NIGEL Farage, the pariah of British politics, has refused to fall into line or accede to Tory hopes that he would stand down his candidates in all but a few seats. Instead he offered Boris a Brexit Alliance on the basis that Boris scrapped his not-Brexit deal, otherwise, he stated, they’d be fielding candidates across the board.
Boris Johnson refused point blank in response, insisting that his deal was ‘a proper Brexit’. He told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, who took this assurance as read, that the difficulty of doing deals with ‘any other party’ was that it ‘simply risks putting Jeremy Corbyn into Number 10’. You can watch the interview here.
The conservative commentator Julie Samuel has accused Farage of sabotaging Brexit. She is not alone. It seems to be the received wisdom across what Melanie Phillips in these pages calls the media’s Planet Remain. Though I wonder whether it will be in three years time.
It is not only our readers who’ve wanted to see the Tories do a deal with the Brexit Party. Conservative Home’s poll of party members published on Friday morning showed that over half of them agreed with Donald Trump and want Boris to offer a Conservative/Brexit Party pact.
So who is sabotaging what? Who exactly is not listening to who?
If you didn’t catch the live streaming of the Brexit Party’s election launch on Friday or hear why they are taking the no compromise stance they are, it is based on their even more fundamental commitment to the need for ‘a new politics’. They are only party seeking this. You can and should watch here.
