(after convincing Rishi to snub Nigel and the frantic helicopter ride that sealed the deal)
PUBLISHED: 02:09, 5 June 2024 | UPDATED: 14:02, 5 June 2024
Hurtling over the English countryside on the helicopter flight back to London – after campaigning behind the fabled Red Wall in the north of England – there was only one topic of conversation among Nigel Farage and four of his closest aides.
They were trying to persuade him to change his mind and run for Parliament.
They had been profoundly struck by how he had been mobbed on Saturday in the Nottinghamshire constituency of Ashfield, where Lee Anderson is defending the seat for Reform after defecting from the Tories. And as the chopper headed south, Farage's opinion was shifting fast in their direction.
When they arrived at Battersea heliport, Farage narrowly avoided bumping into Rishi Sunak and the Hollywood star Tom Cruise, who had both landed there only minutes earlier.
Buoyed by his reception in the north – and earlier in the week at Dover in Kent – Farage decided to have a pint at The Ship, a nearby pub in the fashionable south-west London borough of Wandsworth. The capital has never been fertile territory for Reform, dominated as it is by liberal-minded bien pensants. Yet Farage was asked for literally dozens of selfies and was repeatedly cheered by the locals.
The self-styled man of the people was then taken in his chauffeur-driven car to his home in the Kentish countryside. By Sunday morning, shortly before he switched off his phone to go fishing, he had made up his mind: he would run for Parliament, after all.
Later that day, he made a series of telephone calls to his senior advisers, including Andrew Reid, his long-serving lawyer and one of his best friends.
But one person kept out of the loop was Richard Tice, who became the leader of Reform in 2021, after it replaced the Brexit Party in 2020.
It was not until Monday that Farage called Tice, who was campaigning in Skegness, 150 miles north of London. Tice was astounded to be told that Farage was also seizing the party leadership.
Senior Reform figures including Tice and deputy leader Ben Habib, had to rush back to London to attend the televised announcement of Farage's U-turn at The Glaziers Hall in the City at 4pm on Monday.
'To say Tice was blindsided is an understatement,' said one figure in the know. 'Nigel wasn't risking anything leaking, so kept it tight.'
Farage would have found it impossible to pull off such a spectacular coup if he had been the leader of any other party, as they all require their leaders to win over the membership.
But Reform is a limited company and, as Farage is the majority shareholder – with a 53 per cent holding, compared with Tice's 33 per cent – what he says goes. The fact that Tice had campaigned tirelessly over the past few years counted for nothing.
The crown had been snatched by Farage, a man who has rarely been seen on the campaign trail.
'It's typical Nigel,' says one Reform member. 'We do all the hard graft and Nigel steps in for the sprint finish. He was waiting in the wings for the right moment. As the biggest shareholder, he's the real boss. Some people wonder why Reform is still a company. Now you know. It suited Nigel and his supporters. Richard knows deep down it's for the best as he can't match Nigel's charisma.'
Before he launched his palace coup, Farage took extensive legal advice. Tice wasn't merely the leader of Reform: one of his firms, Tisun Investments, has been keeping the party afloat by loaning it money in tranches ranging from £10,000 to £50,000. By the end of last year, Tice had loaned Reform a total of £1.4 million. Could he call that money in – and what would happen if he did?
However, there was no discussion about which constituency Farage would fight. It was always going to be the Essex seaside town of Clacton, where the former actor Giles Watling is defending a 25,000 majority for the Tories.
As far back as February, Farage had secretly sent two of his most trusted aides to Clacton to take the political temperature. He was hugely encouraged by the feedback. Now, early polls suggest he might be elected to the Commons on his eighth attempt.
His announcement this week has been a devastating blow to Rishi Sunak and his faltering campaign. Could it all have been so different? Around six weeks ago, Dame Andrea Jenkyns – who was first elected the Tory MP for the northern constituency of Morley and Outwood in 2015, defeating the Labour big beast Ed Balls – had a private meeting with Sunak in his Commons office.
Jenkyns, a committed Tory and arch-Brexiteer, had resisted all blandishments from Reform to defect. One admirer said: 'Andrea is a proper Tory. She would never have left the party in the lurch and would never do a deal with anyone trying to eviscerate the party she loves.'
Backed by other Brexiteers, she told Sunak that the best way to 'neutralise' the threat from Farage was to engage in major reform of the European Convention on Human Rights. She also urged the PM to engage properly with the 'Farage wing' of the Tories in the form of ex-immigration minister Robert Jenrick and former Home Secretary Dame Priti Patel.
At one point Farage's private number was handed to No 10, but no one picked up the phone to extend an olive branch.
The Prime Minister's parliamentary private secretary Craig Williams was involved in the talks but they foundered after Sunak's unelected advisers, including his chief of staff Liam Booth-Smith, intervened.
'They can't bear to even mention Farage without a peg on their nose, they are so high and mighty,' says one figure close to the process. 'If the defeat is as bad as the polls suggest, those Sunak advisers will have blood on their hands.'
The impact of Farage's decision to run will not be felt in the opinion polls for some days to come. He had planned to spend the summer in America working with Donald Trump in the run-up to the US presidential election. He released a statement to that effect last month, a move that triggered accusations of 'treachery and betrayal' in some quarters.
Farage, like the majority of Sunak's own Cabinet, had wrongly assumed that the election would be in October or November. 'Nigel was going to do some of the warm-ups for Trump,' said a friend. 'He had it all mapped out.'
Initially, Sunak's decision to go early appeared to have paid dividends, as it caught Reform unawares. The party was still looking for around 150 candidates and did not have its campaign organisation in place, let alone the money to fight a national push.
But now it seems the early election decision, pressed on Sunak by the same advisers who blocked any contacts with the Farage camp, has horribly backfired.
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