Party Membership: UK’s Farage Threatens Legal Action Over Kemi Badenoch’s Comments

Oluchi Chibuzor with agency report

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 reacted furiously to 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.
According to Sky News, he demanded an apology from Badenoch for the “accusations of fraud and dishonesty” that he labelled “disgraceful”, and said he was “not going to take it lying down”.
Asked by Sky News in a call with journalists if he was going to sue the Tory leader for libel, 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 would 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.
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.”

The row started after Reform UK said on Boxing Day that it officially had more members than the Conservative Party, which 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 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.”
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.
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.