Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage is to announce 150 candidates to fight in a General Election, as he warned Prime Minister Johnson may try to pass a version of Theresa May’s unpopular withdrawal treaty in the House of Commons.
While Prime Minister Johnson has ramped up no-deal preparations, he holds out that he can still negotiate a better withdrawal agreement with the EU. Comments made Tuesday where Mr Johnson suggested that a new deal with the EU could mean the UK staying in the Customs Union for two years left Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage asking whether this was an early sign of “the watering down of Boris’s Brexit”.
Writing in The Telegraph, Mr Farage reminded readers that “Johnson twice voted against the Withdrawal Agreement but then fell at the final hurdle by voting for it at the third time of asking, back in March”.
The next General Election is scheduled for 2022; however, if Mr Johnson fails to take the UK out of the EU by the October 31st deadline or seeks to pursue, as his predecessor Theresa May did, a soft exit, it may trigger calls for another election.
Mr Farage wrote said that “if passing this treaty in Parliament is now the Prime Minister’s ambition for Brexit”, his party “will vigorously oppose him”, adding that he will be announcing his party’s “first 150 candidates” this week.
Warning that the electorate no longer “trust” the Conservative Party, Mr Farage said that “if the UK does not leave the EU on 31 October, the Conservatives can rest assured they will be annihilated in any subsequent General Election”.
The Brexit Party has also set its sights on Labour heartlands in Wales, the Midlands, and the north of England, where some five million Labour voters backed Brexit.
In June, Jeremy Corbyn changed Labour’s official Brexit position to backing a second referendum, for which it would back Remain, in a move Mr Farage said “betrayed” those Labour Leavers.
“Having betrayed them, Labour certainly does not represent them any longer,” Mr Farage wrote on Tuesday. “Crucially, most of the seats in these areas are ones the Conservative Party could never win. The Brexit Party is now the main challenger, as shown in the European elections.”
Mr Farage had suggested an election pact with Mr Johnson to “smash” the Labour Party, in which the Tories and Brexit Party would strategically field candidates in constituencies so that they would not be competing with each other, but Johnson has ruled that out.
Mr Farage blamed this position of Mr Johnson’s on his top Downing Street advisor Dominic Cummings — Boris’s fellow Vote Leave alumnus — claiming the Leave campaigner is not a “true believer” in Brexit.
“[Cummings] thinks we’re all cretins and members of the lower order,” Mr Farage said in comments reported by The Times on Wednesday. “He has never liked me. He can’t stand the ERG. I can’t see him coming to any accommodation with anyone. He has huge personal enmity with the true believers in Brexit.”
The Times referred to Mr Cummings as the “fearsome fixer” in its Sunday edition, which reported sources saying that Prime Minister Johnson had pulled the former Vote Leave chief in to run Downing Street because Johnson reportedly said that it was a “national emergency”.
“We are leaving the EU by any means necessary on October 31 and your job is to help me do it,” Mr Johnson is reported to have said, while a source revealed to the Sunday newspaper that Mr Cummings had told special advisers from across Whitehall on six times on Friday: “We are leaving by any means necessary.”
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