It took just over a year for Solihull’s Reform UK group to unravel — and the manner of its unravelling reveals something more troubling than the conduct of three individual councillors.
The central thesis is not complicated: the crisis engulfing Reform UK’s Solihull operation was not an accident of exposure but an outcome of a political culture in which racist and misogynistic attitudes were expressed openly, repeatedly, and without apparent fear of internal sanction — until an ITV documentary made concealment impossible. Alan Feeney, Chris Whelan, and Jamie Campbell did not make their remarks in a moment of private weakness. They made them while canvassing, on polling day, and in the presence of someone they believed to be a fellow traveller. That is the detail that demands analytical weight.
The sequence of events begins well before the group formally constituted itself. In June 2025, Feeney — then a Conservative councillor representing Castle Bromwich ward on Solihull Council — resigned from the ruling Tory group and joined a breakaway Solihull Independents faction alongside Samantha Gethen and Michael Gough. Within three months, all three had attended Reform UK’s conference at the NEC, appeared on a livestream, and announced the formation of a new Reform UK group on the council, with Gough installed as leader. The speed of that political migration, from Conservative dissident to Reform standard-bearer in a single parliamentary season, was itself a signal of the ideological direction of travel.
What followed was a pattern of conduct that, in retrospect, the documentary footage renders legible in a different register. Feeney had already attracted criticism from Solihull’s planning committee chairman, Bob Grinsell, for repeatedly calling in house extensions in Castle Bromwich without speaking at the relevant meetings — behaviour Grinsell characterised as a waste of the authority’s time and money. Feeney’s public defence was framed in the language of community advocacy. The undercover recordings, however, captured a rather different framing: in February 2026, he told an undercover reporter that Muslims should be banned from standing for public office, and by April he was describing his ward as having been “infested” with Asians, whom he labelled “absolute parasites,” and articulating a deliberate strategy of using planning obstruction to make it harder for them to remain. At that same month’s full council meeting, Feeney invoked the language of vindication, claiming he had been called racist for “daring to speak what others fear to say.” The recordings suggest the accusation was not unfounded.
The events of polling day in May 2026 are, by any measure, extraordinary. Feeney, Campbell, and Whelan spent the day canvassing together while an undercover reporter recorded their conversation. Campbell suggested buying pork chops to prevent a mosque from being built. Whelan made a comment about a female candidate that, stripped of its studied jocular register, amounts to a threat of sexual violence. These were not remarks made in isolation or under pressure. They were the ambient language of a group of men who evidently felt entirely comfortable with one another. That comfort is the structural fact the documentary exposes, not merely the individual remarks.
All three were elected. Feeney finished first in Castle Bromwich with 2,376 votes, was simultaneously elected to Birmingham City Council, and was appointed deputy mayor of Solihull, with the mayoralty itself scheduled for 2027. Campbell secured 2,181 votes; Whelan, 2,089. Reform UK as a whole won 17 seats on the council, becoming the official opposition, with Gethen assuming the group leadership after Gough lost his seat. The party’s institutional footprint expanded precisely as the behaviour of its most prominent local figures was being recorded.
The collapse, when it came, followed a recognisable script. On October 13, 2026, Feeney and Whelan announced they were quitting Reform UK to become independents; ITV News simultaneously confirmed the existence of the documentary and released clips. The group initially backed Campbell, now deputy leader, but within days all three had resigned their council seats entirely — before the full documentary screened on October 18. Feeney and Campbell issued social media apologies. None of the three spoke to the press. Group leader Gethen issued a statement apologising to Castle Bromwich residents for having placed trust in them. By-elections were immediately set in motion.
The accountability gap here is worth stating with precision. Three men who held elected office, exercised scrutiny powers, sat on planning and resources committees, and were positioned to assume the borough’s highest civic ceremonial role resigned not because an internal mechanism detected or acted on their conduct, but because a television broadcaster did. The party’s own structures produced no such reckoning. The defection of Councillor David Hoey to the Conservatives in July 2026 and the departure of Eleonora Gough as an independent in September had already signalled internal fracture, but neither departure was accompanied by any public accounting of the group’s culture. It required the imminent broadcast of filmed evidence to force resignations that internal governance had never approached demanding. That is not a footnote to this story. It is the story.