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Nigel Farage has said he is considering taking legal action against Kemi Badenoch after he demanded an apology from the Conservative Party leader for forging his Reform UK membership number.
“I’m not going to take it lying down. What she said was completely outrageous,” Mr Farage said on Friday. “I am calling on Kemi Badenoch to immediately apologize for this disrespectful outburst.”
“We’re going to take some action in the next few days,” he said on a Zoom call with reporters, adding that he had not yet decided exactly what action he would take.
Reform Party Chairman Zia Yusuf on Friday showed the Financial Times the codes and underlying data supporting the party’s membership numbers, providing strong evidence that the tally is accurate.
The Reform leader’s comments came after Mr Farage claimed his party had more members than the Conservatives for the first time, in response to Mr Badenoch’s accusations that Reform had produced “fake” figures on Thursday. Served.
Badenoch responded in a post to X, claiming that Reform’s counters are “coded to operate automatically.”
“We’ve been monitoring the backend for days, and we also noticed that people were pointing it out and changing the code to link to another site,” she added.
This is the first time Mr Badenoch has publicly attacked Mr Farage and Mr Reform, seen as one of the biggest threats to the Conservative Party as it rebuilds after its worst-ever election defeat in July.
Yusuf Posted Thursday’s X poll asked: “Should Nigel Farage sue Kemi Badenoch for defamation?”
Mr Farage said there was evidence that the Conservative Party’s own membership numbers were false and included defections and deaths, and he reiterated his call for the Conservatives to submit their membership numbers to an external audit. I asked for it.
The Reform leader said he would be happy to undergo an annual audit of party membership, whether or not the Conservative Party agrees to do the same.
Mr Farage said Mr Badenoch had “made a terrible mistake. She is completely, completely wrong about us”. “Her life will become even more difficult and she will deeply regret announcing this on Boxing Day afternoon.”
The scandal highlighted the fact that political parties in the UK are not required to publish their membership numbers, and there is no external body responsible for auditing or verifying the numbers they publish.
Most political parties publish tallies in their annual accounts or on their websites, but the Conservative Party does not.
The party had nearly 142,500 members on Friday, compared with 131,680 members for the Conservatives at last month’s leadership election, according to the Reform Party’s online membership tracker.
The FT was shown code that calculates and displays the Reform Party’s online tallies, as well as a dashboard created by NationBuilder, a third-party application used by the party to manage membership and donations.
This demonstration provided strong evidence that the online counter actually corresponds to the number of members signing up to the reform.
Expanding party membership is a top priority for reforms aimed at transforming an emerging party into a reliable party.
A successful ground campaign ahead of next May’s local elections will require reformers to not only run as councilors in hundreds of seats, but also to deploy thousands of supporters to rally voters and collect data. will be required.
Mr Farage said on Friday that he believed the “vast majority” of people joining Reform Party “have never belonged to a political party in their life”.
The Liberal Democratic Party and the Green Party publish their membership numbers on their websites. The Liberal Democrats claim they have “more than 90,000 members” while the Green Party says they have “more than 59,000” members.
The Labor Party announced that it had approximately 370,000 members as of March this year.
The Conservative Party did not respond to requests for comment.
