Nigel Farage has declared he will stand to be a Reform MP as he takes over as Reform leader from Richard Tice. The Mail has more.
The Brexit champion announced the U-turn at a press conference alongside previous leader Richard Tice.
As well as taking the helm of the party, he dropped the bombshell saying that he will run for Parliament in Clacton.
Mr. Farage said he was back “for the next five years” – making clear he wants to dismantle the Tories “when they are in Opposition” after the election.
He said “not on your nelly” would he do an electoral deal with the Conservatives, predicting that Reform would win more votes.
It is a huge headache for Mr. Sunak as he tries to claw back ground on Labour. A Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll this evening put the Tories on 20% backing, only six points ahead of Reform and a massive 26 points behind Keir Starmer’s party.
Mr. Farage acknowledged that it would be “very difficult” to win from scratch in a constituency.
But he said since the snap election was called he had been talking to people on the streets and observed that “there is a rejection of the political class going on in this country in a way that has not been seen in modern times”.
“I rationally thought this was too difficult. I’ve changed my mind because I can’t let down millions of people,” he said.
“Nothing in this country works… we will only recover our position with boldness,” he said. “I’ve done it before, I’ll do it again: I will surprise everybody.”
Explaining his change of heart, Mr. Farage said: “The other thing that really shook me in a way last week were the number of people coming up to me in the street saying ‘Nigel, why aren’t you standing?'”
Richard Tice began the press conference by announcing he was handing over the reins:
How do we turn on the rocket boosters, the turbo chargers, to this campaign? As people know, I wanted Nigel to be able to give as much energy and effort, commitment to this campaign, as he felt able to do. I thought well actually, what I really want to do is to invite Nigel Farage to become leader of Reform U.K.
Explaining his change of mind, Farage said:
Now I stood here, a week ago, and I said look, hands up. I’ve been nonplussed by Rishi calling a short-term election, it doesn’t give me the time to find a constituency, doesn’t give me the time to build up data.
I thought the rational thing to do was not to stand but to do my bit as supporting the party around the country, and for the last week, that is what I’ve been doing. I’ve been travelling all around the country. I’ve had the honour of appearing with Piers Morgan on Question Time amongst other things.
I’ve decided I’ve changed my mind. It’s allowed you know. It’s not always a sign of weakness, it could potentially be a sign of strength.
He added:
Richard is more than happy for me to put my head and shoulders firmly over the parapet and take the flack. So I’m coming back as leader of Reform U.K., but not just for this election campaign. I’m coming back for the next five years.
So our aim in this election is to get many, many millions of votes. And I’m talking far more votes than you got back in 2015 when we when we got four million votes. We’re going to get many, many, many more votes than that.
How many seats in Parliament? Can we win under this system? Well, that’s another matter. And that depends on what momentum we can get from here.
A former Tory Cabinet Minister told the Telegraph that Farage standing as an MP for Reform is “bad news for both major parties, but sadly worse news for the Conservatives”.
This will bring new impetus to the Reform campaign. Farage is arguably the most recognisable figure in British politics apart from the Prime Minister and Boris Johnson. He is an insurgent and will attract votes.
This is bad news for both major parties, but sadly worse news for the Conservatives.
Matthew Goodwin says this is Nigel Farage’s “finest hour” and there are several “open goals” for him in an election campaign that so far has been as “dull as dishwater”:
The palpable anti-Westminster mood. The genuine panic about how to afford life. The creeping sense of despair about mass immigration. The intense anger about our broken borders. The spiralling concern about lawlessness and crime. The rising fear about a dark new sectarianism. The visible erosion of British values and ways of life – particularly since October 7th. And, on top of all that, the deep, unyielding sense of pessimism about where all this is heading – about where this country of ours is heading, about where this place we call home is heading. …
Farage has realised this; many other politicians have not. He has grasped that many people want to have a very different kind of conversation about where we are heading as a society; they have not. He might be criticised by broadcast interviewers and BBC newsreaders as “inflammatory” and at times he certainly is; but already in the opening days of this campaign he’s tapped into this much deeper sense of unease among the British people, this legitimate sense of unease, about what is now unfolding before them.
Can Britain – our shared history, collective memory, identity, values, and ways of life – actually survive in a form that we recognise, respect and want to pass down to our children and their children? How can a national community hold itself together while undergoing unprecedented demographic change, persistent economic decline, and a ruling elite that routinely downplays or derides, rather than defend, who we are?
And who out there, exactly, is willing to push back, seriously, against the growing assortment of radicals and extremists who very clearly loathe who we are, who have no interest in respecting our ways of life? Nigel Farage does not have the answers to these questions. But he is at least willing to talk openly about them. And that in itself gives him an enormous opening.
Stop Press: Can Farage win in Clacton? In 2014, after defecting to UKIP, Douglas Carswell triggered a by-election in Clacton and won. He contested the seat for UKIP in 2015 and won again with 19,642 votes. He was replaced as the UKIP candidate by Paul Oakley in 2017, who only polled 3,357 votes and lost to Giles Watling, the Conservative candidate, who polled 27,031, then held the seat two years later with 31,438. However, the consensus of pollsters, such as James Johnson, is that Farage will win. That’s also the view of the bookies.
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I’ve put a large cardboard box out two weeks running, which they’ve refused to take; presumably because there’s a couple of tiny polystyrene balls at the bottom. I’ve now burnt box at back of garden and will no longer play their silly game of separating the trash. I’m surprised it’s taken me so long to stop playing.
Time to haul out another idiot politician to pay for the sins of our tyrannical bureaucrats.
It’s getting a very long list of them isn’t it?
I once put some rubbish in a rubbish bin, too.
I know, it’s a good job Marcus Aurelius knew isn’t my real name!
Good Lord!
Oh, not that either?
You’re a monster.
Now you tell us, Marcus!
As the saying goes “no good deed goes unpunished”. I would always recommend not binning anything with your intact name or address on it in case the garbage stasi want to trace it back to you. An indelible marker pen or shredding should do the trick.
At least, through incidents like these, people are starting to see how unhinged the environment movement has become.
Been doing that for years. Didn’t think I’d be worrying about the bin police though.
That said, this news should also be used to emphasise the risk of ID theft. Not only could someone go through the bins to identify you – this shows that someone actually did.
I went round, under the cover of darkness, covertly dumping bin bags full of stripped wallpaper in the neighbours’ bins in the street, the night before bin collection.
It’s when we first moved in and the previous owners were obviously fans of the ‘multi-layer’ approach to wallpapering over the decades. We ended up with our garden shed crammed full of these bags.
You’re meant to take it to the tip but we didn’t own a car then and we’d have had to pay through the nose for the council to take it away. It took several weeks but I got shot of it all. ‘Off-territory’ dumping for the win! Fortunately my neighbours are all very chill and helpful, one even suggested I do that, but god knows how much I’d have been fined in Brighton.
I am a master. I’ve got rid of TONS of waste like this. The council employee at the tip told me to do it when I looked aghast at the prospect of having to pay AGAIN for the council to take a few old bricks. Thing is, my neighbours don’t know about this… arrangement… so like you say, darkness and stealth are key
We put an old car engine in a wheelie bin once, back in the 1990s the bins were much bigger. Council truck groaned a bit when it compacted it but there it was, gone..
When wheelie bins were first introduced, as long as it fitted in the bin, you could put it in. True, dat. That was the whole point of them. The only time one wasn’t emptied was when I filled it with garden rubble…it was so heavy it was almost impossible to wheel the bin, so had to take some out and spread it out over a few weeks!
Well I just call it using your initiative. I feel like as the years go by there seems to be more and more rules for us to abide by. The vast majority being totally pointless.
We’ve got some used beer bottles that aren’t made of glass so can’t be recycled. They’re mega heavy and appear to be made from stone or granite. They’ll be getting off-loaded 2 or 3 at a time down at the bins in the car park at the top of the street.
I figure that as long as I don’t do a secretive dump in the dog poo bin I’m not actually doing anything wrong..
There is actually a bin for dog poo———–It’s called a politicians mouth.
I got rid of a bath by chopping it up and putting a bagfull of it in my bin for each collection. Eventually got rid of it over many weeks. This between the time that councils started charging for DIY domestic waste (by claiming it wasn’t domestic’) and the recent change which stops them imposing these charges.
This has turned into quite the “Dumpers Anonymous Confessional”, hasn’t it? You bloody axe maniac you! Or were you more of a Leatherface, in your weapon of destruction choice?
I am pretty sure that they don’t recycle anything like what they claim. I suspect most ends up in landfill. So they have us jumping through all these hoops for nothing. GREEN has to be the most insidious and disgusting political ideology ever imposed on an easily manipulated public, who thought they were living in a free country. —–Once their gas central heating is ripped out and they have 10 plastic bins in their garden some people might actually wake up one day and say “Eh, what is going on here exactly”?
I find the last part of this story particularly vexing. £400 fine for litter picking. My wife does at least an hours litter picking most days. She has early onset AD. If she is fined for putting something in the wrong bin there will be hell to pay.
#excited is trending in the legal community.
My solution is to dig holes and bury it. Keeps you fit digging and yields topsoil to go in raised beds.
I am jusy continuing the practice of the former owner of my home, who was a haulage contractor for a large nearby chemical company. They paid him to take it away and he tipped a lot of the useful bits and pieces in the back garden. For the last three decades it has yielded much useful stuff for an enterprising cheapskate like me.
For a fist full of rubble?
We found an old coal fire back boiler buried in our garden – didn’t know what it was at first.
Hunger games type behaviour, may the odds always be in yr favour.
In Essex visits to waste disposal sites (“recycling centres” in swamp language) requires prior reservation giving phone number, email addreess and vehicle registration number. I have found the staff who check admission allow some leeway on time which is just as well because local roads are often choaked.
Staff in the centre are very interested in metal waste, so much so I wonder if they sell it privately. There is no assistance available for heavy items.
This seems to me just another way of monitoring the public.
Council waste tips have always been obliged to take metal. Yes, I strongly suspect that the staff scavenge and sell-off the good bits. I’m a bit of a car renovation nut – the local guys have got used to me dumping old driveshafts and suchlike.
This level of micro surveillance and stupidity has not yet reached Scotland, as far as I am aware. The response from the typical Jock would likely be far more colourful than awa’ and bile yer heid….
It is sad then that the typical Jock could not manage “awa’ and bile yer heid….” when the Scamdemic and associated nonsense were being rolled out.
No personal criticism intended.
It’s high time everyone told their councils to F themselves. This is rule without consent.
The level of the fine constitutes a cruel and unusual punishment, totally out of order.
How can it even be a crime to put waste in a bin, it’s not industrial quantities of waste, it was one piece of cardboard.
The Highland Council (SNP) is similarly anal about street litter bins, all sorts of threats and incitement to snitch, horrible notices.
Could the FSU help to challenge this or help organise an appeal for funds.
“You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.”
Thomas Sowell
With respect, the people of Brighton shouldn’t complain.
They voted for the greenists.
PS maybe try some direct democracy and sneak out at night and plant some cardboard boxes in the greeny’s bins?
We will soon have a bin that goes out once a year for toe nail clippings. Try not to put it out on the wrong day though or the toe nail wardens will slap you with a heavy fine.
One for the left foot and one for the right.
Years ago (before I retired) after each meal in the company’s dining room we meticulously separated out plastic and polystyrene cups placing them in special containers. One day I happened to be in the service yard where I witnessed the two separate containers being emptied into the back of the same dust cart! After that I made a point of placing plastic cups in the polystyrene container and vice versa.
Simple solution: don’t pay the fine. Inundate the council for evidence of any contract and shower them with FOI requests. Basically, tie them up in legal knots. They’re just out to rob you after all.