Nigel Farage: Brexiteer to be leader of Reform UK and will stand for election in dramatic U-turn

Nigel Farage is to stand for Reform UK in the general election and also become the party’s new leader.

The arch Brexiteer initially said he would not stand as the snap poll had been called at too late notice, and he wanted to help Donald Trump with his presidential bid. On the BBC’s Question Time programme last week, Farage was bombarded with questions about why he wasn’t standing, with Piers Morgan saying the Brexiteer had “bottled it”.

However, Farage announced today, at a central London location, that he has changed his mind and will stand for Parliament in Clacton in the general election on 4 July, saying he “changed his mind”, which is “not always a sign of weakness, it can be a sign of strength”.

He said: “I had people coming up to me in the street saying ‘Nigel why aren’t you standing?’” Adding: “I felt I was letting them down .. I cannot let down these millions of people.” Farage called for a “political revolt against the political status quo”, adding: “It doesn’t work. Nothing in this country works any more.” He replaces Richard Tice as party leader, who becomes Reform UK’s chairman.

Farage said would lose on 4 July and predicted that Reform would become the real opposition over the next five years. He said: “They [the Conservatives] are split down the middle on policy, and frankly, right now they don’t stand for a damn thing. So our aim in this election is to get many, many millions of votes. And I’m talking far more votes than Ukip can got back in 2015.”

He continued: “When people start to realise in the red wall, with Reform second to Labour, when they start to realise that actually in those seats, it’s a Conservative vote that’s a vote for Labour, it’s a Conservative vote that is a wasted vote, then I think we might just surprise everybody.” He added: “We are appealing to Conservative voters, we are appealing to Labour voters.” This will be Farage’s eighth attempt to become an MP, with all seven previous candidacies being unsuccessful. It is also bad news for Rishi Sunak, as Farage’s candidacy is expected to give Reform a boost in the polls. Clacton previously elected a Ukip MP in 2015, after Douglas Carswell had defected from the Tories. However, the Conservatives won the seat in 2019 by 24,702 votes after Farage stood down his Brexit Party candidates.

In January, NationalWorld reported that Farage was preparing to return at the time of most impact. He’s certainly achieved that.

Who is Nigel Farage?

Farage is a former elected politician, representing South East England in the European Parliament from 1999 to 2016. He led the UK Independence Party (Ukip) from 2006 until 2009, and again from 2010 to 2016. Farage led Ukip in the 2009 European elections, achieving the second-highest share of the UK popular vote, beaten only by the Conservatives.

In 2009, he briefly stepped away from leading the party so he could contest then Speaker of the House John Bercow’s seat. He came third in the 2010 General Election for the Buckingham seat. Overall Farage has contested seven Westminster elections, but has never been elected as an MP.

Upon stepping down as Ukip leader in 2016, he remained an MEP and member of the party. In 2018, he left the party and launched the Brexit Party. He stood candidates down in the 2019 election, to allow Boris Johnson to win a huge majority with the message “get Brexit done”. That party has since turned into Reform UK and Farage is currently the party’s honorary president.

Aside from British politics, he also commentated on the US presidential campaign for Fox News in 2020, a channel which widely supported Republican candidate Donald Trump.

He is thought to have right-wing views with regards to immigration, environment and gun control. He has made remarks such as supporting Muslim immigrants who integrate to British society, but is against those who are "coming here to take us over". He also controversially claimed Brexit had been won "without a single bullet being fired" just over a week after the murder of MP Jo Cox by a right-wing extremist.

What happened with Nigel Farage and Brexit?

Farage is seen as the Godfather of Brexit. He left the Conservative Party in 1992 after the Maastricht Treaty, which set in place more EU integration, and set up Ukip - the original anti-EU party. He was a vocal critic of the Euro, and one of the most prominent Eurosceptic voices in the UK.

In 2009, Ukip won the second highest vote share at the European elections, and in 2014 the party won the most seats - heaping pressure on Prime Minister David Cameron to call a referendum. Farage helped create the narrative the immigration was to blame for Britain's woes, after the 2008 banking crisis while Cameron was pushing the UK through austerity.

In 2015, Cameron promised a referendum if the Conservatives won the general election - and the party won an outright majority against the odds. While Farage was side-lined by the official leave campaign - Vote Leave - he still played a prominent role in the referendum campaign, infamously posing next to a photo of Syrian refugees with the caption 'Breaking Point'. Despite Farage running a parallel campaign alongside Vote Leave, it's still unlikely the referendum would have ever been called without him.

Ralph Blackburn is NationalWorld’s politics editor based in Westminster, where he gets special access to Parliament, MPs and government briefings. If you liked this article you can follow Ralph on X (Twitter) here and sign up to his free weekly newsletter Politics Uncovered, which brings you the latest analysis and gossip from Westminster every Sunday morning.