It’s not just a few bad apples at Reform UK, the whole orchard is rotten - David Behrens

In case you were put off watching by the advance warnings that the content might be upsetting, you missed a Reform councillor using the explicit language of grooming gangs to describe a female colleague. “If she was my daughter it would still be bath night on a Thursday,” was just part of what he said.

Another councillor advocated violence against immigrants (“I’ll take them out, bruv, I don’t care”) and an aspiring parliamentary candidate said it was impossible to be both British and Muslim and that migrants on small boats should be put in concentration camps.

I’ll spare you the more commonplace rhetoric about rounding people up and burning down mosques, but you get the idea. It was not latent racism but obsessive, persistent bile that verged on the psychotic. And every one of the people spouting it had passed through what passes for Reform’s vetting process.

This, you will recall, was the means by which Nigel Farage promised to ‘professionalise’ his party to root out those bad apples of his. What it has done is create not so much a political force as an army of mercenaries.

The vetting is so laughably lax that a candidate who failed it twice for using offensive language was signed up anyway. Even the reporter doing the undercover filming was offered a candidacy.

Not only racists but abject morons are welcomed. An elected Reform councillor was filmed saying King Charles was secretly a Muslim and should be beheaded as a traitor.

It’s worth dwelling on all this because if you’ve voted Reform or you’re tempted to in the future, this is the company you’re keeping. More fool you if you fell for the phoney flag-waving ‘patriotism’.

Many of the councillors who were in the programme – and a great many others who weren’t – have left Reform since they were elected. Some walked; others were pushed. Some had not even bothered to attend meetings. At the very least they are time wasters; at worst they are loose cannons who now sit as back-door independents, representing no-one’s interests but their own.

And it’s not just on the ground floor of politics that this charade is being played out. ITV revealed that Nigel Farage personally protected a candidate his own press team wanted sacked for telling the former deputy PM David Lammy to “go home”. Lammy was born in North London, by the way.

Farage’s senior aides also admitted they were scrambling to keep up with his changing explanation for the undisclosed £5m he took from a cryptocurrency billionaire in Thailand. Was it a personal gift or a reward for Brexit? He’s claimed both at different times – and if the latter is true it makes him almost the only person in the country to have derived anything from it.

Meanwhile Sarah Pochin, Reform’s first female MP, was filmed saying the party had systematically excluded women from decision making – a misogynistic streak that has also surfaced off-camera in Hull, where police are investigating claims that the former boxer and now on-the-ropes Reform mayor Luke Campbell shared naked and sexualised images of himself with a female colleague. The press team, of course, denies that, too.

The response has been to shoot the messenger and blame ITV. No other party has been subjected to this kind of media scrutiny, said Farage, conveniently ignoring the free ride he’s had from most of the national papers for the last two years.

And while he continues to insist his party isn’t racist, he too is in denial. If it isn’t, why does he think so many bigots are drawn to it? I’ll tell you: it’s because they’re moths attracted by the coded flashes of light from his racist bat-signal.

This is not to deny Reform’s single justifiable claim that Britain has a problem with criminality among illegal immigrants – but its solution, it is now clear, is to police it by unleashing far more dangerous offenders of its own.

At other times most of us would distance ourselves from people like that but a vote for Reform is to embrace and encourage them. Bear that in mind, and be prepared to be judged by the company you keep.