Nigel Farage has announced that his five-week-old Brexit Party, which is dominating the European Parliament election polls and is beating the governing Conservative Party in some general election polls, has now surpassed 100,000 registered supporters.
“Thank you, thank you, we’ve done it!” the veteran campaigner announced in a social media post.
“We’ve hit a hundred thousand registered supporters, and we’ve done it in the space of five weeks, all of you paying £25 a time,” he said.
“Thank you so much. It is the most amazing grassroots support that’s ever been seen in this period of time in British politics,” he continued — before making it clear he has his sights on an even more ambitious target.
“Now, we’ve got about a week to go till polling day; if we keep going at this rate, we’ll be bigger than the Conservative Party — so go to [the Brexit Party website and] sign up,” he implored.
The rise and rise of the Brexit Party is a mirror image of the fate of Theresa May’s Tory Party.
The self-proclaimed “natural party of government” declined by 10,000 members between 2013 and 2018, from a claimed 134,000 to 124,000 — and the 2013 estimate was itself less than half of the 2002 estimate of 273,000, and nowhere near the party’s 1950s peak of 2.3 million.
Its recent deterioration in the face of Mrs May’s breaking her promise to deliver Brexit on time — made at least 108 times at the House of Commons despatch box — and ongoing attempts to stitch together a manifesto-breaking Brexit deal with Labour’s hard-left leader Jeremy Corbyn, appears almost terminal.
The party lost over 1,300 councillors in English local elections in early May, with Conservative activists and even association leaders and elected councillors reported as declining to support a leadership that does not represent them, and it has crashed to a dismal 10 per cent in some European Parliament election polls.
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