The triumphant new MP Nigel Farage has been pictured on his first visit to Essex after the county backed Reform.
He finally won election to the House of Commons at the eighth attempt after years of trying at Thursday’s election, as he became the Reform MP for Clacton.
The party leader surged to victory in Essex with a comfortable majority of almost 8,000 to join party chairman Richard Tice, Lee Anderson, Rupert Lowe and James McMurdock in representing the party on the green benches.
Mr Farage, 60, has been all smiles since his election success, and was previously pictured celebrating with his girlfriend Laure Ferrari on the night of the election.
He was pictured today continuing the celebrations with his signature pint of beer in tow as he chatted with people at Wyldecrest Sports Country Club in Corringham, around an hours drive from his new seat.
Asked today who he would like to see as leader of the Conservative Party, Mr Farage said: ‘Honestly, I don’t think it matters who they pick as leader. This party is split down the middle, they call it a broad church, well, it’s a broad church with no common shared religion.’
Mr Farage said his aim was to ‘build a mass movement for real change leading up to the next sets of elections’.
Speaking this afternoon the Reform UK leader said: ‘We will do what we can with five in Parliament, what I will do for certain is provide real opposition in the country.
‘And my aim and ambition is to build a mass movement for real change, leading up to the next sets of elections.’
Asked how he would sell proportional representation to the public, Mr Farage said: ‘Well, the fact that for every Reform MP there are 800,000 voters, and for every Labour MP there are 30,000 voters suggests something is very badly, fundamentally wrong.’
He added: ‘We have five MPs, PR would have given us 97 MPs, but we are where we are.’
Mr Farage said Reform is ‘going to do very, very well’ in the Senedd election and based on how it performed in Scotland during the General Election, the party would ‘very much be in the territory of winning seats in the Scottish Parliament too’.
And the new MP said ‘with a couple of exceptions’, the new Cabinet was ‘the most inexperienced people ever to have got into a British cabinet’.
Asked for his thoughts on Keir Starmer’s new Cabinet, Mr Farage said: ‘With a couple of exceptions, they are I think the most inexperienced people ever to have got into a British cabinet.
‘If you actually look at their life stories, their backgrounds and bear in mind, these are people making executive decisions that fundamentally affect people’s lives, I think they’re going to find it very, very hard. And I say that because the country faces some really fundamental problems, I suspect this Government could be in trouble pretty quickly.’
On the Prime Minister scrapping the Rwanda scheme, Mr Farage said: ‘Well he said he would do it, at least he’s kept a promise I suppose.
‘Look, Rwanda was never going to work. What Keir Starmer is proposing, which is, tackle the gangs, well, frankly, you know, the last Government were doing that for the last few years, it’s not going to work. At the minute it’s wild and windy, but we do have some pretty strong first hand accounts that as soon as we get a calm spell, they’ll be crossing the English Channel in their thousands, and let’s face it, Keir Starmer does not have a plan to deal with it.’
A local councillor met Mr Farage at the Essex club and told him he was previously a Conservative councillor, currently sitting as an independent but planned to join Reform UK.
Alex Anderson, from Stanford, who is a councillor on Thurrock Council, said after he met Mr Farage that he was elected in 2018, re-elected in 2022, both times as a Conservative candidate.
The 25-year-old said there was a ‘disagreement over the budget a couple of months ago with the Conservative administration’, which meant he ‘voted against a council tax rise’, had the whip suspended and now sits as an independent.
Mr Anderson said he spoke to Mr Farage about the General Election and how ‘impressive’ it was for Reform to get 4.1 million votes.
The political disruption has already been praised for the win by his friend former US president Donald Trump.
The Republican presidential nominee wrote in a post on his social media site TruthSocial: ‘Congratulations to Nigel Farage on his big WIN of a Parliament Seat Amid Reform UK Election Success. Nigel is a man who truly loves his Country! DJT.’
Mr Farage polled 21,225 votes, comfortably beating incumbent Tory Giles Watling into second with 12,850.
More than four million people voted for his party, giving it a 14 per cent share – with its candidates coming second in 89 seats, many in Labour-won areas of northern England and Wales.
The party leader said he wants to ‘build a mass national movement over the course of next few years’ with the aim of challenging the 2029 general election.
Following his election win, he immediately set his sights on taking on Sir Keir Starmer, adding: ‘We are coming for Labour, be in no doubt about that.’
He said: ‘My plan is to build a mass national movement over the course of next few years as hopefully be big enough to challenge the General Election properly in 2029.
‘There’s no enthusiasm for Labour or Starmer whatsoever… this Labour Government will be in trouble very very quickly and we will now be targeting Labour votes.’
Mr Farage’s gains across the UK came just weeks after he shocked the Tories by U-turning on a decision to sit out the election after seven failed bids.
It is predicted the success of Reform will cause a huge battle for the soul of the Conservative Party in the weeks to come, with senior figures on the right open to some form of link-up.
Reform’s manifesto was designed to outflank the Tories on the Right and included a series of single-sentence policies, such as raising the inheritance tax threshold to £2 million, scrapping stamp duty on properties worth up to £750,000 and quitting the European Convention on Human Rights.
It has been said that Reform’s wide but thin support would not help their success in a first-past-the-post system and Mr Farage has been vocal about the need for changes to the electoral system.
Meanwhile Mr Tice blasted the ‘injustice’ of the first-past-the-post electoral system, after the Liberal Democrats gained 71 seats with 3.5million votes. This meant the Lib Dems had 67 more seats than Reform despite having about 500,000 fewer votes.
The official 10pm exit poll projected the insurgent party’s seat haul could hit 13 – a shock tally that sent shockwaves through Conservative headquarters. That was later revised down to four.
But the success at the election will bolster Reform’s confidence as Mr Farage had previously said this election was only the ‘tip of the iceberg’ for the start-up party as they build to bigger success in 2029.
Mr Farage’s electoral agent and Reform UK councillor Peter Harris has said their party leader is ‘up for the challenge’ of facing up to a Labour government.
On Mr Farage’s potential impact in Westminster, Mr Harris said: ‘He stood alone in the European Parliament, and he got the changes that he wanted and as he said to the European Parliament that when he first got there, they laughed at him and then when we left he said ‘well, you’re not laughing now’.
‘So you know, I can see Nigel will be a huge voice not just for Clacton but a huge voice for so many people in this country that have felt abandoned and betrayed. So, yeah, I think Nigel is up for the challenge.’