The Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has hit out at Reform UK saying their membership milestone is “fake” and that “It’s not real.”
Nogel Farage said that Badenoch is “bitter” and that Reform UK has not been “manipulating” the figures and that they have taken over the Conservatives membership numbers.
Badenoch wrote on X, “Manipulating your own supporters at Xmas, Nigel? It’s not real. It’s a fake…coded to tick up automatically.
“We’ve been watching the back end for days and can also see they’ve just changed the code to link to a different site as people point this out.
“Farage doesn’t understand the digital age. This kind of fakery gets found out pretty quickly, although not before many are fooled…like many of you, I am sick of the endless lies, smoke and mirrors, stuff and nonsense politics.”
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Farage hit back saying, “Kemi says I don’t understand the digital age. I have 5.4 million followers and she has 320k.
“We understand you are bitter, upset and angry that we are now the second biggest party in British politics, and that the Conservative brand is dying under your leadership.
“However, this not an excuse to accuse us of committing fraud. We will gladly invite one of the Big Four firms in to audit our membership numbers as long as you do the same.
“We have heard from many whistleblowers that will swear under affidavits that ballots were sent out to long expired or resigned ex-members. It’s an open secret at CCHQ that your membership numbers are fake.”
Reform chairman Zia Yusuf said, “Oh Kemi, repeatedly calling yourself an ‘engineer’ doesn’t mean you know anything about technology. You cannot see our ‘back end’ just by looking at a webpage.
“The page polls from an endpoint which fetches the live member number from Nationbuilder’s API. Here’s a screenshot from our Nationbuilder backend for full transparency.
“As Nigel Farage says, we will gladly invite a Big 4 audit firm to verify our membership numbers on the basis that you do the same. You just talked an awfully big game Kemi, will you take us up on this? Or are you the same as your predecessors – a compulsive liar?”