One donor said the Reform leader described a Tory-Reform pact as “inevitable”
Nigel Farage has told donors he expects to do a deal between his party and the Tories before the next general election.
One donor told the Financial Times that either a deal or a merger with the Tories would be done on Farage’s terms, in part because he felt betrayed after the pact he tried to make with the Tories at the 2019 election.
One of the individuals who spoke to the FT said that Farage had described a pact or merger as “inevitable” but said it would take some time because he was wary of making a deal.
Farage has dismissed the descriptions of the conversations the FT had had with donors, and said: “sometimes people hear what they want to”.
He added that he would “never do a deal” with a party he didn’t trust.
“No deals, just a reverse takeover,” he added. Referring to the opinion polls, Farage also said that the Tories won’t be a national party after next May.
The latest YouGov poll puts the Tories and Labour neck and neck on 19% of the vote, with Reform on 26%.
In September 2019, Farage tried to make an election pact with the Tories. The Brexit Party took out ads in the Sunday Telegraph and Farage wrote an op-ed, offering a deal.
Farage said his party would stand aside in seats in which they could split the Leave vote, in return for the Conservatives not contesting traditional Labour Party seats in the north of England, the Midlands and Wales. The then prime minister Boris Johnson rejected the deal.
On 11 November, Farage said that his party would not stand in any of the 317 seats won by the Conservatives at the last election in order to not split the Leave vote. Conversations between the Brexit Party and the European Research group, the pro-Brexit Conservative group reportedly led to this decision.
Johnson denies making an election deal with Farage in 2019, but the Reform leader allegedly feels “betrayed” that the pact did not hold.
A Tory spokesman said that no deals or pacts will be considered under Kemi Badenoch’s leadership.
Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick told LBC there would be no election pact. He stated, “We’re two distinct political parties and my leader, Kemi Badenoch and indeed Nigel Farage, have both been very clear that there’s not going to be a pact or a deal.”
However, in a leaked recording released in April, Jenrick said he didn’t want the “nightmare scenario” of Labour winning the next election due to Tory-Reform disunity.
In the speech to the UCL Conservative Association in March, he vowed to “bring this coalition together” to avoid Conservatives and Reform UK fighting each other for votes.
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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