Nigel Farage’s announcement that he will lead Reform UK into the upcoming general election is Rishi Sunak’s “worst nightmare” come true, said The Times‘s political sketchwriter Tom Peck.
At an “emergency general election announcement” press conference in London yesterday, Richard Tice – Reform’s leader since 2021 – revealed that he would be handing the reins to Farage, who will also be running as the party’s candidate in Clacton.
A buoyant Farage then took to the stage, “popping out of the darkness like a clockwork Jack the Ripper”, for a bullish victory speech in which he claimed the Conservatives were on “the verge of total collapse”, and laid down the welcome mat to Tory defectors.
It was another “potentially damaging blow” for the Conservative Party’s “faltering” general election campaign, said The Guardian. Not only does Farage’s entry into the election “pose an immediate threat” to the Tory candidate in Clacton, it may also “energise his party’s national campaign, splitting the right-wing vote in other constituencies”.
Even more than that, Farage’s decision to stand could “both reset and re-align the Conservative Party”, said the BBC‘s political correspondent Ione Wells. By “worrying Conservatives afraid of losing their seats”, Reform UK will now be able to “influence Conservative policy” without even holding any seats.
Farage has never won a parliamentary seat despite trying seven times, but Clacton is the “perfect place” for him to stand, said The Independent. The Essex seaside town was the constituency of the only UKIP MP ever to make it to the House of Commons, Douglas Carswell, who held the seat until 2017.
The town’s current Tory MP, former sitcom actor Giles Watling, was elected for the second time in 2019 with a comfortable 24,000 majority that now looks anything but safe. Or, as Farage’s campaign manager, Peter Harris, put it: “Giles Watling starred in ‘Bread’, but now he is toast.”
Regardless of whether the eighth time will prove to be the lucky one for Farage’s parliamentary ambitions, his dramatic re-entry into British politics is “a moment that will haunt Rishi Sunak for four more weeks”, said Peck, “and after that, one suspects, the rest of his life”.