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Nigel Farage confirms he won't sue Kemi Badenoch over membership row - but reveals how he plans to hit back
7 January 2025, 10:38
Nigel Farage has revealed how he plans to hit back at Kemi Badenoch following their clash over membership figures.
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Speaking to LBC's Nick Ferrari at Breakfast, Mr Farage compared Ms Badenoch's claims over Reform membership to a "whacky conspiracy theory".
She accused the Reform leader of "manipulating" his own supporters after using a membership counter "coded to tick up automatically".
It came as the party celebrated having more members than the Conservatives.
"It was a very odd, sort of whacky, conspiracy theory that she came up with at five o'clock on Boxing Day," Mr Farage told Nick.
"Whether she’d had a drink or not I have no idea, but somehow our membership ticker was pre-programmed."
Nigel Farage takes your calls with Nick Ferrari | Watch in full
He went on to say: "She accused me of being a fraudster basically and I don’t like that.
"You can call me what the hell you like, people do regularly, but I’ve always been straight and honest where money is concerned."
Revealing how he planned to respond to the allegations, Mr Farage said: "I'm not going to sue over it because I do believe in free speech, but I’m offended by it.
"I asked for an apology, one wasn’t given, so I’m going to go to her constituency on the 31st of this month.
"I’m going to hold a big event for all Reform members living in her constituency – there are 417 of them from when I last checked – bet it’s more than she’s got.
"There’s another 800 supporters living in the constituency and I'll do a big joint photo and say 'these are our fake members and we're coming for you at the next election'."
Manipulating your own supporters at Xmas eh, Nigel?
— Kemi Badenoch (@KemiBadenoch) December 26, 2024
It’s not real. It’s a fake ⏰ 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.
Farage doesn’t… https://t.co/2tAsszfHsG
At the time, Mr Farage accused Ms Badenoch of being "bitter".
"Kemi says I don’t understand the digital age," he posted on X.
"I have 5.4m followers and she has 320k.
"We understand you are bitter, upset and angry that we are now the second biggest party in British politics, and that the Conservative brand is dying under your leadership.
"However, this not an excuse to accuse us of committing fraud.
"We will gladly invite one of the Big 4 firms in to audit our membership numbers as long as you do the same."
Reform UK's deputy leader, Richard Tice, told LBC her reaction was "hysterical" and that she will need to eventually apologise.
"It's just deeply, deeply embarrassing for someone who repeatedly has claimed to be an engineer," he said.
"Of course we haven't fiddled the numbers, of course those numbers are bang-on accurate, she's effectively accused Nigel and us at Reform of fraud.
"I mean it's a pretty serious allegation and it shows her and her colleagues at the Conservative party don't understand technology, that number is pulled via a website, via our server directly from our nation builder database and is the accurate number."
