Richard Tice was on the defensive on GB News as Camilla Tominey probed his party’s choice of candidates.
It comes amid reports that a candidate, Guy Lachlan, who had been dropped after he liked tweets that favoured Tommy Robinson is now “back on the slate” and is gearing up to fight an election campaign.
Camilla quizzed Tice on whether this is true and whether Lachlan is the type of candidate Reform should be associating themselves with.
He responded: “I will have to check, Camilla. We have 611 candidates. I don’t know exactly all of them.
“My team have been looking at this. There have been all sorts of allegations and out of context comments on this.”
Camilla then questioned: “This is somebody who has liked a tweet for the far-right Britain First group against Muslims, he has liked another tweet saying Tommy Robinson ‘isn’t entirely wrong’, he has said there is ‘too many people on the planet’, he has said humanity is ‘bacteria’, should he be a candidate?”
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Tice repeatedly sought to halt Camilla in her tracks as she continued to probe, saying “I’m going to stop you there” multiple times in short succession.
“The Mail on Sunday is running a vindictive campaign against us”, he claimed.
“A whole load of stuff gets put to us by journalists, out of context with no notice. Some of it turns out to be completely and utterly wrong.
“We’re not going to respond to stuff live on air. I have literally been given misinformation by a well-known journalist trying to trap us.
“With the greatest of respects, I am not going to respond to something live on air without something sent to us formally that we can check.”
Camilla pointed out that the story was being put to him as it was in the morning papers, which Tice asserted “doesn’t mean it’s true”.
“I’m picking this guy out particularly, I’m not part of some conspiracy, Mr Tice, I’m just a journalist”, she responded.
“I am picking this guy out because you deselected him, because you were so worried about his tweets, and now it seems he is the candidate for this seat.
“And that seems to be contradictory, you deselected him then re-selected him.”
Tice responded: “We will check it out. I don’t have 611 names on my mind.”
