Days after taking office, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised not to call a general election before the October 21 EU departure date, having already ruled out an electoral pact with the right-wing populist Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. He may end up having to do both. Farage, who following last month’s EU elections now leads the biggest single party in the European Parliament, was not where he is paid to be last week: in Brussels, or hosting his evening show on London’s LBC radio station. The former metals trader was in the United States, where on Tuesday, following the Conservative Party leadership election, he watched US President Donald Trump address a crowd of young Republicans in Washington. An ‘absolute hero’ trolled Donald Trump with this fake presidential seal during speech “I think Nigel is some place in this audience. Where is Nigel? Nigel Farage,” Trump told the crowd at the Turning Point USA gathering. “He’s here some place. I saw him. I said what is he doing here, he’s a little older than most of you. He did a great job, and I know he’s going to work well with Boris, they are going to do some tremendous things.” Farage then travelled to New York with a group of Trump supporters, including the president’s former election campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and Phil Bryant, the governor of Mississippi for the launch of a new group called World4Brexit. The chair of the group is Penny Grande, the former executive assistant of US President Ronald Reagan. “The world shows outrage when democracy is absent in places like Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and Zimbabwe,” Grande wrote on the Daily Caller. “Where is the global outrage over the refusal to execute Brexit? “If this thwarting of the will of the people can happen there, it can happen anywhere. The rest of the free world is watching democracy being undermined in the UK and is wondering – are we next?” As a not-for-profit group, under US legislation World4Brexit can accept donations of up to US$5,000 and has no legal obligation to reveal who made them. Proud to have joined my friends @Nigel_Farage and @peggy_grande in NYC at an event to support the fight for Brexit. pic.twitter.com/ulfwHeSAp1 — Phil Bryant (@PhilBryantMS) July 25, 2019 <!--//--><![CDATA[// ><!-- //--><!]]> On its website the group cites African cocoa farmers and US farmers of genetically modified wheat whose products are currently banned by the EU as victims of the failed Brexit process. Johnson’s strategy has been to pack his new cabinet with hard core Brexit-supporting Conservatives. He has hired Dominic Cummings, the master political and social media strategist behind the surprise 52 per cent vote for Brexit in 2016 as his special adviser. He has promised a “do or die” departure even without agreement on October 31. New British PM Boris Johnson’s ruthless purge of enemies before moving into No 10 Downing St Just a few days in office, Johnson has already clashed with the EU and its chief negotiator Michel Barnier who on Friday labelled the UK prime minister’s demands as “unacceptable” in a letter to EU leaders. “PM Johnson has stated that if an agreement is to be reached it goes by way of eliminating the backstop,” Barnier wrote. “This is of course unacceptable and not within the mandate of the European Council.” The backstop seeks to ensure a free-flowing post-Brexit border between British Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, an EU member state, in all eventualities. Despite promises to override parliament, Johnson will likely need parliamentary approval for any agreement with the EU – a process that stymied May’s deal and led to her resignation. His divided Conservative Party and its junior ally the Democratic Unionist party has a majority of just two in the UK parliament, including around 60 MPs who voted to remain. In an article in The Daily Telegraph, Farage said the “inescapable truth” is that Johnson’s party is divided in parliament on both him and Brexit, and that he needs an election and a new pro-Brexit parliament to take the UK out of the EU and defeat Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. “For this strategy to work, he will need the support of the Brexit Party. But it is far from straightforward. I genuinely struggle to understand where he stands on many of the great issues of the day,” Farage wrote. In a tweet Saturday Farage said the Brexit Party, founded by himself and his multimillionaire backer Aaron Banks, was prepared to contest every seat in the next election. If @BorisJohnson tries to put through a reheated version of Mrs May’s treaty, we’ll fight him in every single seat. https://t.co/Ieobx7YcII — Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) July 27, 2019 <!--//--><![CDATA[// ><!-- //--><!]]> Whether he can do that remains to be seen. Farage himself has stood for the UK Parliament many times but has yet failed to win a seat. His party won a huge 32 per cent of the vote in the EU elections, but was substantially defeated in two local by-elections last week in Leave-voting constituencies, won by pro-Remain Liberal Democrats. Johnson appears to be already on a general election campaign, travelling around the country immediately after his leadership victory promising a huge spending programme, including replacing the 20,000 police cut from the force by his predecessor Theresa May when she was home secretary. But he has also attracted criticism from right-wing forces over his proposal to grant an amnesty to undocumented migrants. It was precisely because of fears of immigration that many people voted to leave the EU that has freedom of movement of its citizens as one of its basic principals. Johnson is banking on a post-Brexit trade deal with the US, which accounts for around 14 per cent of UK trade and as such is Britain’s largest single country trading partner. Political pundits are divided as to whether Johnson, who campaigned with Farage during the EU referendum would create an electoral pact with the Brexit Party or seek to win back the hard-right votes for the Tory Party. Writing in The Guardian on Saturday, Jonathan Powell, former PM Tony Blair’s chief of staff said that come September, when Johnson realises he can’t strike a better agreement with the EU than May’s deal, he will face two choices. From Boris Johnson to Donald Trump, leaders who habitually lie win votes by giving people the lies they want “He can go either for a general election or a referendum. Although the latter would be the right choice for the country, it looks likely he will go for the former,” Powell wrote. “The polls will show him that with the progressive vote split, with Labour down to 20 per cent and the Lib Dems at 20 per cent, he could win a landslide in the first-past-the-post system with an electoral understanding – even an informal one – with Nigel Farage. And he will know that if he waits too long into next year for an election, the recession will have begun to bite.” Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University in London told Newsweek : “I think it is far more likely that Boris Johnson will attempt to win back Brexit Party supporters by getting Brexit over the line than by putting together some sort of pact with Nigel Farage. “A pact, possibly involving some kind of stand down arrangement, would run the risk of allowing large numbers of Brexit Party MPs into the House of Commons – something that no sensible Tory could ever contemplate. They’d be cuckoos in the nest.” Farage was the first British politician to meet Trump following his election victory and is also a close ally of the hard-right agitator and Trump adviser Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon says Brexiteer ‘friend’ Nigel Farage in the running to be UK prime minister Trump’s criticism of May and his full support for Brexit has already signified his unprecedented willingness to interfere in UK politics. The US president says he has forgiven Johnson for disparaging remarks he made about the him when he was mayor of London. In 2015 Johnson said presidential candidate Trump’s accusations that London was full of Muslim no-go areas showed a “stupefying ignorance” that made him “unfit to hold the office of president of the United States”. But has he really? If his two “friends” Johnson and Farage end up engaged in mortal political combat, will he back the PM or throw his support behind Farage, campaign pockets filled by wealthy, unnamed US donors and supporters of Trump? Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse