Are there really more Reform members than Tories as Nigel Farage claims?

Nigel Farage has called Kemi Badenoch “absolutely disgusting” for accusing him of lying about Reform UK’s membership numbers.

The leader of the insurgent populist party claimed to have overtaken the Conservatives’ 131,680, surpassing 140,000 members on Friday.

Mr Farage said: “The youngest political party in British politics has just overtaken the oldest political party in the world.”

But Tory leader Ms Badenoch has called the figures “a fake”, accusing Mr Farage of “misleading his supporters at Christmas”.

The bitter row, which erupted on Boxing Day, highlights the ongoing battle between Reform and the Conservatives for second place in British politics. While Reform has just five MPs, compared with the Tories on 121, Mr Farage used the milestone to declare his party “the real opposition”.

But with the spat between the leaders deepening, The Independent looks at the truth behind Mr Farage’s assertion and Ms Badenoch’s counterclaim.

Ms Badenoch accused Mr Farage of “not understanding the digital age” and pursuing a kind of fakery that is easily uncovered.

“We have been watching the back end for days,” Ms Badenoch said, a reference to the part of a website that is invisible to users and is responsible for storing and processing data.

She claimed that, as X users pointed out it was “coded to tick up automatically”, Reform changed the code to link to a different site.

But Mr Farage was quick to invite one of the “Big Four” consultancy firms to audit Reform’s numbers if the Conservatives would be willing to do the same. He also opened up Reform’s systems to a handful of media outlets to verify the figures are correct.

As well as claiming to have surpassed the Tory membership figures, Mr Farage said the 131,680 figure used by the Tories includes long-expired and resigned former members.

After throwing down the gauntlet to Ms Badenoch, Reform chairman Zia Yusuf took to X to say Ms Badenoch “doesn’t know anything about technology”. He even suggested Reform is considering suing Ms Badenoch for libel over her claim, asking followers whether Mr Farage should take legal action in a poll on X.

The former businessman posted a screenshot from the party’s tech platform Nationbuilder showing it had, at the time, 134,832 members. It also included a breakdown of regular members versus cheaper under-25 members, of which there are 2,774.

Mr Yusaf asked: “You just talked an awfully big game Kemi, will you take us up on this?”

A House of Commons Library briefing on Great Britain’s political parties points out that it can be difficult to accurately compare them by size.

“There is no uniformly recognised definition of membership, nor is there an established method or body to monitor it,” the briefing states.

It could just be that Reform measures its membership differently to the Conservative Party, accounting for the confusion. Pollster Luke Tryl, director of the More in Common think tank, said the metric is “opaque and murky”.

And while it appears Mr Farage has the evidence to back up his claims about membership numbers, questions have been raised about the political wisdom of Ms Badenoch’s decision to even give airtime to the spat.

Mr Tryl told The Independent: “What has become abundantly clear is that the main political parties can no longer hope just to ignore Reform and need to find a way of fighting back if they’re going to stall Reform’s rise.

“The problem is working out how best to do that. Criticising Reform UK’s stunts is only likely to draw more attention to them and the parties might be better focused on trying to identify weaknesses in Reform’s policy programme instead.”

As Jeremy Corbyn’s dreadful 2019 election result showed, having more members than your rivals does not translate into winning more seats.

So while Reform may have risen above the Conservatives in membership numbers, Ms Badenoch would perhaps have been better off rising above his latest political attack.