Nigel Farage’s mission is to destroy the Tory Party

Nigel Farage's shock return to frontline politics could make a dire situation for the Tories even worse, ITV News Correspondent Harry Horton reports

The Tory Party’s response to Farage taking direct control of Reform and becoming the Clacton candidate is to fundamentally misunderstand him.

A Tory spokesman warns he is handing Starmer a blank cheque by undermining the Tories.

But Farage said on the Peston show last week that he could not care less about the damage to the Conservatives, because he is convinced they have lost, with or without the challenge of Reform.

Farage is contemptuous of the Conservative Party. He told me the election was already effectively over - and the latest YouGov MRP poll suggests Sunak has more than a mountain to climb - such that Labour would inevitably win.

With that conviction, all Farage cares about, he said, is that the right wing in politics should regroup and rebuild in the aftermath.

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He said he does not want to reconfigure and rebuild the Conservative Party from within, whatever Tory MPs say about welcoming him to their ranks.

Farage believes the Tory Party will break up, and that Reform is therefore the vehicle by which a right-of-centre party will rise again.

He also said that there is no way he can be bought off by Sunak, since he broadly believes the country went to the dogs after he stood down candidates in 2019 for Boris Johnson.

The only deal Farage would contemplate, he said, would be Tory candidates being forced to stand down by Sunak in favour of Reform. That is never going to happen, he conceded.

So an election campaign that initially looked like the PM paddling in a small boat into a storm now looks like him heading straight into a hurricane.

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