Nigel Farage slapped down calls to join forces with Boris Johnson as he condemned the former Prime Minister’s record on migration.
Former Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, who served under Mr Johnson, defected to Reform on Friday and urged both men to come together to defeat Labour.
But Mr Farage rejected talk of a pact because of Mr Johnson’s record on immigration, which led to the so-called “Boris-wave” of arrivals.
Net migration hit a staggering 906,000 in the year to June 2023, amid an influx of foreign students, a spike in non-EU workers, particularly in the health and social care sectors and the introduction of the Ukraine and Hong Kong refugee visa schemes, Office for National Statistics figures revealed.
Mr Farage declared during an interview on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: “I don’t think that would really work.
“I like him personally, I always have done, he’s a very entertaining bloke.
“But I think that the Boris-wave was felt by millions of people.
“Millions of people allowed – being allowed – into Britain, most of whom by the way don’t even work, and are costing us a fortune.
“That’s something for which this audience will never, ever forgive him.
“Nadine was a Brexiteer of course herself, and she brings us the one commodity we’re very short of, and that’s experience at government level.
“That is our biggest weakness.
“You know, you could ask me lots of questions about policy and personnel and all the rest of it, but if you ask me, you know, ‘How are you going to do this?’
“I can’t really give you an answer because I haven’t got anybody in the senior team that’s ever been there before. Nadine came, she’s the first, and there will be others.”
Speaking to the Daily Mail, Ms Dorries said: “If there’s a will to make the lives of people better, then I think both men could and would find some way to accommodate each other’s egos and to coexist for the sake of the country.”
Reform’s Zia Yusuf went further, insisting Mr Johnson would never be welcomed into the party.
He branded the former Conservative leader “one of the worst prime ministers in British history” and accused him of betraying Brexit voters.
“We certainly would not welcome Boris Johnson – that’s never going to happen,” he told Sky News’s Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips.
“He threw open our borders. The Boris wave, which is millions and millions of non-EU migrants flooding into the country post-Brexit, betrayed every single person that voted Brexit.
“Frankly he was one of the worst Prime Ministers in British history.”
Former Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick on Thursday called for a decade of net emigration. Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman backed the move.
Mr Jenrick, who resigned over Rishi Sunak’s approach to legal migration, turned his fury on Boris Johnson and Priti Patel’s immigration policies.
He declared: “At the Home Office I walked into a total bin fire. I think the points-based system that was created by the ministers at the time was the worst public policy mistake in my lifetime.”
Reform UK has called for net zero migration.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch on Sunday blasted Tories flocking to join Nigel Farage and told others they are free to leave if they do not support “traditional, authentic Conservatism”.
The Conservative leader, putting the economy at the centre of her pitch to voters, said Reform UK will make the UK’s economic crisis “worse”.
Mrs Badenoch also warned Mr Farage wants to “increase benefits”, adding “we are the only party talking about living within our means”.
The Conservative leader branded Reform a “populist party” that is exploiting a Labour Government in “freefall”.
Asked what Sir Jake Berry, Nadine Dorries, David Jones and Graham Simpson have in “common”, the Tory leader said: “They’re all people who decided to leave the Conservative Party and join Reform, which is extraordinary because the biggest problem facing our country is that the economy is in crisis and Nigel Farage will only make it worse.
“He wants to increase benefits.
“We’re the only party talking about living within our means, and that’s quite important.
“What I’m doing is turning the Conservative Party into the traditional, authentic Conservativism that people recognise, and that’s going to mean taking some tough decisions.
“I’m afraid if people don’t like it, then they are welcome to leave.”
Mrs Badenoch is scrambling to revive the Conservatives’ sliding poll ratings, with the ‘poll of polls’ putting the party on 17%.
And the Tories are facing an intensifying threat from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
Reform is polling at around 31%.
Mrs Badenoch added: “Oppositions take a long time to come back after historic defeats. The last opposition had been 14 years, 13 years and 18 years.
“I’ve been in 10 months and I have something that is very different from what previous Conservative oppositions have had, which is a challenger party that claims to be on the right.
“Those are things that are going to take time to deal with.
“The reason why this is happening and why populist and protest parties are doing well, is because the government that won a historic majority is in freefall.
“This time last week, Keir Starmer hadn’t even started his reset, and already, it’s over.
“We have a Deputy Prime Minister resigning because she hasn’t paid £40,000 in tax and the public are fed up.
“My job now is to show that the Conservative Party has changed under my leadership.
“It’s going to take time, it’s not going to be easy, but the way we’re doing it is by making sure that we have a real plan for Government, not just announcements like other parties have, but a real plan for delivery.”
Asked if she could keep calling Reform a protest party when it is so far ahead of the Conservatives in the polls, Mrs Badenoch insisted: “Nigel Farage himself said pretty much that, that people are angry with the previous two parties and he has a blank sheet.
“But what I’m saying is that he is making the same mistake that Labour did. Labour said once we remove Conservatives, everything will be fine.
“Now he’s saying once we remove Labour and Conservatives, everything will be fine. Still making the same mistakes of not doing the real work in opposition of figuring out how we solve our problems.
“Our economy is no longer productive.
“We are living beyond our means. We are spending more on debt interest than we do on education.
“We are spending so much on welfare, health and social benefits, far more than on defence.
“We are not in a good place. How are we going to get ourselves out of this? He doesn’t have a plan. We’re working on one.
“We’ve already come up with policies around borders where we know we’ve made mistakes. We know we’ve made mistakes but we’re learning from them. What I see is Labour and Nigel Farage making bigger mistakes than the ones we did and they will run into trouble.”