JOHNSON TOLD TO DROP BREXIT DEAL OR ELSE.
LONDON • Hardline Brexit advocate Nigel Farage opened his U.K. election campaign on Friday by telling Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson that his Brexit Party will contest every seat unless Johnson drops his EU divorce deal and agrees to an election pact. The call was swiftly rejected by Johnson.
The snap election, set for Dec. 12, is highly unpredictable so an alliance on either side of the Brexit schism could be a game changer after nearly four years of political crisis over Britain’s decision to quit the EU.
Farage cast his proposal as a non-aggression pact.
“I will say this to Boris Johnson: drop the deal because it is not Brexit, drop the deal because, as weeks go by and people discover what it is you will have signed up, they will not like it,” he told reporters at the launch. “This is not Brexit.”
“He is trying to sell a second-hand motor where he has polished up the bonnet but actually, underneath, nothing has changed, and it is Mrs. May’s appalling surrender treaty,” Farage added. Johnson predecessor May agreed to a less radical divorce with the EU, which parliament rejected three times.
Farage has shown in the past that he can unnerve Conservative leaders with the threat of poaching voters.
Opinion polls give Johnson a healthy lead over the main opposition Labour Party, but also suggest that more than 10 per cent of voters back the Brexit Party — enough to split the pro-brexit vote in some seats and hand victory to Labour.
Farage said that if Johnson rejected his proposal, the Brexit Party would fight for votes in every seat.
Instead he proposed to stand aside in around 500 seats in return for the Conservatives giving his party a clear run in about 150 seats where he thought the Brexit Party had a better chance of winning. He gave Johnson until Nov. 14 to consider.
As leader of the UKIP party, Farage helped force May’s predecessor David Cameron to call the Brexit referendum in 2016, and then played a leading role in the campaign to leave the EU.
The idea of a pact was endorsed by U.S. President Donald Trump — a friend of Farage. Johnson ruled out dropping his Brexit deal.
“What we’ve got is a fantastic deal that nobody thought we could get,” he told ITV television. “We can put that deal through.”
Farage proposes a type of “no-deal” departure, with no arrangements to temper the economic shock, that many businesses and banks say is their nightmare scenario.