LAST UPDATE | 5 Jul

NIGEL FARAGE HAS won his first ever seat in Westminster on the eighth time of trying tonight, being elected as a Reform MP in Clacton.

He is the fourth Reform candidate to get over the line so far as the counting goes on. Lee Anderson was the first and former party leader Richard Tice has also picked up a seat. Former MEP Rupert Lowe secured a seat in Great Yarmouth.

Reform UK is the latest political vehicle of the longtime anti-immigration and Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage. The party looks set to win several seats in parliament, with the exit poll predicting 14 seats for the populist party.

Reform UK, which was only formed in 2018, currently has one MP, Lee Anderson, who defected from the Conservatives after he was kicked out for saying London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Labour leader Keir Starmer were ”controlled by Islamists”. 

EXIT POLL:

💥⁦@reformparty_uk⁩ forecast 13 seats pic.twitter.com/m9339vONKo

— Richard Tice 🇬🇧 (@TiceRichard) July 4, 2024

Anderson was previously a Labour councillor before he was suspended in 2018 and defected to the Conservative party.

As an MP, Anderson has continued to court controversy, but despite this was elevated to deputy chairman of the party by Rishi Sunak before his resignation from the party earlier this year. 

He previously railed against food banks in the UK arguing that there was no major need for them and that instead, their use was linked to a lack of cooking and budgeting skills. 

He gained the nickname “30p Lee” in some quarters after he said publicly that nutritious meals could be prepared with a budget of just 30p. 

More recently, Anderson commented that asylum seekers who do not wish to be housed in barges should ‘f*** off back to France’.

I think the picture speaks for itself 🩵 pic.twitter.com/BWSlP1hfO7

— Lee Anderson - Reform candidate (@LeeAndersonMP_) July 5, 2024

‘Reverse takeover’ 

Farage has made no secret of his intentions in the run-up to the election, saying he wants to engineer a “reverse takeover” of the Conservative Party. 

He said he is not interested in being the leader of “this Conservative Party”, which he said is controlled by “social democrats”. 

“You can speculate as to what will happen in three or four years’ time. All I will tell you is if Reform succeed in a way that I think they can, then a chunk of the Conservative Party will join us.”

Farage was a founder of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in the early 1990s and was elected leader in 2006, a position he held at different times between then an 2016. He also represented the eurosceptic party as a member of the European Parliament. 

The Brexit Party was founded in 2018 and advocated for a no-deal exit from the bloc as negotiations went on, but when the UK did actually leave the EU the party was renamed Reform UK. 

Farage had been spending his time in the US campaigning for former president Donald Trump but he decided to come back once the election was announced. 

With reporting from Jane Matthews