Who's telling porkies about Farage defection approach?

Nigel Farage, currently hoovering up Tory defectors to his Reform Party, likes to tell the story of how the hunter was once the hunted. Back in 2004, so his story has long gone, a “Tory knight of the shires” approached him with the offer of a safe seat in Farage’s home turf of Kent if he was prepared to abandon UKIP, then under the leadership of the forgotten-to-history Roger Knapman. But Farage stayed loyal and the rest is history.

An exciting tale. But is it true?

Not so, says the “knight of the shires” himself – Sir Paul Beresford, then MP for Mole Valley, who told Channel 4 News this week that it was Farage who was sniffing around the Tories, rather than the other way around.

“I said to him, ‘look, what do you want?’” Beresford said of his meeting with Farage at the home of a local Conservative councillor, Helyn Clack. “And there’s a deep intake of breath, and he said, ‘I want to be nominated for a solid Conservative seat in Kent. Can you fix that?’

“I mean, I recall that there was a specific seat up for election at Tunbridge Wells,” said Clack.

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The claim he was put up by then-Conservative leader Michael Howard to talk Farage into the Tories “is a figment of his imagination,” Beresford says now. Of the idea he approached him, he says: “That is a lie.”

As for Farage, he is sticking to his tale. “They offered me a safe seat,” he insisted to the programme. “They offered me a safe seat which I didn’t take. They are dishonest… if they’re saying that, that sums them up. Dishonest to their back teeth.

“I was approached by a knight of the shires to meet confidentially and offered Tunbridge Wells, and they said ‘you have it on a plate, you’ll be the MP there for as long as you want’. And I said no.”

Beresford says of that: “It’s completely and utterly untrue. Complete opposite of what happened. I had to be asked to come and meet him. I didn’t ask him. I don’t like him, I don’t trust him.”

So who knows who to believe? Although perhaps Robert Jenrick – who still insisted on the phone to his Conservative chief whip the very morning of the day he defected to Farage’s mob that had no intention of doing so – may have taken some advice from the master of dissembling!