Reform's ghost candidate who died six months earlier

Has Reform finally hit on a way to select candidates who pose no danger of embarrassing the party, making racist statements or being forced to quit within weeks of being elected? By selecting those who are, er, dead? That’s the question being posed after a bizarre situation in the party’s Croydon, South London, branch emerged.

The independent website Inside Croydon has reported how, at the start of this year, the party selected 70-year-old Sharon Carby as its candidate for the mayoral election in the borough, to be held next year – despite the fact that Carby had passed away six months earlier.

According to the site Carby, who died on July 27 last year, was the sole potential candidate put to the local party by the national HQ and was adopted by a selection meeting of fewer than 10 Reform members. One said of Carby, who hailed from Bradford: “I haven’t met her but I’ve been told she’s absolutely brilliant”.

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Carby had been a Brexit Party supporter since 2019 and her X bio described her as a “Brexiteer. Anti-woke patriot. Anti-WEF [World Economic Forum]. Conservative Christian. Reform member. Love Farage, Tommy [Robinson] and DJT [Donald Trump]”. Perhaps that was enough for some members to overrule the fact she was no longer alive – Inside Croydon reports that “those who suggested that Carby’s death might be a bit of a problem for them at the 2026 elections were abused and ordered to be quiet. Some drink had been taken by some of the older members attending the meeting, and they became abusive”.

Incredibly, it is not the first time Reform has had difficulties with a candidate who had shuffled off this mortal coil. Last year it dropped its candidate for York Central, Tommy Cawkwell, for being inactive only to discover that he had in fact died.

When the party removed Cawkwell, an RNLI volunteer, as the parliamentary candidate, it said: “We can’t afford to have people doing nothing in an election year.” It later emerged that Cawkwell had died after the selection process. A Reform spokesman explained that Cawkwell had been removed after failing to respond to calls and emails from the party.

Reform last month told its members it was introducing a less stringent “common sense” vetting system for would-be candidates after complaints the previous checks were too strict. Now it’s so lax even being dead doesn’t seem to be a hindrance!