Kemi Badenoch has accused Nigel Farage of faking a surge in Reform members after the party claimed to have surpassed the Conservatives for the first time.
Reform’s online membership tracker put its membership number 131,712 at around 11.30am on Thursday, beating the last known Tory total of 131,680.
But Mrs Badenoch claimed it was a “fake” tally “coded to tick up automatically”.
Responding to a celebratory post from Mr Farage on X, she wrote: “Manipulating your own supporters at Xmas eh, Nigel?
“It’s not real. It’s a fake [counter] 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.
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“Farage doesn’t understand the digital age. This kind of fakery gets found out pretty quickly, although not before many are fooled.”
On Thursday, speaking from a Boxing Day hunt in Kent, Mr Farage held up the membership count and said: “This is a historic moment. The youngest political party in British politics has just overtaken the oldest political party in the world. Reform UK are now the real opposition.”
Credit: Heathcliff O’Malley
But in a five-part post on X, Mrs Badenoch accused Mr Farage’s party of bombarding the British public with “endless lies, smoke and mirrors” in order to manipulate “good people” who are “crying out for hope”.
She claimed she knew “for certain” that the Reform did not have more supporters than the Tories because her party had gained “thousands of new members” since she took over as leader.
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She wrote: “Like many of you, I am sick of the endless lies, smoke and mirrors, stuff and nonsense politics. For a party that pretends to hate the establishment so much, they are copying and pasting the fake Tony Blair/ [Alastair] Campbell’s spin book. Why does it matter…?
“Because millions of good people in our country are crying out for hope…some of them think Reform are the answer. But as we saw today, Reform will let them down. They’ll say anything for cheap media hits because they have no plan underneath. Just rage against the machine.
“The Conservative Party is under new leadership and 2025 is going to be about hard, unvarnished truths. Many of those truths will be difficult for my party and for the country.
“We’re in opposition because previous governments made mistake[s]. We have to do things differently.
“We won’t fix what has gone wrong over the last 30 years with rage, but with courage. Telling the truth takes bravery.
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“And on a final note… How do I know for certain the Reform announcement is not true? Because the Conservative Party has gained thousands of new members since the leadership election. But we don’t shout about it…we are building quietly and steadily on principles and values, not gimmicks. The road ahead is long and difficult. But our first mission is to win the trust of the British people – you don’t do that by manipulating them at Christmas.”
Reform membership has surged thanks to an influx of younger members attracted by a cheaper fee of £10 for those aged 25 and under. At the weekend, Mr Farage announced that 1,000 young people had joined the party in less than 48 hours.
The Conservatives do not regularly publish their membership numbers. The latest figure was released in November, when members elected Mrs Badenoch as leader.
To mark the moment, Reform projected the number onto Conservative Campaign Headquarters in the middle of the night.
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Sharing a photo of the stunt on X, formerly Twitter, the party wrote: “Reform UK have just smashed through the Conservative membership number.
“Santa paid a late visit to CCHQ last night to wish @KemiBadenoch a Merry Christmas.”
Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, predicted that the party’s membership lead over the Tories would translate into a boost in the polls.
He told The Telegraph: “Everybody who wrote us off, we’re just warming up. Roll forward a year, we’ll not only be bigger than the Tories in membership, we’ll be the biggest party in polling terms.
“The sense of frustration and sadness at the state of the country, the state of the economy, people getting poorer, nothing working, and that pain of socialism being felt by everybody, I just think that people realise that Britain needs Reform.
“It is just that simple statement that Britain’s youngest political party has now overtaken the oldest political party. We have got the momentum. The Tories look stale and turgid. In a sense, the crisis for them is existential. No one wants them.”
Zia Yusuf, the Reform chairman, said: “History has been made today, as the centuries-long stranglehold on the centre-right of British politics by the Tories has finally been broken. Nigel Farage will be the next Prime Minister, and will return Britain to greatness.”
The boost for Reform will pile further pressure on Mrs Badenoch to reinvigorate support for the Tories. Since taking over from Rishi Sunak in October, she has been accused by some of moving too slowly, with a lack of major policies on key issues such as immigration.
It is feared in Tory circles that this has left a void to be filled by Reform, with Mr Farage appealing to those who are disenfranchised by mainstream politics.
Meanwhile, Labour Party membership has dropped to its lowest level in a decade. The party lost 37,000 members last year, bringing its total membership at the end of 2023 to 370,450, according to the party’s official accounts.
The figure marked a new low for Labour membership under Sir Keir Starmer, compared to 532,000 members recorded in 2019 when Jeremy Corbyn was leader.
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