Farage to fight lockdown

London: Nigel Farage, the British politician who helped force a Brexit referendum and successfully campaigned to leave the European

Union, will fight Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Covid19 lockdown by recasting his small Brexit Party as Reform UK.

Farage said Johnson had terrified the United Kingdom into submission over Covid19 and squandered vast amounts of taxpayers’ money while holding out hopes of a ‘‘miraculous’’ vaccine.

‘‘The single most pressing issue is the Government’s woeful response to coronavirus,’’ Farage and Brexit Party chairman Richard Tice said in a joint article in The Daily Telegraph.

‘‘Ministers have lost touch with a nation divided between the terrified and the furious. The debate over how to respond to Covid is becoming even more toxic than that over Brexit.’’

Johnson has ordered England back into a national lockdown from Thursday after the UK passed the milestone of one million Covid19 cases and a second wave of infections threatened to overwhelm the health service.