Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch accused each other’s party of having fake membership numbers on Thursday after Reform UK claimed it had more members than the Conservatives for the first time.
Reform said it had more than 135,000 members on Thursday, according to the party’s live online tally, surpassing the 131,860 Tory members at the time Badenoch was elected as leader of the opposition last month.
“This is a big, historic moment,” Farage said on Thursday. “The youngest political party in British politics has just overtaken the oldest political party in the world. Reform UK are now the real opposition.”
But Tory leader Badenoch claimed the Reform numbers were “not real” and that the online tally was “fake” and “coded to tick up automatically”.