Video taking off 21x its usual first day

Undercover ITV footage records Reform councillors on deportations and the King

A two-minute Short from the ITV Exposure investigation puts recorded remarks beside a resignation, an unanswered request for comment and the party's statement on vetting.

Channel:

ITV News Story of October 15, 2026Trari Newsroom

Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 149,652 views a day, 21 times a normal first day on this channel (7,094).

ITV reporters undercover inside Reform UK as racist views revealed #nigelfarage

A Reform UK councillor sits in a pub with someone he does not know is an ITV reporter and sets out a deportation plan. It would cover legal residents and their children, carried out street by street by young men trained in the army. "Even the legal ones," he says.

The Short, which carries a warning for distressing and graphic language, is a preview of Undercover: A Year in Reform, the ITV Exposure documentary made with Hardcash Productions and due on ITV1 and ITVX on Sunday. Within ten hours it had passed 93,000 views, many times what an ITV News Short usually gathers in a full day. The comment section moved faster still, with close to a thousand comments where a typical Short draws a few dozen.

The first half follows a second councillor, from Bromley. In a car he complains that "we've been ethnically cleansed out of London." Walking at night, he uses racial slurs. Outside a building, he repeats a claim that King Charles is secretly Muslim and calls for the King to be beheaded. ITV reports that he has since resigned from Reform and said he was heavily medicated at the time because of a chronic pain condition. The councillor heard in the pub did not respond to ITV's request for comment.

Reform UK told ITV that investigations had begun where people had clearly behaved inappropriately, with some suspensions, and that a handful of individuals who do not share its values will sometimes get through its vetting, as happens in any organization.

The investigation dominated the channel's day. A second Short and a longer report from the same footage are also starting well above usual, and the only upload keeping pace was a Short of Andy Burnham welcoming Volodymyr Zelenskyy to Downing Street with a King's Guard outside Number 10.

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