Leicestershire and Rutland's Police and Crime Commissioner has joined Reform UK. 

In a shock move this morning, the party's leader Nigel Farage announced Rupert Matthew's defection from the Conservative Party at a media conference at Reform UK headquarters in Westminster. 

Mr Matthews, who has twice been elected for the Conservatives as Police and Crime Commissioner joined Farage on stage, as he was announced as the party's first police and crime commissioner. He has left the Tories after 40 years of membership. 



Rupert Matthews has become Reform UK's first Police and Crime Commissioner (Photo: LDRS)

Mr Farage said: "Rupert Matthews is the police and crime commissioner for Leicester. He has twice been elected as a conservative, but today he comes across as our first police and crime commissioner." 

Mr Matthews said: "I have known Nigel off and on for several years and so I asked him what he wanted me to say and great man that he is, he said 'say anything you like as long as you tell them why you're joining Reform." 

He continued: "As police and crime commissioner for Leicestershire and Rutland, I daily face the fight against crime. I see ordinary hard-working people, burgled, robbed and mugged. Shoplifting is getting out of control, anti-social behaviour is turning too many of our town centres into an apocalyptic wasteland of lawless Britain." 

He said police officers were doing the job with one hand behind their backs and said the prisons are full of 'foreign criminals who should be deported the day they are convicted, not kept here at the expense of British taxpayers'. 

He claimed that the police race action plan, which has been devised to create a national police force that is anti-racist, is an 'abomination'. He said it was a 'disgrace and the very epitome of two-tier policing'. 

He also criticised Kemi Badenoch's Conservative party and said Nigel Farage was the 'better choice'. 

He said the 'dark heart of wokeness; needed to be cut out of the criminal justice system.' 

Mr Matthews will have fellow Reform UK colleagues in Leicestershire as the county council came under control of the party at the May elections.