The Euroskeptic and anti-immigration Reform UK party has surpassed the Conservatives in terms of membership numbers, the party’s leader, Nigel Farage, has claimed. The Tories responded by accusing him of data manipulation.
According to the online counter displayed on the party’s website, it has 137,165 members. Last month, the Conservative Party declared that it had 131,680 members eligible to vote during its leadership election.
“This is an historic moment. The youngest political party in British politics has just overtaken the oldest political party in the world,” Farage wrote on X on Thursday.
“Reform UK are now the real opposition,” he added.
New Tory leader Kemi Badenoch quickly accused Farage of “manipulating” his supporters. “It’s not real. It’s a fake [clock] coded to tick up automatically. We’ve been watching the back end for days and can also see they’ve just changed the code to link to a different site as people point this out,” she wrote on X. “Farage doesn’t understand the digital age. This kind of fakery gets found out pretty quickly.”
Farage fired back, saying that he was willing to conduct an independent audit of membership numbers. “We understand you are bitter, upset and angry that we are now the second biggest party in British politics, and that the Conservative brand is dying under your leadership,” he wrote in a reply to Badenoch.
“It’s an open secret at CCHQ that your membership numbers are fake,” Farage wrote, referring to the Conservative Party’s main office.
Farage rose to prominence as one of the leaders of the successful campaign for the UK to leave the European Union. In 2018, he founded the Brexit Party, which was eventually renamed to Reform UK.
The Conservative Party’s public image has been damaged by a string of scandals and frequent internal fighting, with the country having four Tory prime ministers between 2016 and 2024.
The Tories suffered a historic defeat in the July parliamentary election, losing power to the Labour Party. Badenoch was elected party leader last month, replacing Rishi Sunak.