Lee Anderson confuses a generic Tory email with a personal plea from Badenoch

Kemi Badenoch has firmly rejected the prospect of an electoral pact with Reform UK, telling Conservatives that there will be no “unite the right” deal with Nigel Farage’s party.

While some senior figures in both parties have argued that the Conservatives and Reform should join forces to defeat Labour at the next election, Badenoch used her conference speech to draw a clear line between the two.

She said she did not want to live in a country “run by people who threaten journalists, who call veterans ‘traitors’ and debate whether my mixed-race children are English”.

Badenoch also took aim at some of Reform’s biggest controversies, including Nigel Farage’s £5m donation and the imprisonment of its Welsh leader over corruption offences.

“The circus goes on and on and it will never stop, because this is who Reform politicians are,” she said.

“To those who say ‘unite the right’, we are not uniting with that.

“People deserve better than that and we are going to give them better than that.”

GB News subsequently invited Reform chairman Lee Anderson onto one of its programmes to discuss Badenoch’s rejection of an electoral pact.

Anderson claimed that the Conservatives were “literally pleading with ex-members like myself and Rob and Suella and Layla to rejoin the Tory Party”.

“Desperate times, Martin, call for desperate measures,” he added.

Presenter Martin Daubney asked Anderson to clarify whether he had received an email from Badenoch, along with Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman and Layla Cunningham, asking them to return to the Conservative Party.

Anderson said he had the email on his phone and claimed it said: “Please rejoin the Conservative Party, we are a different party, we have been reborn,” before dismissing the message as “all this sort of nonsense”.

He then steered the conversation back towards his wider criticism of the Conservatives.

“Nobody trusts them anymore, Martin. This is a desperate measure,” he said.

Daubney asked Anderson if he could send him the email, to which Anderson agreed, saying he would do so once he was out of the building and had a decent signal.

But the email Anderson had presented as evidence of the Conservative Party personally trying to win him back turned out to be a generic party email sent to former members.

It began by saying: “We’re sorry you couldn’t join us at Conference this time round. But don’t miss out on your chance to join us in Manchester next year.”

The message was clearly not a personal email from Badenoch to Anderson, nor, as Anderson had suggested, a bespoke appeal to a handful of prominent former Conservatives.

The issue was later discussed again in the GB News studio, where the channel showed a screenshot of the email.

GB News political correspondent Olivia Utley clarified what had happened.

“It wasn’t directly from Kemi Badenoch,” she explained. “It was simply asking people to join the comeback.”

The supposed evidence of Badenoch personally pleading with Anderson and other Reform figures to return to the Conservative Party was actually a mass email sent to former members.

The exchange didn’t go unnoticed by viewers, with the clip prompting bemusement online.

One commenter described it as “Lee Anderson caught in a brutally embarrassing lie on GBNews,” arguing that he had claimed Badenoch personally sent emails to him, Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman and Layla Cunningham, only for the programme to reveal that it was a generic email sent to former members.

Another commented: “This takes thick to a whole new level.”