Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said “racism stings” in response to a slur used against him by a Reform UK canvasser, which Nigel Farage has refused to apologise for and denounced as a “political set up”.
Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage speaks during a BBC Question Time Leaders’ Special at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham “With regards to Farage, I won’t put labels on people, but I will call out blatant racism when I see it, and there are clearly deep, deep problems in the party he leads. Asked who he believed paid Mr Parker to pretend to be a Reform canvasser, Mr Farage said: “It may well have been the production company, or it’s the guy himself who wanted publicity to get more parts, I don’t know. What I know is this is a political set-up of astonishing proportions.”
In response to the former, Mr Farage said: “I’m not going to apologise. I’m not going to apologise – for what? And we’ll find out the full truth, but I promise you what happened over the weekend, what was on the front page of The Times today is a set-up, a deliberate attempt to smear us. When you look at it, what do you say? It’s almost unbelievable.”A spokesman for Essex Police said the force is “urgently assessing” the comments “to establish if there are any criminal offences”.