Kemi Badenoch is unlikely to apologise for claiming that Reform UK’s membership figures were “fake”, shadow home secretary Chris Philp has said.
The Conservative leader sparred with Nigel Farage last month when the Reform leader said his party now had more members than the Tories and was “the real opposition” to Labour.
At the time, a digital counter on the party’s website said the party had 131,680 members – the amount the Conservative Party declared before its leadership election in the autumn – just before midday on Boxing Day.
The number on its website now stands at more than 173,000.
Ms Badenoch, who replaced Rishi Sunak as Tory leader last November, immediately disputed the figures last month, posting on X: “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.”
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Reform has subsequently threatened to take legal against Ms Badenoch if she does not apologise.
Sky News has since verified that the figures published by Reform are correct.
Asked whether she would apologise in light of the discovery, Mr Philp told Sunday Morning with Trevor Philips: “I don’t think so. She also had information that she based her comments on.”
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He added: “Let me let me just be clear about some of the most important facts.
“Since the general election, there have been, I think, 175 council by-elections – we have won seven times more of those than Reform. We’ve won about 50. They’ve only won I think seven. We’re winning seats from Labour who are losing seats to us.”
Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Reform, later told Sunday Morning with Trevor Philips his party was unlikely to pursue legal action against Ms Badenoch.
“The thing about a legal action is you have to prove harm,” he explained.
“The truth is that Kemi Badenoch has helped us, so we’re sort of thanking her.”
He added: “But what we’d like is an apology – I think Chris Philp has just confirmed we’re not going to get an apology.”
He said that in absence of an apology, “we’re going to instead make her constituency a key target seat for Reform at the next general election”.
“We think that might focus the mind of the leader of the opposition, actually, on what really matters,” he added.
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Mr Philp was also questioned about words used by Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary who lost the Tory leadership to Ms Badenoch.
Mr Jenrick posted on X: “To sustain order in a multicultural Britain, the state considered it necessary to apply the law selectively.
“For decades the most appalling crimes from predominantly British Pakistani men were legalised and actively covered up to prevent disorder.”
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Asked whether he believed that the previous Tory government “covered up scandals”, Mr Philp said: “I don’t think the government covered up the scandal, but I think there were individual local authorities who did.
“They were mostly, by the way, Labour-controlled local authorities in places like Oldham.
“And we’ve seen examples of individual police forces not investigating very serious reports of criminal activity, the gang rape of young girls, because they were worried about community tensions.
“All of that was completely wrong and morally wrong, morally bankrupt.”
Pressed on whether he would use the same language as Mr Jenrick – who claimed the grooming scandal happened because Britain had a policy of “importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures” – Mr Philp replied: “He will choose his words. I’ll choose mine. I haven’t used those words.”
