Badenoch claims Farage getting £5m gift from donor shows he can't claim to be in touch with ordinary people

Kemi Badenoch has claimed that Nigel Farage receiving a £5m gift from a donor proves he cannot claim to be in touch with ordinary people. The Conservative Party leader made the attack during a round of local radio interviews on Saturday.

Speaking on BBC Radio Merseyside, Badenoch was challenged by presenter Tony Snell that Merseyside was a "lost cause" for the Conservatives. Snell noted that Farage, the Reform UK leader, had been on the programme the previous day arguing that Scousers were "down to earth" and that the Tories were seen as "aloof and remote".

Badenoch responded: "No one has ever described me as aloof and remote." When told Farage was talking about the party, she said the Conservatives were "the party of working people" and claimed Labour were only interested in welfare.

She then launched her attack on the £5m gift: "Nigel Farage can say as much as he wants that he's the one who's down to earth. Someone just gave him a £5m gift the other day. I don't know what's down to earth about that. Who gets £5m as a gift? If I got £50,000 as a gift, I think people would raise their eyebrows. That's a hundred times that. And he forgot to register it. He forgot that he'd been given £5m. I don't think that's down to earth. So I'm not going to be taking any lessons from Nigel Farage."

On BBC Radio Sussex, presenter Sarah Gorrell put to Badenoch that councils were struggling because of the funding record left by the last Conservative government. Badenoch refused to engage with this point, instead arguing that Conservative-run councils were better managed than those run by other parties.

Gorrell reminded Badenoch she was a student at the University of Sussex and said the left-wing students she encountered there helped make her a right-winger. She said Badenoch had described students there as "spoilt, entitled, privileged, metropolitan elite in training". Badenoch said she did not know the students there now, but said the "silly things" she had encountered in student politics she was now seeing in the Labour government.

On BBC Radio London, Badenoch said the Conservatives were committed to keeping council tax "as low as possible". She said, unlike Reform UK, the Conservatives were not promising to cut council tax because Reform "could not deliver".

Asked what would be a good result for the Conservatives in London, Badenoch said she wanted to win as many seats as possible and would like to win back councils the party had lost, citing Westminster as an example. But she refused to set a target for how many seats she expected to win.

On BBC Radio Leeds, Badenoch said people should vote for Conservative councillors because they were "not drama queens" and "not playing games". Presenter Gayle Lofthouse put it to her that this was exactly what she had been doing in Westminster this week with the vote on the privileges committee inquiry. Lofthouse also said BBC reporters were being told voters in West Yorkshire weren't interested in this.

Badenoch said she had spent much of the past month focusing on energy policy and petrol prices but quickly reverted to defending the vote on Tuesday. She said: "It's not a TV show, this is real life. Having a prime minister who appointed someone who is a national security risk affects your residents, your listeners. It is a problem if we cannot defend our country because someone who had links to Russian companies that were closely linked to the Kremlin was appointed American ambassador."

Meanwhile, election forecaster Robert Hayward has predicted Labour could lose 1,850 seats in the English local elections on May 7. Speaking on ITV's Peston, Hayward said the losses would be nationwide and represented "bad news for Sir Keir and Labour".

He predicted Reform UK would be the biggest gainer from both Labour and the Conservatives, overwhelmingly outside London, with gains of 1,550 seats. The Conservatives would lose 600 seats, many in councils deferred from last year. The Greens would gain 500 seats in London and middle-class areas of other cities, the Liberal Democrats 150 seats, and independents 250 seats.

The number of households in temporary accommodation in England has fallen slightly for the first time in three years. There were 134,210 households in such accommodation at the end of December, down from 134,700 at the end of September 2025. However, the number of children in temporary accommodation continued to rise, standing at 176,130, up 6% year on year.

The NAHT headteachers' union said analysis of Ofsted inspections under the new report card system found one in five schools with above-average numbers of pupils with special educational needs and disabilities were judged "needs attention" in the attendance and behaviour area, compared with one in 10 schools with below-average SEND pupils.