NICE ONE, NIGEL... BUT IT’S STILL NOT ENOUGH
Farage won’t fight Tory seats after our front page plea. Now what about the Labour ones?
Nigel Farage was facing intense pressure last night to withdraw his candidates from labour-held seats targeted by the Tories.
The Brexit Party leader yesterday scrapped plans to contest the 317 constituencies won by the Conservatives in 2017.
But polling experts said the move might still not be enough to hand the Tories a majority at next month’s election. Brexiteers said this meant that Mr Farage should stand aside in key Labour constituencies as well.
His partial U-turn yesterday came two days after the Daily Mail made a front-page appeal for his party to give
the Conservatives a free run. Thousands of our readers wrote to his candidates over the weekend urging them not to split the Leave vote.
At his campaign launch in Hartlepool yesterday, the Brexit Party leader bowed to pressure and announced he would concentrate instead on around 300 seats currently held by opposition parties. The Tories need to snatch seats from Jeremy Corbyn in his party’s Leave-voting heartlands for Mr Johnson to get the majority he needs to deliver Brexit.
Asked if he would pull out further candidates where the Tories are the clear challengers to Labour, Mr Farage said: ‘I have not even considered that at this moment in time.’
Pushed again, he said: ‘We are fighting 300 seats – that is all I am going to say.’
Asked if he might ‘backpedal’ and tacitly back Tory candidates in some marginal seats, he added: ‘I have just taken 48 hours to make this decision – allow this one to settle first.’
Last week he had threatened to stand candidates in 600 seats unless Mr Johnson ditched his Brexit deal and promised to leave the EU without an agreement with Brussels.
But after the Conservatives rejected his offer of a ‘Leave alliance’ he came under intense pressure from within his own party to compromise – with at least 20 of his candidates withdrawing. Mr Farage said he had taken the ‘difside decision’ not to run against the Tories in seats they won in 2017 amid fears it could have let in significant numbers of Liberal Democrats, opening up the prospect of a hung parliament and a second referendum.
Addressing supporters at a rally in Hartlepool, Mr Farage said: ‘ This announcement prevents a second referendum from happening. And that to me, I think right now, is the single most important thing in our country.
‘So in a sense we now have a Leave alliance, it’s just that we’ve done it unilaterally.
‘We’ve decided ourselves that we absolutely have to put country before party and take the fight to Labour.’
Mr Farage said he still believed the withdrawal agreement Boris Johnson negotiated with Brussels would not deliver ‘the Brexit we voted for’ in the 2016 referendum. But he said he had been encouraged by statements from the Prime Minister at the weekend.
Mr Johnson had offered his rival an olive branch on Sunday evening by ruling out an extension of the Brexit transition period beyond the end of next year. He also stressed that he would pursue a ‘straightforward free trade deal’ with the EU that was ‘ not based on any kind of political alignment’.
Mr Johnson yesterday welcomed Mr Farage’s announcement on the campaign trail in Wolverhampton.
The Brexit Party’s move will help the Tories defend seats, particularly in the South West, where the Conservatives are under threat from the Lib Dems. However, polling experts yesterday sounded a note of caution as it will not boost the party in the target seats it needs to gain.
Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary University of London, said: ‘In the Labour and Lib Dem seats the Brexit Party is still standing in, they are far more likely to take votes from the Conservatives than Labour. In some places we are talking a ratio of 3:1.’
Chris Curtis, head of political research at pollsters YouGov, said: ‘It is still the case that most marginal seats are Labour-Conservative battles and this is the most important dynamic in deciding who will be celebrating Christmas in 10 Downing Street.’ Today the
Mail repeats its appeal to readers to write to Brexit Party candidates urging them to stand down in Tory target seats.
Former Conservative party leader Iain Duncan Smith yesterday described Mr Farage’s announcement as a ‘good thing’, but he urged him to go further by withdrawing from Tory target seats.
Steve Baker, Tory chairman of the pro-Brexit European Research Group, said: ‘The reality is that until Boris has got a clear majority in Parliament then Brexit is at risk and indeed the future of the country. I hope the right decisions will be taken overall to make that possible.’