Nigel Farage said the new British government “could be in trouble pretty quickly” as he watched a football club’s first match with Reform UK’s fifth MP.
The Reform leader, who is also the new MP for Clacton, watched East Thurrock Community Football Club in Essex on Saturday afternoon with James McMurdock, who won the seat of Basildon South and East Thurrock on Friday.
Mr McMurdock won the seat with a majority of just 98 votes from Labour which meant Reform secured five seats in the UK parliament.
Mr Farage was met with a warm reception at Wyldecrest Sports Country Club, where he posed for photos with locals, drank a pint and had a cigarette outside while watching the football match.
He met a boy who asked him to say “Brexit means Brexit” for him to record on a phone, which the Reform UK leader did.
Speaking before the match began, Mr Farage said “with a couple of exceptions”, the new cabinet is “the most inexperienced people ever to have got into a British cabinet”.
Asked for his thoughts on Mr Starmer’s new team of ministers, Mr Farage said: “With a couple of exceptions, they are I think the most inexperienced people ever to have got into a British cabinet.
“If you actually look at their life stories, their backgrounds and bear in mind, these are people making executive decisions that fundamentally affect people’s lives, I think they’re going to find it very, very hard. And I say that because the country faces some really fundamental problems, I suspect this government could be in trouble pretty quickly.”
And asked for his reaction to the British prime minister scrapping the Rwanda scheme, Mr Farage said: “Well he said he would do it, at least he’s kept a promise I suppose.
“Look, Rwanda was never going to work. What Keir Starmer is proposing, which is, tackle the gangs, well, frankly, you know, the last government were doing that for the last few years, it’s not going to work.
“At the minute it’s wild and windy, but we do have some pretty strong first hand accounts that as soon as we get a calm spell, they’ll be crossing the English Channel in their thousands, and let’s face it, Keir Starmer does not have a plan to deal with it.”
Reform UK’s leader said his aim is to “build a mass movement for real change leading up to the next sets of elections”.
He said: “We will do what we can with five in Parliament, what I will do for certain is provide real opposition in the country.
“And my aim and ambition is to build a mass movement for real change, leading up to the next sets of elections.”
Asked how he would sell proportional representation (PR) to the public, Mr Farage said: “Well, the fact that for every Reform MP there are 800,000 voters, and for every Labour MP, there are 30,000 voters suggests something is very badly, fundamentally wrong.”
He added: “We have five MPs, PR would have given us 97 MPs, but we are where we are.”
Asked who he would like to see as Conservative Party leader, Mr Farage said: “Honestly, I don’t think it matters who they pick as leader. This party is split down the middle, they call it a broad church, well, it’s a broad church with no common shared religion.”
Mr Farage said Reform is “going to do very, very well” in the Senedd election and based on how it performed in Scotland during the General Election, the party would “very much be in the territory of winning seats in the Scottish Parliament too”.
A local councillor met Mr Farage and told him he was previously a Conservative councillor, currently sitting as an independent but planned to join Reform UK.
Alex Anderson, from Stanford, who is a councillor on Thurrock Council, said after he met Mr Farage that he was elected in 2018, re-elected in 2022, both times as a Conservative candidate.
He said there was a “disagreement over the budget a couple of months ago with the Conservative administration”, which meant he “voted against a council tax rise”, had the whip suspended and now sits as an independent.
Mr Anderson said he spoke to Mr Farage about the election and how “impressive” it was for Reform to get 4.1 million votes.
There are now five Reform UK MPs after Lee Anderson defended Ashfield while party chairman Richard Tice secured Boston and Skegness and former Southampton FC chairman Rupert Lowe won Great Yarmouth, both at the expense of the Tories.
It comes after Mr Farage gave a “100% promise” to rid Reform UK of “bad apples”, as multiple protesters disrupted an event designed to celebrate the party’s election performance on Friday afternoon.
He faced a barrage of heckles from protesters in the audience as he tried to start a speech in central London to mark what the party described as a “political earthquake”.
After claiming the election showed there was “absolutely no enthusiasm” for Keir Starmer’s Labour, Mr Farage reiterated his party’s ambitions to act as the opposition to the new British government.
Mr Farage also said he was “launching criminal legal action” against Colin Bloom of Vetting.Com as he vowed to “professionalise” Reform UK.
Facing a question about the racism row engulfing the party, its leader again blamed the firm it contracted to vet candidates.
Mr Farage called Friday’s event “full on theatre” when he spoke in Essex on Saturday.
He said: “Well, it was full on theatre wasn’t it? We had protesters, I probably enjoyed it more than they did.
“But no, I mean, look, the one thing about press conferences that I do, complete contrast to what Sunak and Starmer have been doing, is we take questions from any press organisation, we’re not afraid of anything.”
While Reform UK was formed in 2018, Mr Farage has sought to become an MP multiple times without success.
He was a member of the European Parliament for 20 years, during which time he campaigned fiercely for the UK to leave the EU.
