Farage: This election will be decided by tactical voting
Jonathon Read
Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage speaks during a party rally in Ilford. Photograph: Joe Giddens/PA Wire. - Credit: PA
Nigel Farage has claimed that the general election will be decided by tactical voting.
Speaking on Radio 4's Today programme Farage was pushed on why he is not standing in the election with the Brexit Party leader claiming he could not be "hunkered down" to one seat.
He said: "I am spending my time touring the country. If I was hunkered down in one seat, I could not do that.
"I'm going to go out around the country saying to Labour voters, 'you are being let down badly, betrayed by the Labour Party who now want you to vote again'.
"And the same for Conservative voters, in seats that the Conservatives have never won in 100 years, your best chance of getting Brexit is to get us in there and hold Boris Johnson to account.
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"And ultimately this election will be decided by tactical voting decisions all across the country."
He said the Conservative Party would rather risk losing the election than forming a Leave alliance with his party.
"The job of the Brexit Party is to hold him (Boris Johnson) to account, because too many times over the last three years the Conservatives have made promises and not delivered."
On whether Farage was prepared to stand Brexit Party candidates down in more seats, he said: "This all started way back in September when I sent to Number 10 some polling that said that in their 40 key seats, if I endorsed their Conservative candidate, one-third of Labour voters in those seats would vote Conservative on a one-off basis to get a genuine Brexit done.
"And ever since that time, what I've realised is that the Conservatives want a Conservative majority in parliament, not a Brexit majority in parliament."
He added: "There are very clearly seats in which we are the lead challenger and their are other seats in which they are the lead challenger to Labour, and we could have done a deal on that basis, but the priority for the Conservative Party, they do not want the Brexit Party to get seats in parliament.
"They'd rather risk not winning the election than having a Leave majority, a Leave alliance."
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