A Reform UK candidate has revealed Nigel Farage’s simple yet mysterious answer to the question of whether he would return to frontline politics.
Alan Cook, the party’s candidate in the outer London seat of Bromley, has said “Everyone wants Nigel to come back and have a greater role in the party”.
However Mr Farage reportedly always gives the same three-word answer when asked the question: “Timing is everything.”
Mr Cook added: “When he does come back, because I’m pretty sure he will, there’s going to be a massive rise in interest certainly from the media, and you don’t want that to drop down if the election is a year later”.
“He will come back at a set time, and then there will be a massive media furore that will carry through to the election.”
The cryptic response leaves the gate wide open to an astonishing return to the political battleground, a move that could terrify the Conservatives.
Yesterday Tory Party deputy chairman Lee Anderson warned that Mr Farage and Reform UK are a bigger threat to the Tories and the country than Labour.
He told GB News that while he has “a lot of time for Nigel”, “They are a threat, a bigger threat to the country at the moment I think than the Labour Party”.
Mr Anderson warned that Reform UK picking off Tory MPs at the next election as they have promised to do would lead to even more Labour MPs who will take the UK back into Europe.
The revelation that Mr Farage is focusing on a well-timed return to frontline politics comes just hours ahead of a much-anticipated Reform UK press conference in Westminster.
While the Richard Tice speech is being hyped up as a new focus by the party on going after Labour voters as well as Tory voters, speculation still swirls around whether Mr Farage will be present at the announcement.
Mr Tice will argue that the Labour Party “will bankrupt Britain with a catastrophic cocktail of cultural and economic poison”, pointing not only to Sir Keir’s tax and spend policies, but warning of a woke onslaught under a Labour Government.
If Mr Farage is not unveiled in a new role this morning, Reform UK is also holding a Spring Conference in the last week of February, which could be the last big opportunity for him to return to frontline politics ahead of a rumoured May election.
Seven in 10 Conservative Party members want Mr Farage to rejoin his former party, which he left in the 90s over what he saw as John Major’s EU sellout by signing the Maastricht Treaty.
However Mr Cook added that while Mr Farage had a fun time at the Tories’ Manchester conference last year, “he had absolutely no intention of going back to the Tory Party”.
Despite little media coverage, Reform UK is now beginning to outpoll the LibDems and get double digits in the polls.
Polling expert Sir John Curtice has observed that Reform is already a headache for Rishi Sunak.
He told the BBC’s World At One: “If you actually look at the polls that were done in December and examine how people who voted for the Conservatives in 2019, what they now say they will do, for every one voter who now says they will vote for Labour, there is another one voter who now says they will vote for Reform”.
“In other words, the Conservatives are losing votes as heavily to Reform as they are to Labour.”
