Badenoch and Farage clash over Reform membership numbers

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has accused Nigel Farage of “fakery” over Reform UK membership numbers, after his party claimed they had surpassed the Tories in signed-up members.

Badenoch said Reform’s counter was “coded to tick up automatically”, but Farage said he would “gladly invite” a firm to “audit our membership numbers” as long as the Conservatives do the same.

The row comes after a digital counter on the Reform website showed a membership tally before lunchtime on Boxing Day ticking past the 131,680 figure declared by the Conservative Party during its leadership election earlier this year.

When the figure was announced, Farage said it was an “historic moment”.

However in a thread on X later on Thursday, Badenoch said it was “a fake” and used a clock emoji to say that it was “coded to tick up automatically”.

She added “we’ve been watching the back end” of the counter “for days”.

Badenoch said: “Farage doesn’t understand the digital age. This kind of fakery gets found out pretty quickly, although not before many are fooled.”

There were 131,680 Conservative members eligible to vote during the party’s leadership election to replace Rishi Sunak in the autumn, but Badenoch claimed in her thread that “the Conservative Party has gained thousands of new members since the leadership election”.

In response to the thread, Farage said that the “Conservative brand is dying” under Badenoch’s leadership, and added: “We will gladly invite one of the Big 4 firms in to audit our membership numbers as long as you do the same.”

The official Reform X account also posted an image that it said included a “screenshot of our internal membership numbers”, which appeared to show figures at more than 134,000.

In a post on X on Thursday evening, Farage said that “over 5,000 people have joined Reform today”.

A research briefing published by the House of Commons Library in 2022 said comparing party membership numbers can be “difficult”, saying there is not a uniformly recognised definition of membership, or an established method to monitor it.

Reform was set up as a limited company and in September Farage announced that he would change the ownership structure so that it would be owned by members.

“I no longer need to control this party,” he said at the time.

In a video posted on X, he said: “We will change the structure of the party from one limited by shares to a company limited by guarantee, and that means it’s the members of Reform that will own this party.”