Nigel Farage has called on Boris Johnson to agree to an electoral pact between the Brexit Party and the Tories, after Remainer MPs voted to make no deal Brexit illegal.
Speaking to the BBC on Thursday morning, Mr Farage, who has made similar offers before, said “at some point, he’s going to need to [talk to me]… because he’s made this decision that he has to deliver Brexit, he’s sacked 21 of his MPs who are essentially Remainers. He cannot win an election, whenever it comes, if the Brexit Party stands against him.”
The Leave campaigner said that such a “non-aggression pact” would result in the Brexit Party pledging to not field candidates in seats such as in the West Country where Johnson “faces a challenge from the Lib Dems” and the Tories stay out of Labour-Leaver dominated areas of the North, where the Brexit Party is more likely to win.
However, as with Mr Farage’s offer from earlier in the week, Johnson would need to drop Theresa May’s withdrawal treaty, and fully pursue a no-deal Brexit.
“It’s a very logical deal if you put the support of Boris Johnson’s Conservatives and the Brexit Party together. The truth is in a General Election with a clear policy we’d be unstoppable,” Mr Farage said.
Prominent Conservative and chairman of the European Research Group Steve Baker made the admission earlier this week that the Conservatives would need a pact with the Brexit Party to stop the “Remain Coalition” and prevent a split of the Brexit-supporting vote. Mr Baker said that if “the Brexit Party think that we are heading in a direction which does not deliver our independence from the EU, then they will stand candidates virtually everywhere.
“And the result will be as per Peterborough and in Wales — they will result in a Lib/Lab Remain coalition and we will lose Brexit, and that’s why I’ve said we need to have some sort of accommodation with them, but we are not quite at that bridge yet.”
Mr Farage has said in the past that he would target northern, Brexit-backing constituencies abandoned by Labour, saying last night ahead of a party rally in Doncaster: “Labour have betrayed the North. Only The Brexit Party can win in their former heartlands.”
“The Labour Party is now totally and utterly disconnected from its Northern roots, its people, and its voters,” Mr Farage told the crowd on Thursday night, telling Northern Brexiteers: “The Labour Party thinks that you are stupid, the Labour Party thinks it knows better, and it’s the Labour Party that is now completely and utterly dominated from London.”
“Here we are in South Yorkshire where 80 per cent voted by more that 60 per cent to leave the European Union, and it is in South Yorkshire where virtually every seat has been Labour for decade after decade.
“However much the Conservatives have failed to deliver Brexit since 2016, it is Labour who have brazenly betrayed five million of their own voters.”
Prior to the 2016 referendum, Mr Corbyn was a Eurosceptic, but came out in support of the Remain vote. Despite the leader and party backing Remain, Labour’s 2017 manifesto pledged to respect the outcome of the vote and support Brexit being delivered. Mr Corbyn’s announcement in July that the party would back a second referendum and Remain vote was seen as a betrayal of the five million Brexit-supporting, working-class Labour voters in the North, Midlands, and Wales.
“Labour has effectively announced that it cares more about the opinion of the new metropolitan middle classes than about its traditional base of support,” Mr Farage said at the time, adding: “Its final abandonment of Brexit and millions of Leave voters has opened the door to the Brexit Party in many parts of the country in the most extraordinary way.”