Nigel Farage has played down controversy surrounding a Reform UK candidate after a photograph emerged appearing to show him making a Nazi salute, insisting it was intended as a comedic reference.
The image, featuring Corey Edwards — Reform’s lead candidate for the Pen-y Bont Bro Morgannwg constituency in the upcoming Senedd elections — has circulated online, though details about when and where it was taken remain unclear.
Speaking during the launch of his party’s local election campaign, Nigel Farage told ITV News the gesture was part of a “Fawlty Towers impression”.
He said: “The context I have been told, it was taking a Basil Fawlty sketch, and that’s why he did it. He’s a human being.” Asked whether Edwards would continue as a candidate, Farage added: “I get the point – it looks terrible. Things in isolation often do. I wouldn’t approve of it.”
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Corey Edwards has also addressed the image directly, stating it had been “misinterpreted” and acknowledging past mistakes.
“There is a clear distinction between ordinary use of the appalling gesture, compared with me imitating a Welsh footballer’s use of it, or indeed Basil Fawlty’s walk,” he said.
“The Nazi regime was the most barbaric ever and I’d never make light of nor dilute its seriousness.”
A Reform UK spokesperson echoed a more lenient stance, telling ITV Wales: “We’re not willing to write people off forever because of mistakes they made when they were young.”
Farage, meanwhile, contrasted the situation with what he described as a “far more serious” incident involving a Plaid Cymru candidate who withdrew from a race over an offensive social media post dating back more than a decade.
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The episode adds to a string of issues threatening to distract from Reform’s campaign momentum ahead of local elections.
Farage has already been forced to defend the party’s Scottish leader, Malcolm Offord, after a homophobic joke made at a rugby club dinner in 2018 resurfaced. Offord later apologised and denied being homophobic.
Addressing the matter at a campaign event in Sunderland, Farage argued against harshly judging past remarks made in informal settings.
“If we’re going to drum people out of public life for telling a joke at a boozy rugby club dinner that’s amongst friends, we’ll finish up with the dullest group of individuals, looking a bit like, sounding a bit like Keir Starmer,” he said.
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He added: “When you take something as it is, yeah, of course it looks awful.”
Farage suggested Offord “probably regretted doing it” even at the time and criticised opponents for what he called a “po-faced purism attitude”.
Separately, Reform recently dropped its mayoral candidate for the Hampshire and Solent 2028 election, Chris Parry, after remarks comparing a Jewish community group to “Islamists on horseback” came to light.
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