he world has gone mad. What has happened to the country when you can't even have a bit of racist and sexist banter with your mates at work? Time was when up to 20 million viewers would settle down to watch Till Death Us Do Part, for 30 minutes of laughter with Alf Garnett moaning about black people while calling his wife "a silly old moo". That was a Britain that was worth living in. These days the thought police are everywhere. The wokerati from London, Oxford and Cambridge who are out to ruin everyone's lives. What's wrong with letting sleeping racists lie?

Well, Zia Yusuf has had enough and he's not going to take it any more. After the ITV exposé which revealed racist remarks by members of the party, he has posted a six-and-a-half-minute video on social media promising extreme retribution against the undercover journalists who posed as Reform-friendly.

You have to love the irony. Because for the past six months, Zia has been posing as something he isn't: the shadow home secretary. Now he may be equally as half-witted as Chris Philp, but the last time I checked, they weren't the same person. Maybe Zia has a crush on the Philpster. Longs for the gym bod and absence of brain. Zia isn't even an MP. When the Gorton and Denton Reform association prefer the dislikable Matt Goodwin, you know how loathed you are.

Hoping to add some gravitas by sitting in front of a union jack in a wood-panelled room, Zia prepares to address the nation. And it turns out that he's not the slightest bit bothered that some Reform members are racists and misogynists – it was probably as much of a surprise to him as it was to the rest of us. What really seems to bother him is that ITV didn't ask permission to film colleagues being racist. Which is a bit like being annoyed that Pete Hegseth wanted to broadcast a live execution because it was being streamed on pay per view.

Zia has clearly never heard of undercover public interest journalism. And he's crushingly disappointed by the deception. He had imagined that ITV would have taken the trouble to personally write to him, asking permission to film people being racist. And he would have happily let them do so. Because then everyone would have known exactly what was going on. I mean, think of the possible consequences of not doing it this way. It might turn out that there were dozens of other undercover journalists in Reform. All just hoping to catch each other out. No one at Reform HQ might be who they say they are.

There was no knowing where any of this could end. It was quite possible even that Robert Jenrick was a plant. That his defection from the Tory party had been a plot dreamed up by Kemi Badenoch. A long game to place one of the least trusted and least talented Conservative politicians at the heart of Reform.

And it had worked brilliantly. Nigel Farage had taken the bait and had appointed Honest Bob as his so-called "shadow chancellor", making Reform look more and more like a care home for unsuccessful Tories. Job done with Nige tanking in the polls. Some day in the future, Kemi would reward Jenrick with a peerage. The Conservative establishment looking after one another as usual. How things ought to be.

First, though, Zia was promising retribution. He wasn't just alleging that crimes had been committed by ITV. He was stating it as a fact. Which might get a little awkward for him. The most detailed crime was that ITV had directly affected the outcome of a council election in which Reform had lost one ward by 24 votes. The facts were this, apparently. ITV had paid their journalists to put a curse on the 200 leaflets they had been asked to distribute by Reform so that the people reading them voted for Labour and the Conservatives.

Sometimes you wonder if a man can actually be this dim. At which point you have to consider if the whole video is a double bluff and that Zia is also a Tory stooge who has managed to embed himself at the heart of Reform. That his desire to deport women and children is just a front. Because first, the journalists weren't being paid by ITV to canvass for Reform. They were being paid to be undercover journalists.

And second, the idea that 200 leaflets could swing 24 voters is clearly absurd. Of the 200 leaflets it is likely that all 200 of them would have been put straight in the recycling. A leaflet changes the mind of about one person in 10,000. Leafleting is something parties do for their own benefit. To make them feel like they are doing something useful.

Having got all this off his chest, Zia wanted to express his hurt. His disappointment. The psychological damage that had been done to Reform activists and workers in HQ. Men and women who had been entitled to believe they had been in a safe space, where racist outbursts would be well received and applauded. Only now they had been forced to consider the possibility that some people might find them offensive. How could that possibly be right?

The violation had been so severe that Zia had been forced to issue a Reform Victim Support card for those most badly affected by the ITV investigation. Much like the yellow card that people with cancer get given. Find yourself on a crowded train full of foreigners and you just brandish the card and all black and brown people are obliged to leave the carriage and give you a seat. And if the police come across a dishevelled-looking man wearing a teal tie and babbling about how foreigners have ruined the country, they can call the hotline number on the back of the card and a Reform outreach worker will come and pick them up and take them to a refuge.

Who would have guessed that the snowflake slayer in chief would turn out to be the biggest snowflake of all? Hiding in plain sight. "We will never give up," Zia concluded. On day one of a Reform government, perhaps Nige would create safe spaces where people could be as abusive to foreigners and women as they liked. This was a Britain of which we could all be proud.