Ross Clark Ross Clark

What was Badenoch hoping to achieve with her attack on Farage?

Kemi Badenoch went on the attack against Nigel Farage (Getty images)

Kemi Badenoch believes she has caught out Nigel Farage with a bit of digital sleuthing. No sooner had Farage announced that the official membership of Reform has surpassed the 132,000 declared membership of the Conservative Party than Badenoch declared it is all a con.

All Badenoch has really achieved is to emphasise how shrunken the Conservative party has become

“Manipulating your own followers at Xmas, eh Nigel?” she tweeted on Boxing Day. The counter that Reform has been showing us is a fake, she declared. “It is designed to tick up automatically. We’ve been watching the back end for days, and can also see that they have just changed the code to link to a different site as people point this out. Farage doesn’t understand the digital age. This sort of fakery gets caught out pretty quickly.”

Given that Badenoch is a software engineer and I am not, I will take her word for it.

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