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Nigel Farage has been accused of making a U-turn after he said Britain should not get involved in Donald Trump’s war with Iran.
His comments on Tuesday contrasted with his previous assertion that the “gloves need to come off” when dealing with Iran.
Anna Turley, chair of the Labour party, said: “Reform wanted the UK to go to war in Iran and are now trying to cover up the consequences for British families, including higher fuel prices.”
While Farage has insisted he does not heed public opinion, a YouGov poll showed Reform’s 2024 voters are split, with nearly a quarter (24%) wanting the UK to actively join the attack on Iran and 63% supporting either a retaliatory or defensive position.
The conflict has exposed existing fault lines among senior Reform figures over foreign policy and the extent to which the UK should take a more isolationist “Britain First” position – an echo of splits in Trump’s own conservative base in the US. Here is what key figures have said.
Nigel Farage
On Tuesday, Farage said: “There are differing opinions as to whether we should physically join the attacks. I, as leader, am saying to you, if we can’t even defend Cyprus, let’s not get ourselves involved in another foreign war.”
This contrasts with his first public comments after the start of the war, when he said that he was in favour of “regime change” in Iran and told a press conference in Westminster: “We should do all we can to support the operation.”
Richard Tice
Reform’s deputy leader has taken a gung-ho stance from the start. In recent years, he has split his time between his Lincolnshire constituency and Dubai, where his partner lives.
“We would be helping the Americans and the Israelis in any way they saw appropriate because this is a strategic, permanent threat to all of our safety and interest,” he has said. “If requests were made, we would have been saying: ‘Yes, we are pleased to help.’”
Robert Jenrick
The former Conservative minister and Reform Treasury spokesperson laid out an explicitly “hands off” position on Monday. Writing in the Telegraph, he said a prolonged conflict would send prices spiralling and hurt British consumers.
“We are a party for working people, not drawn-out wars in faraway places,” wrote Jenrick, lambasting “the liberal interventionists of the early 21st century. The British people have had enough of them. It’s time to be realists and put Britain first.”
Andrea Jenkyns
The mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, who holds Reform’s most powerful public post, went as far as floating the prospect that she could support British troops on the ground in Iran.
“Do I want to see British troops on the ground? Ideally not at this stage,” she said, when asked on Sky News on Monday. “You can’t rule anything out. It’s too hostile. We don’t know the direction it is going to go in. Should we be using more of our weapons? Most certainly.”
Nadhim Zahawi
The recently recruited Reform member and former Conservative chancellor told the Sun last month that Britain should support and join the US and Israel’s bombing of Iran.
On Sunday, he told Times Radio that the UK should at least have made its bases available to the US from the start for offensive and “make everything available to our greatest ally, the United States of America”.
Zahawi, who was born into a Kurdish-Iraqi family which fled Saddam Hussein, said Iran had to stay “coherent as a nation”, but he recognised that the US was determined to create an environment for the Iranian people “to rise up again”.
