving, and has over 1,200 Facebook followers. How many other parties have an MEP who describes himself as ‘spectacularly homosexual’ and a ‘great big screaming poof’. David Coburn MEP’s words – not mine!”.

The following year Monckton wrote an article for the far right US website WorldNetDaily arguing that homosexuality was “every bit as dangerous as smoking”, that “it leads in so very many cases to disease and even to death” and that “it is a sin not because some half-crazed desert prophet said so many thousands of years ago but – like all sins – because of the deadly harm it causes”.

Now, rather than distancing themselves from him, Reform is giving him a platform, with Monckton addressing a panel on what they call climate change “realism” and others would call “denial”. Monckton has called for those who warn of the dangers of climate change to be jailed, calling them “bogus”.

So, disruptive, crass and insensitive… and now very much at the heart of Nigel Farage’s Reform revolution!