Just ignore Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson tells Tories
Boris Johnson has said that the best strategy to counter Nigel Farage is to ignore him.
Speaking to the Swiss magazine Weltwoche in Milan, the former prime minister pointed out that, when he was leading the Conservatives, the Brexit Party – which changed its name to Reform UK in 2021 – was at “zero per cent” in the polls.
Some MPs have called for the former prime minister to return to the Commons to revive the fortunes of the Conservative Party, which is being beaten in the polls by Reform.
Mr Johnson said that while he felt “a deep sense of regret” that he was “not able to be useful”, he could not afford to return to politics because he had to pay for his wife Carrie’s new kitchen.
However, he did offer advice on how to tackle the threat from Reform, saying the best thing was for political rivals to offer their own policies and not to talk about Mr Farage.
“My strategy with the individuals that you mention is don’t talk about them,” he said. “When I was running the UK, this party you mention was on zero per cent in the polls, sometimes 3 per cent max. Don’t talk about them. Talk about what you are going to offer the people.
“I think Conservatives need to focus on the economy and making life better for people and giving people opportunity.
“I think if we concentrate on the economy we mount full spectrum warfare on all the things that Starmer is doing wrong, we will win.”
The Brexit Party was on 19 per cent in the polls when Mr Johnson took over as prime minister in July 2019. By the general election in December, that had fallen to 2 per cent.
Mr Johnson was speaking a year on from the general election, at which Reform secured five seats with 14.3 per cent of the vote and the Tories lost 252 seats, recording a 23.2 per cent vote share.
The most recent survey of voting intention by YouGov has Reform on 26 per cent, Labour on 24 per cent, and the Conservatives on 17 per cent.
In the May local elections, Reform wiped out Conservative councils across England in an historic sweep, with Mr Farage’s party winning control of seven local authorities and becoming the largest party in three others.
Both Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, have been accused of spending too much time addressing the threat from Reform.
In an interview with The Telegraph in March, Mrs Badenoch dismissed Mr Farage as a reality TV star, saying government was not an episode of I’m a Celebrity.
Mr Farage retorted that it was a good thing that people know who he was, and compared his television past with that of Donald Trump.
In May, Sir Keir gave a speech dedicated to attacking Reform. The Prime Minister declared the Right-wing party his main opposition, saying the Conservatives had “run out of road”.
His efforts to tackle Reform have backfired, however. He echoed the party’s hard-line stance on migration in a speech last month, when he said that Britain was at risk of becoming an “island of strangers”. It was met with fury from Labour MPs, and he later said he regretted using the phrase.
Mr Johnson said he felt “a deep sense of regret” that he was “not able to be useful today” to the Conservative Party.
Asked whether he would consider returning to power – as Cincinnatus did in Rome – he implied that he could not afford to.
“Rome is in good hands, and I’m very happy,” he said. “I’m engaged in the innocent task of trying to pay for my wife’s kitchen refurbishment, which is extremely expensive and difficult, and that’s basically what I’m doing.”
While in office Mr Johnson is said to have privately complained about the cost of refurbishing the Downing Street flat he shared with his wife. A row over who funded the redecoration, which came to more than £100,000 with thousands spent on luxury wallpaper, fuelled a backlash among Tory MPs.
Elsewhere in the interview, Mr Johnson also took aim at Sir Keir’s non-dom crackdown and suggested it would be “useful” for the Government to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
Sir Keir’s raid on non-doms has driven billionaires out of London, and Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, is now considering reversing the policy under which non-doms are charged 40 per cent inheritance tax on their global assets.
“Every private business in Britain, a big increase in taxes, big taxes on non-doms,” Mr Johnson said. “My God: people are leaving London to come to Italy. What’s going on? Mamma mia.
“When I was mayor of London I used to say that London was to the billionaire as the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan. You went out into Mayfair late at night and you saw the billionaires in their natural habitat, and now I think you can come to Italy for a flat tax of €200,000 – it’s a good deal.
“I met some people last night who had fled London to come to Italy. When I was running London, that would have been absolutely unthinkable.”
He also suggested that leaving the ECHR could be a “useful” way to bring down illegal immigration.
The first flight under a Conservative policy to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda was blocked by European judges citing the ECHR in 2022.
Mr Johnson said: “It would be useful to quit the ECHR, but the main thing is to get back to our Rwanda plan – the only credible way of smashing the cross-Channel gangs. Bring back Rwanda.”
Mrs Badenoch last month signalled she was ready to quit the ECHR “in the national interest”. She has set up a commission to look at the possibility of leaving the treaty, amid concerns it makes it harder for countries to expel illegal migrants.
Reform is committed to leaving the convention, and Labour to remaining.
Mr Johnson also discussed immigration and rejected criticism that he oversaw a “Boris-wave” of 1.4 million legal migrants flooding into the UK.
He blamed the huge increase on civil servants for overestimating the number of EU nationals who were going to leave after Brexit, meaning they allowed too many others to come in to replace them to do vital jobs.
“Nonsense. All bollocks,” he said. “What we had was two things: we had Covid, which meant nobody came, so immigration collapsed, and then what happened was unfortunately the Remain establishment believed their own propaganda.
“They thought the millions of EU nationals were all leaving and they were not… They panicked when we couldn’t find people to stack the shelves and drive the trucks after Covid, but the crucial thing is that we took back full legal control and can rectify such mistakes immediately while Starmer would surrender control again to the EU.”
A European Union research document last week claimed Brexit was the main driver of Britain’s worsening migration crisis, stating that the post-Brexit “liberalisation of migration laws” caused a record increase in net migration.
But Mr Johnson defended Brexit, saying it had saved lives during the Covid pandemic because it meant the nation was able to roll out vaccines more quickly than the European Union.
“Brexit was a wonderful thing and is a wonderful thing, and I love Brexit more and more with a weird intensity because it’s about freedom and autonomy is the most wonderful thing for people, for countries, for families,” he said.
“We saved thousands of lives because of Brexit and we were able to get our economy moving again faster because of Brexit.”
Mr Johnson also addressed the conflict in the Middle East, downplaying the suggestion of imminent regime change in Iran.
“I’ve become a bit of a sceptic about the value of regime change in the Middle East,” he said. “Countries need to make their own decisions about their governments. You can’t impose a new government. We tried it in Iraq, we tried it in Libya, it wasn’t a great success…
“I may be wrong but I don’t think there will be regime change very soon in Tehran. That’s not the information I’m getting.”
Mr Johnson also said he would have backed Israeli attacks on Iran, and said he believed Vladimir Putin did not oppose them because he does not want Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, to have a nuclear bomb.
A Reform source said: “Boris Johnson did unprecedented damage to this country. He is the mastermind behind the mass immigration experiment. Whilst he tries to save and rewrite his legacy of mass immigration and net zero, Reform is offering the country real change.”
The Conservatives declined to comment.
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