Keith Williams🗿

Will the REAL Robert Kenyon please stand up? Given he currently has such a high profile, it is astonishing how little we actually know about the Reform UK candidate for the Makerfield by-election. 1. The Army Reservist Let’s start with the known verifiable facts about Kenyon being a former Army Reservist, which come from mainstream UK news outlets. Robert Kenyon (born 1985, age 41) served as a part-time British Army Reservist in the Royal Engineers, completing Army Reserve basic training. UK Army Reserve basic training (Phase 1, also known as the Common Military Syllabus (Reserve) or CMS(R)) is flexible and part-time, designed to fit around civilian jobs and life. It is usually spread over 3–6+ months rather than completed in one block, and consists of two main modules plus online learning. Module 1 (Foundation Training) involves either five alternate weekends over about 10 weeks or a single 9-day consolidated course, held at a local Army Training Unit. Module 2 (Battle Camp) is a single 15.5-day full-time residential course, usually at ATR Grantham in Lincolnshire, which serves as the main “boot camp” phase. Recruits are paid for all training days, starting at around £63+ per day. Reporting describes his service as part-time/reserve (not full-time regular Army) and focused on the initial training period. No independent mainstream outlets have published official military records, service number, discharge papers, or other primary documents. Here’s what we DON’T know: —The dates of enlistment and discharge —Total length of service (e.g., months? years?) —Frequency and consistency of attendance (e.g., weekly, annual, or minimal participation) —Specific duties or roles performed beyond basic training —Any deployments, operational service, or call-outs —Final rank achieved and confirmation of any promotions —Reasons for leaving the reserves —Any official service record summary. UK military personnel records are generally private and not released publicly without the individual's consent, which suggests Kenyon has not consented to revealing any details. Voters seeking more information would need Kenyon to voluntarily provide or authorise release of his service documentation. 2. The Plumber Similarly, we don’t know much about his claims of being a plumber. What we do know: Kenyon is publicly described across mainstream UK media as a self-employed plumber from Makerfield, Greater Manchester. He says he completed a plumbing apprenticeship at age 18 and presents this as long-term work, but no verifiable proof of this has surfaced. Companies House shows that Robert Francis Kenyon (DOB March 1985) is the director of Makerfield Heating Ltd (company number 17014370). The company is active but was only incorporated in February 2026. This confirms the business venture is very recent. No earlier limited company for his plumbing work appears in public searches under his name. What we DON’T know: —The start date of his hands-on plumbing work (he claims years of experience, including pre-2026 self-employment; critics question this). —Details of any prior trading (e.g., as a sole trader, cash-in-hand, or under another name). —Information on the age/condition of his van, tools, or specific equipment (the claims that his van and tools all look newly purchased and nothing like what a real plumbers set up would look like are visual observations). —Information based on his business accounts, client history, or tax records —Where, when, or with whom he served his apprenticeship. In short, the “recent plumber” narrative has a factual basis — his limited company is brand new (Feb 2026) — but he has consistently been presented as a practising self-employed plumber for some time, including during the 2024 election campaign. The gap between the claimed but unverified long-term trade work and the new company incorporation is the main point of public scrutiny and rumour. So we know very little about his time as an army reservist, and very little about his plumbing claims. 3. The #NHS Specialist Technician Similarly, we don’t know much about him being an NHS worker. The claim that Kenyon “previously worked as a specialist technician for the NHS in Lancashire for around 6 years”, including through the pandemic, rests primarily on Kenyon’s own statements and Reform UK’s biographical material rather than fully independent primary verification. Multiple mainstream news outlets repeat the claim almost verbatim. Kenyon himself has stated this publicly, e.g., in his candidate profile and local election material: “I’m a plumber, I’ve served in the British Army, I worked for NHS for 6 years including throughout the pandemic...” Reform UK’s official announcements and Nigel Farage’s posts promote the same detail. What we do know: A “Bob Kenyon” (probably the same person) appears in 2023 NHS job adverts as Recruiting Manager/Site Maintenance Manager for estates/facilities roles at Southport and Ormskirk Hospital NHS Trust (part of Mersey and West Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust). Whether or not this role justifies the label “specialist technician” is unknown. It appears to fit the maintenance role in Lancashire and the timeline (active in NHS estates work in 2023). A LinkedIn profile for a Robert Kenyon as “Estate supervisor at NHS” in the Greater Preston area also exists, though it’s not definitively linked. What we DON’T know: —No publicly released contract, HR records, start/end dates, or exact job titles from official NHS sources —No detailed independent investigative reporting (as of now) that cross-checks payroll or references beyond the self-reported bio —Whether someone working in estate maintenance deserves the label “NHS specialist technician”. So we know very little about his time as an army reservist, very little about his plumbing claims, and very little about his NHS claims. This means there is very limited publicly available verifiable information about Kenyon on which voters should decide if he would make a good MP or not. Given Reform UK’s woeful vetting track-record, and the almost constant stream of revelations about candidates, councillors, and even current and former MPs, this should concern everyone. 4. The social media posts What we DO know plenty about are Kenyon’s frequently grotesque, bigoted, divisive and adolescent social media posts (primarily from 2020–2022). These include sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, vaccine-skepticism, climate-change-sceptisim, denial of reality, conspiracy theory thinking, anti-abortion rhetoric, disinformation, sexism, and interactions with far-right extremists including former Holocaust denier, 'Peter Sweden'. For many years he used now-deleted or suspended X/Twitter accounts, but the internet rarely forgets, and screenshots and archived versions of his posts have been widely reported by mainstream outlets (including The Telegraph, Independent, Metro, and Financial Times). What did his now deleted posts say? Kenyon replied to (and endorsed) a highly explicit sexual tweet directed at Carol Vorderman with “He’s only saying what we’re all thinking” + laughing and thumbs-up emojis. Vorderman has publicly condemned it as “disgusting,” called Kenyon a “cowardly misogynist,” and demanded a full apology. Kenyon has acknowledged it was “inappropriate” but the post was part of a pattern of other offensive comments from his deleted accounts. He has openly stated “I’m sexist, sorry but I am,” claimed women “can’t ref, drive, or give directions,” and made derogatory remarks about women’s bodies, female rugby players, and English women in general. He posted that many abortions are for “vanity purposes,” a “secondary form of contraception” so women can “shag anyone they want,” and described abortion as “cowardly murder” of a baby. During the summer riots he echoed far-right extremists by referring to an “invasion of foreign criminals,” suggesting King Charles open palaces for asylum seekers, and questioned whether Asian men assaulting white people en masse was a hate crime. Despite Kenyon claiming in at least one post that the “far right don’t really exist”, verifiable evidence shows it categorically does exist, and that it is a growing threat in the UK. Official 2024/25 Home Office Prevent statistics recorded 21% of referrals (1,798 cases) for extreme right-wing concerns — more than double the 10% (870) for Islamist extremism — alongside MI5’s ongoing assessment of extreme right-wing terrorism comprising around 25% of its caseload, and multiple recent terrorism convictions including neo-Nazi Callum Parslow (life sentence for a 2024 stabbing attack), a 2025 Manchester Jewish community plot (life sentences), and a West Yorkshire neo-Nazi group (29 years combined for plotting attacks on mosques and synagogues). Kenyon has also shared or engaged with vaccine scepticism, compared COVID policies to Nazism, and interacted with far-right figures e.g., former Holocaust-denier Peter Imanuelsen/Peter Sweden. Other reported themes include transphobic language, homophobic slurs (e.g., posting “You can’t call her ‘The Queen’ anymore because it offends the poofs”), and climate-change-skeptic comments. Despite climate change disproportionately harming the world’s poorest people, Kenyon has called climate change “a middle class problem” and strongly implied that climate change is simply natural climate variability over long periods rather than primarily human-driven recent change. Predictably, Reform UK has defended him and his posts, (as it defended James McMurdoch after Reform concealed from voters his conviction for repeatedly kicking a young woman), describing the comments as merely “unpolished” and stating they will not drop him or investigate further. It seems their vetting system has once again been a catastrophic failure — unless of course they knew all about his reality-denying bigotry and thought “this is exactly the kind of irresponsible sexist far-right bigot we need to appeal to a certain demographic” (especially those voters considering switching to the even more extreme Restore Britain party, led by former Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe. Kenyon’s main @X account is currently suspended (or was terminated/deleted by X for violating platform rules), and he attempted to “mothball” his Facebook account shortly before selection. The existence and content of these specific posts are verifiably documented via archived/screenshot evidence reported by multiple reputable outlets. They are not disputed as fabrications. Reform’s propensity to conceal important information about their candidates and representatives is now a well-documented and deeply troubling pattern which has already cost taxpayers a fortune. Reform won hundreds of council seats in the 2025 and 2026 local elections. Since then, roughly 80 Reform councillors have departed (resigned, suspended, or left the party) due to scandals, offensive posts, undeclared conflicts, or other issues linked to vetting shortcomings. Each local by-election typically costs councils £20,000–£25,000+, depending on the area. Reports from mid-2026 put the bill for just a dozen early resignations at around £322,000 in by-election costs alone. With about 80 departures, the total could easily exceed £2 million across various councils. These costs are funded by local council budgets (i.e., council tax and central government grants), diverting money from services like libraries, social care, bin collections, and road repairs. Many have called it a direct consequence of poor vetting. Reform UK has faced repeated waves of scandals involving its candidates and councillors. Before and after the 2024 general election, multiple candidates were dropped for racist or offensive comments. In the 2025 local elections alone, dozens of elected councillors faced allegations including racist, Islamophobic or antisemitic posts, far-right links, OnlyFans activity, and threats to kill, resulting in numerous suspensions, resignations, and by-elections. The party responded not by improving its vetting process, but by loosening it to a “common sense” approach in mid-2025 after complaints that it had been too strict, and it continued to lose representatives. The very obvious poor vetting standards have repeatedly been highlighted despite Nigel Farage’s false claims of having the “best” process. This has produced a steady stream of revelations that has damaged the party’s credibility. The case of former Reform MP James McMurdock exemplifies this broader pattern. In 2006, at age 19, he was convicted of assaulting his ex-girlfriend, pushing her to the ground and kicking her around four times outside a nightclub; he served 21 days in a young offenders’ institution but initially described the incident as merely a “push.” He nor Reform did not publicly disclose the conviction before the 2024 election. McMurdock eventually left the party in July 2025, not for his violent assault on a young woman, but after the Sunday Times reported that his companies, which were effectively dormant, had received approximately £70,000 in Bounce Back loans during the pandemic. He then suspended himself and sat as an independent. McMurdock is still an MP. No wonder Reform UK are highly selective about how they present Kenyon, and go to great lengths to conceal from voters verified information about who he really is. Voters of #Makerfield: when so little of Robert Kenyon’s core biography stands up to basic scrutiny while his long trail of sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic and conspiracy-laden posts is fully documented, trusting Reform UK’s latest “man of the people” means ignoring a now-proven pattern of catastrophic vetting that has already wasted £millions.

Sorry Elon, your argument is simplistic, incomplete, and thus misleading. Democracy rests on the bedrock principle of popular sovereignty, meaning that ultimate power resides with the people. For this power to be meaningful, citizens must be able to speak freely, debate ideas, and challenge authority. Free speech is the mechanism that enables active participation in governance. While this right is not absolute in any democracy, and in practice is limited when it causes serious harm or threatens the system’s stability, it remains the prerequisite for any legitimate democratic agency. Alongside sovereignty and speech, democracy depends on a shared commitment to a broadly verifiable reality. While perspectives and interpretations naturally differ, a functioning society requires a common basis for judging what is true in law, science, and public social and economic policy. Without this shared informational foundation, public debate becomes vulnerable to manipulation, and citizens lose the capacity to make the informed decisions necessary for self-rule. In this context, Elon Musk represents a particularly salient modern risk to democratic systems. As the owner of X, one of the most influential platforms for political communication, he exercises significant influence over the flow and visibility of information. This concentration of communicative power sits uneasily with popular sovereignty, as the digital spaces where citizens form opinions are increasingly shaped by the decisions of a single private actor. This influence complicates the operation of free speech in practice. Platform design and algorithms do not simply permit expression; they structure its reach, shaping which voices are amplified and which remain less visible. In this sense, the conditions under which citizens encounter and evaluate ideas are now much less neutral in many democracies, and due largely to the concentration of media ownership, mediated in ways that can subtly influence public discourse. Most critically, this concentration of power bears on the condition of truth itself. Changes to moderation, verification, and content dynamics on such a platform can affect the balance between reliable information and misinformation, placing strain on the shared reality upon which democratic deliberation depends. When that shared reality is weakened, the ability of citizens to exercise meaningful self-rule is correspondingly diminished. Musk (along with the more traditional long-established media barons) represents the convergence of vast economic power and control over the infrastructure of public discourse. Crucially, this power operates in limited or indirect accountability compared to public institutions, as it lacks the checks and balances that constrain public authority. When the digital architecture of the public square is held mainly by private interests, democratic oversight is weakened, exposing a structural vulnerability in which the foundations of self-governance are increasingly shaped by private power that lacks direct democratic accountability. Here is what an actual genius said about the concentration of sources of information back in May 1949: