Reform UK candidate Mark Matlock has admitted to using an AI-generated image in the run-up to the General Election as pressure mounts on Reform UK to prove all its candidates were real people.
Nigel Farage’s party picked up more than four million votes on July 4th in a vote that propelled him into Parliament for the first time.
Key to the party’s bid to win as big a share of the national vote as possible was fielding a full slate of candidates, with so-called “paper candidates” who did no campaigning and were there simply to help increase the party’s vote share winning several thousand votes.
Reform insists every one of its 609 candidates on 4 July were real, but Mark Matlock, the candidate for Clapham and Brixton Hill, has admitted to using an AI-generated image in the election.
He told Private Eye that he used AI for the campaign leaflet because he didn’t have a picture of himself in Reform’s turquoise tie.
Matlock told the outlet that he lived in the south Cotswold, some 80 miles away from the seat he was contesting, and didn’t attend the vote count because he had pneumonia.
Posting on X, he said: “Unfortunately I will not be attending the count tonight as I have pneumonia. The hospital I visited was closed before it’s closing time. I said to the nurse on a buzzer I am struggling to breath and she said call a number. Vote reform this is madness”.
One X user replied: “If you couldn’t get into hospital, how did you get the diagnosis? You’re just a made up candidate You’ve been rumbled mate”
Another referenced the fact that Mr Matlock’s post showed he was in a Gloucestershire hospital at 7:43pm on election night, despite the fact that his seat was in south London.
They wrote: “If you were intending to attend the count in Clapham (London) why were you in Gloucestershire?”
After Labour’s landslide win, Mr Matlock took to X to quash any rumours that he wasn’t a real person.
He wrote: “To all those people on Reddit wondering if I’m real or if Reform has fake candidates ? Keep smoking the crack pipe and wondering what sexuality you are. How do you think anyone could be nominated if you don’t exist ? Do you people know anything about anything?”.
Related: Voter ID rules may have prevented 445,000 from voting in election
