’s weekend programme turned tense yesterday as she confronted ’s live on-air.
The pair got into a spat about MP Rupert Lowe, who has been accused of bad behaviour just a day after publicly insulting Reform leader and the party at large. An independent investigation is now being held into the allegations, which Lowe denies. He claims “there is no credible evidence against me” and says he is the victim of “a political assassination because I dared to question ”.
The Great Yarmouth MP has now been suspended by Reform and referred to the police over allegations of making verbal threats of violence.
Speaking live on the , Tice was quizzed about the ongoing situation, telling Laura: “Well look, this is very sad, Laura, and we had been aware of Rupert’s behaviour. We couldn’t ignore these allegations and quite rightly the chairman Zia Yusuf said that we had to have an independent investigation led by [lawyer] KC that is underway.
“Like I say, it’s very sad, it’s unfortunate, but we had to be decisive, it was the responsible thing to do and imagine if we hadn’t done that. Imagine if we had tried in some way to brush it under the carpet, that would have been completely the wrong thing to do.”
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Laura Kuenssberg grilled one politician on her BBC show (Image: BBC)
Laura wasn’t letting him off the hook so easily as she pressed: “I’ll ask you again, though – when did you first know? You said you’ve known for some time,” before using four words to skewer the politician, probing: “The timing is curious.”
She said: “Because the timing appears to many people, perhaps people watching this, it appears rather curious because on Thursday Mr Lowe was very critical of saying that Reform was still a protest party run by someone like the messiah and the very next day, miraculously, these allegations of bad behaviour which Mr Lowe denies were suddenly out in the public domain and you called the cops.”
Tice tried again to say: “In terms of the anxieties that we had had over Rupert’s behaviour, regrettably that had been going on for some time, just before the parliamentary break, as had previously been reported there was an unfortunate, regrettable incident in the itself.
Richard Tice defended Reform UK (Image: BBC)
“There was an unfortunate trend here and we had these bullying allegations and they have to be dealt with. I understand as a parliamentary investigation and as a party there’s a duty of care to people who are either directly or indirectly employed and it’s quite proper and right that it’s dealt with in the responsible way.”
Laura interrupted: “But was it responsible then, to sit on these allegations that were made around incidents happening in December, before Christmas, and then lo and behold-“ before Tice cut her off to argue: “I don’t know the specifics of exact timings, I wouldn’t expect to, that wouldn’t be appropriate either.”
Laura carried on: “Well forgive me, has told- Forgive me Mr Tice, has written in The Telegraph today about an incident in December.” Clarifying it was the House of Commons incident, Tice repeated his earlier statements, before Laura questioned: “Do you expect viewers to believe there is no connection between the fact that Rupert Lowe was very rude about the party and Mr Farage on Thursday, and news of these allegations emerged on Friday? Do you expect people to believe that?”
Tice replied: “I think people will believe that, because there is absolutely no truth in that suggestion. The sad reality is Rupert’s been doing some great work, but there have been too many instances where actually we’ve seen a different character and it’s just become really challenging-“
Clearly done with the issue, Kuenssberg said: “I’m sure many people watching this will be disappointed. You’ve been at the top of some recent opinion polls, you’ve obviously been growing as a party, you’ve got thousands and thousands of new members, but isn’t the danger with all this that having this kind of spat in public, these allegations of behaviour of one MP, that you don’t look like the professional party you aspire to be? And that some people watching this might think you’re more interested in fighting with each other, and you don’t look like you can run a normal HR process – and you might not even look like you could run a bath!”