Kemi Badenoch has accused Nigel Farage of “manipulating” his supporters after he claimed Reform UK had more members than the Tories.
The populist party said on Thursday it had exceeded 131,680 members – that’s the number of Conservative members who voted in this year’s leadership race.
Farage even released a social media video showing Reform’s online tracker being projected on the Conservative Party’s headquarters in London.
The projection claimed Reform were now “the formal opposition”, and sarcastically added: “Merry Christmas Kemi!”
Farage also proudly posted on social media that the youngest political party in the UK had overtaken the “oldest in the world” – despite having five MPs to the Tories 121.
Unsurprisingly, Badenoch was not happy about his claims.
“Manipulating your own supporters at Xmas eh, Nigel?” She wrote on the social media platform X in response to the video.
She continued: “It’s a fake [clock] 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.”
The Tory leader claimed it’s clear “Farage doesn’t understand the digital age”, because this “kind of fakery gets found out pretty quickly”.
Badenoch then slammed the “endless lies, smoke and mirrors, stuff and nonsense politics.”
She added: “For a party that pretends to hate the establishment so much, they are copying and pasting the fake Tony Blair/ Alister Campbell’s spin book.”
Badenoch said Reform will let the public down, as “they’ll say anything for cheap media hits because they have no plan underneath”, only “rage against the machine”.
Badenoch mysteriously added that the next year is “going to be about hard, unvarnished truths,” particularly for the Tories after their historic defeat at the polls in July.
She then claimed: “The Conservative Party has gained thousands of new members since the leadership election. But we don’t shout about it.”
Farage, naturally, responded saying he has “5.4m followers” – he has 2.1m on X and 1.1m on TikTok, so this number may be a sum of all his social media platforms – while Badenoch “has 320k”.
He claimed: “We understand you are bitter, upset and angry that we are now the second biggest party in British politics, and that the Conservative brand is dying under your leadership.”
He said he would be happy to audit their membership with an established accounting firm as long as her party did the same, adding: “It’s an open secret at CCHQ that your membership numbers are fake.”
Reform’s official account then claimed to have a screenshot of Badenoch’s internal membership numbers, supposedly showing the Tories have 134,832 members.
He later went on GB News to call her claim “absolutely disgusting”.
A Conservative spokesperson told the BBC that Reform had “delivered a Labour government that has cruelly cut winter fuel winter payments for 10 million pensioners, put the future of family farming and food security at risk, and launched a devastating raid on jobs which will leave working people paying the price”.
He said: “A vote for Reform this coming May is a vote for a Labour council – only the Conservatives can stop this.”
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