LONDON (Reuters) – Nigel Farage, new leader of Britain’s right-wing Reform Party and thorn in the side of the ruling Conservatives, was doused with a soft drink on Tuesday during his first full day of campaigning for a seat in parliament in the July 4 election.
On Monday, Farage produced the biggest shock of the campaign so far by announcing he would head Reform and run in the election, a major blow to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, whose Conservative Party trail Labour badly in surveys.
Farage is best known for having helped lead a successful campaign in 2016 for Britain to leave the European Union, and his popularity has put pressure on a succession of Conservative prime ministers to take tougher positions on immigration.
Shortly after launching his campaign for election in the seat of Clacton-on-Sea, southeast England, Farage was approached by a woman who threw a large cup of soft drink over him as he left a pub, footage posted on social media showed.
He appeared unharmed as he was led away by security.
Richard Tice, the chairman of Reform, said his party would not be bullied off the campaign trail and the incident would help it win hundreds of thousands more votes.
A former commodities trader who is often pictured with a cigarette and pint of beer in hand, Farage has for three decades been the figurehead of euroscepticism in Britain, and is no stranger to controversy.
Charismatic and divisive, he has in the past made comments that his political opponents have called racist. During the Brexit campaign, Farage appeared in front of a poster showing lines of migrants under the slogan “Breaking Point”; last month he said Muslims did not share British values.
He was previously doused in milkshake in 2019 while campaigning for the Brexit Party, Reform’s predecessor, in Newcastle before a European Parliament election.
On that occasion, his attacker was ordered to pay for his suit to be cleaned after pleading guilty to common assault and criminal damage.
(Reporting by Sarah Young; editing by William James and Kevin Liffey)
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