Kemi accuses Farage of fiddling membership figures

It wouldn’t be Christmas without a family feud. Reform has spent this Boxing Day trumpeting its membership figures, which, it says, now outnumber the Conservatives. Nigel Farage’s party projected a ‘countdown clock’ onto CCHQ last night to mark the moment when Reform got its 131,670th member – thus beating the number who voted in the last Tory leadership contest. Talk about cheeky eh?

But Kemi Badenoch is clearly not prepared to take Reform’s claims at face value. Five hours after Farage declared that the ‘youngest political party in British politics has just overtaken the oldest political party in the world’, the Tory leader took to Twitter/X to fire back a 300-word response. In a five tweet-thread, Badenoch accused Farage of ‘manipulating your own supporters’. She suggested that Reform’s ‘countdown timer’ was nothing of the sort: ‘It’s not real. 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.