THE launch of Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party was marred yesterday – after a Remainer group registered its domain name.
Campaign group Led By Donkeys set up thebrexitparty.com website, posting its own material and stating: “Nigel Farage wants to register a huge victory in the European elections, but he can’t even register his own website.
“Seven times he’s failed to get elected to Westminster. But he did get himself a seat in the European Parliament because at the time hardly any of us cared. Well we do now.
“Nobody is more responsible than Farage for the diminished state of our nation. Now he’s seeking to exploit the turmoil he himself created to get re-elected to Brussels on the May 23 – Register to vote by May 7 to stop him.”
READ MORE: Why Nigel Farage is a Westminster-made monster ... and Tories should be afraid
But, speaking in Coventry, MEP Farage insisted the new party, positioned as an alternative to his former party Ukip, would set out to “change politics”, adding: “I said that if I did come back into the political fray it would be no more Mr Nice Guy and I mean it.”
Speaking on the Today programme, Farage said Ukip “did struggle to get enough good people into it” and, despite sharing a policy base, his new operation “will be distanced from the far-right”.
The launch follows the October 31 Brexit delay, which means the UK will probably now participate in the May 23 European Parliament elections.
Farage says he has an “impressive list” of 70 candidates. They include Annunziata Rees-Mogg, sister of Tory Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg. She was once a prospective Tory MP and rejected advice from David Cameron to call herself Nancy Mogg to broaden her appeal.
Rees-Mogg said she had stuck with the Tories “through thick and thin” but Brexit had caused her to change allegiance.
READ MORE: Brexiteers urge Theresa May to quit after latest delay
Farage said the Brexit Party secured £750,000 in donations over 10 days and that he has already staked a £1000 bet on the as-yet-unconfirmed May contest, stating: “In some ways I can scarcely believe I’m doing this.
“I thought, well, we have won the referendum and then 448 of them said it was going to happen.
“I think what we have seen over the course of the last four weeks is the betrayal, the wilful betrayal of the greatest democratic exercise of this nation.”
He went on: “This party is not here just to fight the European elections.
“This party is not just to express our anger – May 23 is the first step of the Brexit Party.
“We will change politics for good.”
On the potential impact of splitting the Leave vote, Farage said: “When it comes to pro-Remain parties, you have the SNP, pro-Remain, the Green Party, pro-Remain, Plaid, pro-Remain, LibDems, pro-Remain, Chuka and his chums, pro-Remain, the Labour Party now, pretty much pro-Remain.
“Splitting the vote is going to be on the Remain side, it seems to me.”
Responding to the launch on Twitter, Ukip leader Gerard Batten dismissed Farage’s suggestion that there is no policy difference in policy between the parties as “a lie”, further stating that the Brexit Party’s “only purpose is to re-elect him” and act as a “Tory/Establishment safety valve”.
Batten told followers on the social network: “Ukip has a manifesto and policies. Farage’s party is just a vehicle for him.”
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