ITV's Tom Giles talks about the recent ITV Exposure documentary Undercover - A Year in Reform and the practice of investigative journalism

Tom Giles was hired by ITV ten years ago to run its current affairs output after a hugely successful career at the BBC.

Former editor of Panorama, the award-winning Undercover Care: The Abuse Exposed, which won a Bafta for its account of the abuse of vulnerable young patients at a private hospital near Bristol, was on his watch, as was Fifa’s Dirty Secrets, broadcast three days before the football governing body’s vote on the staging of the 2018 World Cup.

He was also responsible for Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain.

At ITV he took on current affairs strands including Exposure, Tonight, and On Assignment.

The recent documentary Undercover - A Year in Reform exposed not only the racism, sexism and extremism of Reform UK members, but gave the lie to its leader Nigel Farage's assertion in his party conference speech two years ago that these were "a few bad apples" and such people would be weeded out of the party by improved vetting for candidates.

Hardcash productions, who made the programme for ITV, managed to get a journalist into Reform's press office as a press officer, where she filmed them secretly. Another journalist went to election campaigns around the country. The documentary filmed Reform members at every level, from grassroots to MP, many of them happily talking about how easy it was to circumvent vetting and how important it was not to reveal their real agenda to the public who would find it "unpalatable", especially in the "woke south", until they were in power, when they would "just do it".

Join Tom Giles to hear him talk about investigative journalism at The Chiswick Calendar's Media Club.