You might have forgotten about Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch’s Twixmas Twitter spat, but the Reform UK leader certainly hasn’t. Mr S would remind readers that, during the Christmas period, a fight on the right broke out between the two party readers after Reform announced it had officially overtaken the Conservatives’ membership total – which led to a rather unedifying back and forth. Talk about a lack of festive spirit, eh?
On Christmas, the Farage-led party projected a ‘countdown clock’ onto CCHQ to mark the moment when Reform got its 131,670th member – thus overtaking the Tories. While the up and coming party took to social media to celebrate the achievement, their political rivals were not quite as chipper. Badenoch was quick to accuse Farage of ‘manipulating your own supporters’, before claiming the figures were ‘not real’. To evidence her remark, she added:
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.
It’s quite the claim. Nige didn’t take long to hit back at the Conservative party leader, demanding on 27 December: ‘I am asking Kemi Badenoch to apologise immediately for this intemperate outburst.’ More than that, as Katy Balls wrote at the time, The Spectator was even shown the code on the front end of Reform’s online tally, the backend code, and how that code links to the third-party donation site built by Nationbuilder – and the demonstration appeared to provide evidence that the online tally did correspond to members that had signed up to Reform.
And now Farage has escalated the row further. Ahead of his party’s regional conference in Leicester this afternoon, the Reform leader has taken to Twitter to take another pop at the Tory leader:
An apology has not been forthcoming from Kemi Badenoch regarding her crazy conspiracy theories about Reform UK. I will be giving my full response at a sold out conference tonight in Leicester.
In another nod to his new friend Musk, Farage has also promised all those interested but unable to attend that the event will be broadcast live on Twitter from 7pm this evening. Stay tuned…
An apology has not been forthcoming from @KemiBadenoch regarding her crazy conspiracy theories about Reform UK.
— Nigel Farage MP (@Nigel_Farage) January 3, 2025
I will be giving my full response at a sold out conference tonight in Leicester.
The event will be LIVE on X from 7pm.
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