Brexit Party candidates list: The big names standing for Nigel Farage's new party at European elections 2019

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James Morris24 April 2019
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Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage has vowed to steal Tory, Labour and Ukip votes in next month’s European elections.

Mr Farage has introduced a slate of candidates which he claim will "revolutionise and modernise politics".

He promised they will help “squeeze” the established parties to “virtually nothing”.

So, who are the most prominent candidates standing?

Nigel Farage

Mr Farage was hailed as the most successful single-issue politician in modern UK history after the 2016 referendum. But three years on, he claims he is fighting the establishment to force Brexit over the line.

He left Ukip, one of the key driving forces behind David Cameron calling the referendum, late last year after its lurch to the far-right under Gerard Batten and his courtship of Tommy Robinson.

As leader of the Brexit Party, Mr Farage is aiming for his fifth election to the European Parliament since 1999.

The 55-year-old has attacked rival new pro-Remain party “Change UK – The Independent Group” by mockingly labelling it "Continuity UK".

Annunziata Rees-Mogg

Ms Rees-Mogg left the Tories having joined at the age of five (Reuters)
REUTERS

The sister of Brexit hardliner Jacob Rees-Mogg defected from the Conservative Party last week. She had been a member since the age of five.

A freelance journalist, Ms Rees-Mogg said of her decision to join Mr Farage: “We need to get out, we need to leave. We need to leave cleanly and we need to leave now."

In a blistering attack on the current Tory leadership, she added: “From Maggie Thatcher to Theresa May. I know which one I would rather have representing us now.”

Ms Rees-Mogg, 40, was defeated for the Somerton and Frome seat in the 2010 general election, losing out to Liberal Democrat David Heath by 1,817 votes.

Ann Widdecombe

Ann Widdecombe pictured leaving the Celebrity Big Brother house last year
Stuart Wilson/Getty Images

The former Tory MP retired from frontline politics in 2010 after an often controversial 23-year career in the Commons.

In the intervening years, she became a media personality, even appearing on Celebrity Big Brother last year.

But the hardline Eurosceptic was back on Wednesday, announcing she had defected from the Tories to stand for the Brexit Party.

She said: "If I am elected in Brussels my message to [Jean-Claude] Juncker and company will be very simple, very loud and very clear. Nous allons [we go].”

Richard Tice

Businessman Mr Tice is another Tory defector, having only last year been on the list of contenders to become the Conservative candidate for mayor of London.

While bidding to be mayor of the capital, the Standard’s Londoner column revealed in September last year that he in fact spent most of his time at his six-bedroom house in Buckinghamshire.

The 54-year-old is the co-founder of the Leave Means Leave campaign group, and is now also chair of the Brexit Party.

Described as a “property entrepreneur”, Mr Tice has said of the Brexit negotiations: “We need business people taking over these negotiations, not this current useless political class.”

Claire Fox

Unlikely bedfellows: Claire Fox and Nigel Farage
Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images

The most surprising candidate so far, given her left-wing history. Ms Fox is a former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

Ms Fox was introduced at a Brexit Party press conference on Tuesday as a "free speech campaigner" and author. She said she would be "standing in solidarity" with the Leave voters whose voices "have been traduced and trashed".

And in a subsequent article for the Daily Mail, she admitted: "You’d struggle to find a pair of more unlikely political bedfellows than the former Ukip leader and myself, a former Trotskyist who spent her youth agitating for a workers’ revolution."

But bemoaning that the UK "remains scackled to Brussels", Ms Fox added she and Mr Farage "agree on the one historic issue that today matters more than anything else: Brexit and the future of British democracy".

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