Did Nigel Farage make his first mistake on the campaign trail?
From him incendiary claim that the West provoked the war in Ukraine will be offensive to many people.
This may make some Tory supporters considering switching to Reform UK on July 4th think again.
And a clarification in a late-night tweet that appears to depart from his previous statements in a television interview suggests he may have realized he went too far.
“I am one of the few figures who has been consistent and honest about the war with Russia,” he posted on X.
“Putin was wrong to invade a sovereign nation and the EU was wrong to expand eastward.
“The sooner we realize this, the closer we will be to ending war and achieving peace.”
His previous comments were straight out of his friend Donald Trump’s playbook.
But if it was his intention to provoke a fight and gain publicity, the plan may have backfired this time.
Mr Farage He stated in his interview that he warned in 2014, when he was a UKIP member of the European Parliament, that there would be a war in Ukraine.
He blamed the “increasing expansion of NATO and the European Union” for giving Vladimir Putin a reason to go to war.
His critics will say that this is not just a conspiracy theory, but a dangerous crazy theory, the kind that Trump would peddle.
It is also a statement that should make Conservatives who want to welcome Mr Farage into their party with open arms change their minds.
His comments appear, however, to have sparked a change in the way senior Conservatives have treated Mr Farage in this election campaign and made us wake up to his threat.
So far, Rishi Sunak and his senior colleagues have barely laid a glove on the politician who has promised to destroy his party and take over as the official opposition to Labour.
Sunak said – weakly – that he understands the anger of Conservatives who are frustrated with their government’s performance and are tempted to vote for Reform UK.
The most ministers have said against Farage so far is that a vote for Reform UK is a vote to put Sir Keir Starmer in Downing Street with a “supermajority”.
That approach appears to have changed now.
James Cleverly, certainly a leadership contender in the event of a Tory defeat, led the criticism, but even he could have gone further.
“Just Farage echoing Putin’s vile justification for the brutal invasion of Ukraine,” he said.
Really? Is that it, Mr. Smart?
Sir Liam Fox, former Defense Secretary, said: “The West did not ’cause this war’ in Ukraine and it is shocking that Nigel Farage would say so.”
It was Ben Wallace, the most recent former Defense Secretary, who – not for the first time – said what other senior Conservatives should have said in condemning Farage.
He said the UK’s reformist leader was “expressing sympathy for a dictator who has implanted nerve agents on Britain’s streets” – a reference to the poisoning attack in Salisbury.
And jokingly, no doubt intended to irritate Farage, he said he was “more Chamberlain than Churchill”.
This should make the UK’s reformist leader choke on his warm beer.
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But it was Labour’s shadow defense secretary, John Healey, who launched the kind of scathing attack we should have heard from Tory ministers.
He denounced Farage as a “Putin apologist” who “would rather lick Vladimir Putin’s boots than defend the people of Ukraine”.
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Perhaps Mr Farage was being deliberately provocative with his comments and intended to provoke a political dispute.
After all, he craves attention and enjoys controversy.
After Mr Sunak’s D-Day fiascofor example, he stated that the PM “doesn’t understand our culture” and portrayed himself as a defender of veterans and the armed forces.
Since fighting Richard Tice for the leadership of Reform UK, he has campaigned for more defense spending, increasing the size of the army and better housing for soldiers.
But his remarks will dismay many Britons who have taken the suffering of the people of Ukraine seriously and, in many cases, welcomed the country’s refugees into their homes.
And so, despite appearing to justify his remarks in his tweet, his pro-Putin comments may have been too big a gaffe for swing voters who have so far been sympathetic to his outspoken views.
This story originally appeared on News.sky.com read the full story
