Nigel Farage has said “the gloves are off” in the next election bout for Kemi Badenoch’s constituency in Essex. It comes after the Conservative Party leader claimed Reform UK’s online membership counter was fake.
The Reform UK leader told his supporters he would not sue Ms Badenoch for her claim. Instead, he promised to take a “big joint photograph” in an effort to prove the existence of his party membership.
Mr Farage, the MP for Clacton, has now set his sights on removing Badenoch as the MP for North West Essex. The Reform UK leader – who will be in Essex today (January 4) for the party’s Eastern Region conference – said he will meet local members as part of his challenge to Ms Badenoch.
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The party leader continued: “It’s all well and good saying ‘sue her’ but you have to prove actual harm. She hasn’t harmed us. She’s given us tens of thousands more members.
“But what I am going to do – isn’t it delightful that the Eastern Region conference tomorrow takes place at Chelmsford Racecourse which happens to be in her parliamentary constituency, which is good. And better than that, on 31st of this month, we’ve booked a big venue and I’m going to invite all our members and supporters in North West Essex to come along to meet me, to have a photograph.
“And we already have 800 supporters in her constituency, nearly 400 of whom have signed up as members, and we’ll do a big joint photograph and I’ll tell Kemi, not only are these not fake members, but we’re now going to make this a target constituency for the next general election.
“You had your chance. You accused me of being dishonest. You had your chance to apologise. Well now the gloves are off.”
Ms Badenoch beat Labour’s Issy Waite by 2,610 votes to be elected as the MP for North West Essex in July 2024. That was a massively reduced majority from the 27,594 lead over the second-placed Liberal Democrats in the formerly-named Saffron Walden constituency in 2019. Reform UK were backed by almost 8,000 votes in the area in last year’s election.
Grant StClair-Armstrong was listed as the Reform UK candidate but resigned from the party after the Times reported he previously called on voters online to elect the British National Party (BNP). Mr StClair-Armstrong said in a comment to the BBC at the time that he had “never supported the BNP”.
Ms Badenoch, the MP for North West Essex, had previously challenged the legitimacy of Reform’s membership figures, writing on X: “It’s not real. It’s a fake, coded to tick up automatically. We’ve been watching the back end for days and can also see they’ve just changed the code to link to a different site as people point this out.
“Farage doesn’t understand the digital age. This kind of fakery gets found out pretty quickly, although not before many are fooled, like many of you, I am sick of the endless lies, smoke and mirrors, stuff and nonsense politics.”
Several media outlets including The Spectator and Financial Times reported having been shown the code for calculating and displaying the party’s online tally, which they found appeared to function properly.