Nigel Farage has escalated his spat with Kemi Badenoch, threatening to directly target her North West Essex constituency in the next general election.
After the Tory leader accused her Reform UK rival of lying about the party’s membership figures, Mr Farage responded by promising to plough time and money into ousting her from the seat.
The Reform UK leader said the move was payback after she was “so rude” and “unpleasant” over the issue.
Reform UK published a membership ticker on its website, along with a “join us” link.
On Boxing Day, Ms Badenoch wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that the figure was “a fake, coded to tick up automatically”.
Several media outlets including The Spectator and Financial Times reported having been shown the code for calculating and displaying the party’s online tally, which they found appeared to function properly.
During the Reform UK East of England Conference in Chelmsford, Essex, on Saturday, Mr Farage paused midway through his speech to hold up a mobile phone, which seemingly showed the party’s membership tally pass 170,000.
Addressing Conservative leader Mrs Badenoch while looking down a camera lens, Mr Farage said: “Kemi, are you watching on the livestream?”
The conference was held at Chelmsford City Racecourse, which is part of Mrs Badenoch’s North West Essex constituency which she won in July with a 2,610 majority over Labour.
Earlier in his speech, Mr Farage described Mrs Badenoch as a “ranting conspiracy theorist” and said: “Kemi, because you’ve been so rude, so unpleasant, the accusations you’ve made against me are so wrong, I promise you, we as a party now will put time, money, resource (and) this will become a target seat for us at the next general election.”
The MP for Clacton said 900,000 people had watched the previous party conference in Leicester via livestreams on Friday, where Mr Farage had promised “the gloves are off” in the next election.
Reform UK chairman Zia Yusuf told supporters on Saturday that more than 46,000 people joined the party in the last two weeks of December, and asked them to give a “big Reform round of applause” to the Tory leader.
Mr Yusuf said Reform’s membership numbers had exploded since her “ill-advised outburst” and that he was “very grateful” as the party had become “the talk not just of the UK but of the western world”.
Mr Farage also said he was inviting all Reform UK members and supporters in North West Essex to a big venue to meet him on January 31 and take a photo together to show the opposition leader that the members are real.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer also faces challenges from Mr Farage, according to a new poll.
According to a seat-by-seat projection by Stonehaven, published in The i paper, Reform would win 120 Commons seats at the next election, while Labour would have 278 MPs left, down from 411 at the 2024 election.
But North West Essex would remain under Conservative control, according to the model.
Lee Anderson, also speaking at the conference, instead took aim at Cabinet members as he described Sir Keir as “never here Keir”.
He told party members: “This Labour Government are doing the impossible – they’re making things worse. Who knew?
“But look who we’ve got. We’ve got free gear Keir, or never here Keir. We’ve got Rachel from accounts. We’ve got the no-brainer Angela Rayner.”
Party members applauded when Mr Anderson then mentioned business leader Elon Musk, who has publicly expressed support for Reform UK in recent weeks, and US President-elect Donald Trump.
