Nigel Farage opened his election campaign yesterday by telling Prime Minister Boris Johnson that his Brexit Party will contest every seat in Britain unless he ditches his EU divorce deal and agrees to an electoral alliance of Brexit-supporting parties.
The call was swiftly rejected by Johnson’s Conservative Party.
The snap election, set for December 12, is highly unpredictable so an alliance on either side of the Brexit schism could be a game changer after nearly four years of political crisis over Britain’s decision to quit the European Union.
Farage cast his demand as an offer of a non-aggression pact. “I will say this to Boris Johnson: drop the deal, drop the deal because it is not Brexit, drop the deal because as weeks go by and people discover what it is you will have signed up, they will not like it,” Farage told reporters at the launch. “This is not Brexit. He is trying to sell a second hand motor where he has polished up the bonnet but actually underneath nothing has changed and it is May’s appalling surrender treaty,” Farage said, referring to the deal former prime minister Theresa May struck which was rejected by parliament three times.
Farage has a record of exerting pressure on Conservative leaders with the threat of poaching their traditional voters.
Opinion polls show Johnson has a healthy lead over the main opposition Labour Party, but also that more than 10% of voters back the Brexit Party — enough to split the pro-Brexit vote in some seats and hand victory to Labour.
Farage said that if Johnson, who confounded his critics by striking a last-minute divorce deal with the EU two weeks ago, refused then the Brexit Party would fight for votes in every seat in Britain.
Instead he proposed that if the Conservatives did not contest about 150 seats where he thought the Brexit Party had a better chance of winning, he would stand aside in the remaining 500.
He gave Johnson until November 14 to consider the offer.
Farage, who as Ukip leader helped force May’s predecessor David Cameron to call the Brexit referendum and then played a lead role in the campaign to leave the EU, said that without a pact Britain’s exit from the bloc was in peril.
The idea of a pact was endorsed by US President Donald Trump — a friend of Farage — who called up Farage’s radio show on Thursday and said: “If you and he get together it’s, you know, unstoppable force.” But the Conservative Party, which has long said it would never cut a deal, quickly dampened any hope of a change of heart, saying that unless eurosceptics rallied behind them, Brexit could get bogged down in a parliament led by the opposition Labour Party.
“It will not get Brexit done — and it will create another gridlocked parliament that doesn’t work,” Conservative Party chairman James Cleverly said.