A TORY police and crime commissioner who wrote a have-a-go history book on Adolf Hitler has defected to Reform UK, the party said today.

Rupert Matthews, who has also written about UFOs, ghosts and alien abductions, was elected as Leicestershire and Rutland’s PCC in 2021.

He told the Reform press conference in Westminster that he had been a Tory member for more than 40 years and vowed to remove the “dark heart of wokeness” from the criminal justice system. 

He added that politicians in Britain had taken inspiration from “Lebanon and Libya” for their policies.

Mr Matthews also tutored a course called Understanding Our Paranormal Universe for the US-based online International Metaphysical University before filling a vacant post as East Midlands Tory MEP in 2017.

Deborah Lindsey, co-founder of the so-called “educational arm” of the International Metaphysical Churches, has claimed that the university chose not to be accredited to avoid government meddling and beliefs that do not “align with the truth taught by our world renowned thought-leaders.”

Mr Matthews is believed to have offered a course that cost £152 to complete.

The Prime Minister’s political spokeswoman called the defection “very interesting, the fantastical and the unexplained.

“It’s no surprise [leader Nigel Farage] has added Reform’s fiscal plans to that list.”

Reform also announced Wormwood Scrubs retired prison governor Vanessa Frake-Harris had joined the party and would be contributing to its law-and-order task force. 

Ms Frake-Harris, who joined the prison service in 1986, cited increases in escapes, attacks on prison officers and a rise in drugs, weapons and mobile phone finds in the last year as factors behind her decision.