Nigel Farage arrived late to the election campaign but has proven to be a thorn in the Conservatives’ side as he attempted to establish Reform UK on stable political ground.
Has Nigel Farage made his first blunder in the election campaign?
His Incendiary claim that the West caused war in Ukraine It will be offensive to many people.
It may make some Conservative Party supporters considering switching to Reform UK on July 4 think twice.
And a clarification in a late-night tweet that appears to backtrack from his earlier claims in a television interview suggests he may have realized he went too far.
“I am one of the few figures who has been consistent and honest about the war with Russia,” he posted on X.
“Putin was wrong to invade a sovereign nation and the EU was wrong to expand eastward.
“The sooner we realize this, the closer we will be to ending the war and achieving peace.”
His comments above came straight out of his friend Donald Trump’s playbook.
But if his intention was to provoke a fight and gain publicity, this time it may have backfired.
mr farage He stated in his interview that he warned in 2014, when he was a UKIP member of the European Parliament, that there would be a war in Ukraine.
He blamed the “ever more eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union” for giving Vladimir Putin a reason to go to war.
His critics will say it’s not just a conspiracy theory, but a dangerous and far-fetched theory of the kind Trump would peddle.
It is also a statement that should change the minds of those Conservatives who want to welcome Farage into their party with open arms.
However, his comments appear to have sparked a change in the way senior Conservatives have treated Farage in this election campaign and woken them up to his threat.
So far, Rishi Sunak and his senior colleagues have barely laid a glove on the politician who has vowed to destroy his party and take over as the official opposition to the Labor Party.
Sunak has said – weakly – that he understands the anger of those Tories who are frustrated by his government’s record and are tempted to vote for Reform UK.
The most Cabinet ministers have said against Farage so far is that a vote for UK Reform is a vote to put Sir Keir Starmer in Downing Street with a “supermajority”.
That approach seems to have changed now.
James Cleverly, surely a leadership contender in the event of a Conservative defeat, led the criticism, but even he could have gone further.
“Farage is simply echoing Putin’s vile justification for the brutal invasion of Ukraine,” he said.
Actually? Is that it, Mr. Cleverly?
Sir Liam Fox, former defense secretary, said: “The West did not ’cause this war’ in Ukraine and it is shocking that Nigel Farage says so.”
It was Ben Wallace, the most recent former defense secretary, who – not for the first time – said what other senior Conservatives should have said in condemning Farage.
He said the UK’s reformist leader was “expressing sympathy for a dictator who deployed nerve agents on the streets of Britain”, referring to The Salisbury poisoning attack..
And in a jibe no doubt intended to irritate Mr Farage, he said he was “more Chamberlain than Churchill”.
That should make the UK’s reformist leader choke on his hot beer.
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But it was Labour’s shadow defense secretary, John Healey, who launched the kind of stinging attack we should have heard from Conservative cabinet ministers.
He denounced Farage as a “Putin apologist” who “would rather lick Vladimir Putin’s boots than defend the people of Ukraine.”
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Perhaps Mr Farage was being deliberately provocative with his comments and intended to provoke a political row.
After all, he craves attention and enjoys controversy.
After Sunak’s D-Day fiascoFor example, he claimed that the prime minister “doesn’t understand our culture” and presented himself as an advocate for veterans and the military.
Since wresting the leadership of Reform UK from Richard Tice, he has campaigned for greater defense spending, an increase in the size of the army and better housing for soldiers.
But his comments will dismay the many Britons who have taken the long-suffering people of Ukraine seriously and, in many cases, welcomed the country’s refugees into their homes.
And so, even though he appears to justify his comments in his tweet, his pro-Putin comments may have been too big of a gaffe for undecided voters who have until now been sympathetic to his outspoken views.
