Jordan Bardella and Nigel Farage signed a “memorandum of understanding” at Reform’s conference today (Alamy)
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Nigel Farage has unveiled a pact agreed with French far-right politician Jordan Bardella at his party’s conference, declaring it would “stop the boats forever”.
The Reform UK leader joined the president of France’s National Rally party on stage in Birmingham to sign a “memorandum of understanding”, which the pair said would be enacted if they both got into power.
Farage said the most significant part was an agreement that “the United Kingdom will intercept boats which launched from French shores and entered British territorial waters and will return the persons on board to France”, something not currently agreed by the two countries.
He added that it was the beginning of a “genuine new entente cordiale”, and that if National Rally – led by Marine Le Pen – wins the French presidency next year the country will “do their utmost to stop all departures” across the Channel.
It came after Bardella, the front-runner to become the next French prime minister, said in his speech to the Reform UK conference on Friday that a National Rally government “will do everything in its power to ensure that France is no longer the gateway for illegal migration into the United Kingdom”.
Bardella added: “The destination of illegal migrants entering France shall not be the United Kingdom – they should be returned to their countries of origin.
“The English Channel must no longer be a migration route to Dover or Folkestone, where thousands of people risk their lives in the hands of criminal smuggling gangs with the complicity of the leftists.
“Together, we must put an end to these daily routes. We must break the smuggler business model and together we must take back control of our borders.”
After the pair signed the memorandum on the main stage, they gave a joint press conference to journalists, which was dominated by questions around a report alleging that two Reform officials arranged party donations that breached UK electoral rules.
Farage sought to downplay the comments made by Reform officials in the documentary broadcast by Channel 4 and investigative reporting outfit Verbatim, calling them “loose pub talk”.
But two senior party figures – longstanding Farage aide Dan Jukes and Reform’s head of policy, Cambridge professor James Orr – have now stood down pending an internal investigation. The matter has also been referred to the police and the Electoral Commission.
Reform’s leader said “the party has done nothing wrong, taken no illegal money”, and instead claimed the story was “an exercise in entrapment”.
He added: “What is more problematic is loose pub talk, including a couple of boasts that simply were not true.”
Asked for his view on the investigation into donations, Bardella told reporters it “looks like a smokescreen”.
The French politician argued in his speech on the main stage of conference that public opinion was more important than the judgement of others, saying: “There is only one supreme judge – the people.”