Farage: “It’s the end of Boris in the Conservative Party”

Appearing on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, the prominent Eurosceptic campaigner - who has not held elected office in more than three years - said that there was a “gap for insurgency” on the centre-right of the Conservative Party.

Discussing the prospect of a comeback for Mr Johnson, Farage said that he thought it was “the end of Boris in the Conservative Party.”

“I think all this talk of ‘oh, he’ll go for this seat or that seat’, well, hang on, he’s virtually just gifted Uxbridge to the Labour Party, there’s no way he’s going to be given a seat, if he really wants to be in politics he is going to have to be part of some sort of centre-right realignment,” he said.

Boris Johnson has held the seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip since 2015. At the last election his majority was 7,210, although some polls in the constituency suggest Labour might take the seat at an election.

The head of polling company Ipsos Mori said the by-election in Johnson’s former constituency would be “an acid test” of Keir Starmer’s leadership of Labour.

Speaking to Sky News, Ben Page said: “If they breeze through that, then all the polls showing an average 16-point lead for Labour, people will bake it in.

“If they don’t, or it’s only very narrow, then I think there will be a lot more uncertainty.”

Discussing the possibility of a split in the Conservative Party, Farage said: “It’s been talked about years ago, the referendum stopped it, now the Ukip insurgency was getting to such a level that there was real talk about this happening.”

Mr Farage then seemed to challenge Johnson’s ambitions, asking “is Johnson somebody who would want to be part of a new attempt to break the mould of British politics, or would he rather be on the after-dinner speaking circuit?”

Moving on to his most recent political party, Reform UK, Farage said how he’s “not actively involved in it at the moment, but I think the gap for another insurgency is actually bigger than it was 10 years ago.”

He speculated that new Conservative MPs in the so-called ‘red wall’ of traditionally Labour-voting areas in the North of England who won their seats in 2019 due to Boris Johnson’s popularity would lose their seats if they stood again as Conservative candidates.

In response to a question about the possibility of a new party emerging, he said: “More than before, I think there are quite a lot of Conservative MPs right now who know they are going to lose their seats, the Red Wallers know they’re going to lose their seats as it is running as Conservatives, and if there was a coming together on the centre-right, which is where the gap is, I think quite a few would.”

Speculating on how many Tory MPs might join a new party he speculated that more than 10 might be interested.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said, “I don’t know what Boris Johnson’s going to do, but I see a bigger gap for insurgency today than I did before.”