London, Jul 5 (PTI) Nigel Farage finally succeeded in winning a parliamentary seat on his eighth attempt as he won from Clacton and his hardline rightwing Reform UK party won four seats in the UK general election, according to media reports on Friday.
The 60-year-old defeated the Conservative candidate, Giles Watling, who had represented the coastal constituency in Essex since 2017, The Guardian newspaper reported.
Farage polled 21,225 votes to Watling’s 12,820, defeating him by a margin of 8,405 votes. Clacton had been regarded as Reform UK’s best hope as it was the only constituency to return a UK Independence Party MP in a general election when it was won in 2015 by Douglas Carswell.
Carswell had successfully retained the seat during a by-election the previous year after defecting from the Tories, the report said.
In a speech after his victory, Farage said that his party would be turning its guns on the Labour Party that hurled towards a landslide majority in the elections and dealt a bruising defeat for incumbent premier Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party.
“We are coming for Labour … be in no doubt about that,” he said, in a short speech at a leisure centre in the seaside town.
Farage, revelling in the Conservatives’ heavy defeat across the country, railed against the party of which he had once been a member. Farage said, “This is the beginning of the end of the Conservative Party”.
“They are literally a broad church that has no shared religion,” he said.
The Reform UK leader ruled out working in Parliament with the Conservative Party itself but opened the door to Tory MPs coming over to his party.
Answering a question about whether he wanted to become prime minister, he replied, “Whatever happens, happens, and probably by 2029 this movement will have found someone younger and better looking than me.” PTI GSP AKJ GSP
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