Reform investigates whether Makerfield candidate’s sexist posts were costly

Reform UK is examining whether sexist comments by its candidate in the Makerfield byelection may have harmed the party’s chances, after Nigel Farage accepted the result had disappointed him. The party’s examination of its defeat comes after Andy Burnham won 55% of the vote share in a poll that Reform hoped would be a tightly fought battle between the Labour leadership hopeful and its own candidate, Robert Kenyon, a local plumber. Canvassers from different parties reported that voters highlighted sexist and lewd social media posts by Kenyon, which emerged during the campaign, with women in particular saying they were put off by them. After Kenyon came more than 9,000 votes behind Burnham in Thursday’s vote , one Reform activist said the party had advised the candidate not to apologise for the comments. “That’s something that was not his fault, it was how he was advised,” they said. The issue rose to prominence when the TV presenter Carol Vorderman used a video posted online to demand an apology from Kenyon, after it emerged he had joined in a graphic discussion about her, in since-deleted posts. “I will admit that the Vorderman stuff did not help us,” another Reform source said. Farage’s party has pointed to the scale of the task it faced taking on as well-known a figure as Burnham, even in a seat demographically more favourable to Reform than Labour, saying Kenyon performed well to increase his share of the vote from 2024, even by just 2.7 percentage points. …