Nigel Farage has threatened to take legal action against Tory leader Kemi Badenoch if she does not apologise for accusing him of publishing a “fake” ticker showing Reform UK’s membership increasing to overtake the Conservatives.
The Reform UK leader has reacted furiously to Ms Badenoch’s assertion that he was “manipulating [his] own supporters” with a ticker that is “coded to tick up automatically” after it showed the insurgent right-wing party had gone past 131,680 members – the number of eligible Conservative Party members in its leadership election in the autumn.
He is demanding an apology from Ms Badenoch for the “accusations of fraud and dishonesty” that he labelled “disgraceful”, and said he is “not going to take it lying down”.
Asked by Sky News in a call with journalists if he is going to sue the Tory leader for libel, Mr Farage said: “I’m going to take some action in the next couple of days. I’ve got to decide exactly what it is, but I’m certainly not going to take it lying down.”
“I think it’s an absolutely outrageous thing for her to have said,” he continued. “I know she’s got a very bad temper. I know she’s well known for lashing out at people, but I am not at all happy, and I’m going to take some action.”
He added that he will confirm within two days exactly what this action will be if she does not apologise for the “intemperate outburst”.
Reform showed Sky News the coding used to link the ticker to the member count within their account on the platform NationBuilder. The demonstration provided strong evidence that the ticker was not automated. Scroll down for the full analysis.
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A Tory source told Sky News: “Fake Farage is clearly rattled that his Boxing Day Publicity Stunt is facing serious questions over a fake clock and hundreds of ‘members’ seemingly joining in the middle of the night.
“Like most normal people around the UK, Kemi is enjoying Christmas with her family and looking forward to taking on the challenges of renewing the Conservative Party in the New Year.”
‘It’s a fake’
The row started after Reform UK said on Boxing Day that it officially had more members than the Conservative Party, which Mr Farage, party leader and MP for Clacton-on-Sea, hailed as a “historic moment”, describing his party as “the real opposition”.
Reform UK also shared a video of the membership tracker being projected on to the Conservative Party headquarters in London.
But Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch accused the party of issuing misleading figures: “Manipulating your own supporters at Xmas eh, Nigel?. It’s not real. It’s a fake… [the website has been] coded to tick up automatically.”
Posting on X, she added that the Tories had “gained thousands of new members since the leadership election”.
Reform UK hit back at Ms Badenoch, publishing a screenshot of an online register claiming to show “active memberships”.
Data journalist
Some tickers are indeed “coded to tick up automatically”. This is often done when the data isn’t updated regularly and so, in the meantime, the counter is made to increase at realistic intervals.
Any ticker showing government debt, unemployment or global temperatures, for instance, is almost certainly going up at a regular, pre-programmed rate.
Sky News analysed Reform UK’s ticker to see if this was the case for their membership ticker.
Specifically, we looked at a video posted by Nigel Farage on X, which shows an uninterrupted view of the counter from 4pm on Christmas Day to 2pm on Boxing Day.
The chart above shows the number of new members added every 30 minutes during that 22-hour stretch.
What we can see is that it varies a lot – very few people join overnight, and there is a big surge from around 11am on Boxing Day.
This was around the time that it was first reported Reform UK had acquired more members than the Conservatives, which provided a burst of publicity to the party.
If the ticker was simply increasing automatically, we would expect a much flatter line.
Political parties in the UK aren’t required to reveal their membership numbers, much less provide data that can be independently verified.
However, Reform UK did show Sky News its account on Nation Builder, an independent platform widely used by political parties and campaigns to track and manage their memberships.
Sky News was able to verify that the number of memberships in Reform’s NationBuilder account matched the number presented on their on-site ticker.
The Conservative Party had 131,680 members as of the November leadership contest, while Labour had 366,604 members as of March 2024.
Reform UK chair Zia Yusuf also waded into the row, claiming that people whose memberships of the Tory party had lapsed voted in the autumn leadership election that saw Ms Badenoch elected to the role.
In a call with journalists earlier, he repeated the assertion, and after putting out a call on social media for people to contact him if they had voted in the leadership election but are no longer party members, he said he has received “just so many” that he has not yet been able to verify their claims.
Ms Badenoch and the Conservative Party have been contacted for comment.
Reform UK has said it will submit to an audit of its membership numbers by one of the “big four” accountancy firms if the Tories do the same.
Farage gets personal
Speaking to journalists earlier, Mr Farage was very critical of Ms Badenoch personally, saying her claim that their membership number ticker had been faked “reflects her personality”.
He labelled her “aggressive” and “liable to lashing out”, and said he thinks she wrote her tweet out of a “slight sense of anger”.
“She’s got to fully disprove this, and she’s going to find life a lot more difficult and bitterly regret putting this out on Boxing Day afternoon,” he added.
