The Royal Cinque Ports Yachts Club was an appropriate place for Nigel Farage to make his first big speech of the election campaign today. Set on the Dover seafront, it offered the perfect setting for Farage – Reform’s honorary president and spiritual figurehead – to lambast the Tory record on small boats. The Conservatives, he said, had betrayed their 2019 voters by allowing an ‘invasion’ of migrants: ‘If 3,800 boats and 125,000 people isn’t a sort of slow motion D-Day in reverse, I don’t know what is.’ It was the kind of stump speech that we have seen honed in endless GB News monologues, with the familiar cast of villains: Strasbourg jurists, French naval officers, continental people-smugglers and above all, the spineless British political class. ‘We have a liberal establishment who are terrified of debate’ claimed Farage, challenging Sunak to a head-to-head on immigration: ‘He wants six debates with Keir Starmer but none with me!’
‘In this election, the leaders are making long speeches and taking few questions’ he told me beforehand: ‘I’m going to be make a short speech and taking lots of questions.’
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