Revealed: The extraordinary offer made by Tory fixers to 'bribe' Nigel Farage with a knighthood and peerages - and why it's sown the seeds of disaster for Rishi

They were the secret negotiations between Nigel Farage's Brexit Party and shadowy Tory fixer Dougie Smith which sowed the seeds of the disaster facing Rishi Sunak.

It can now be revealed that Mr Smith, who has been accused of plotting with Michael Gove to topple Boris Johnson, led a team of Tory power brokers who tried to ‘bribe’ Mr Farage into withdrawing before the 2019 election by offering him a knighthood, ten peerages for his Brexit Party members and influence over the Government’s ‘policy direction’. 

Mr Farage’s response was to text a ‘very rude’ message to Boris.

Later that day, Boris recorded a video clip making promises over the delivery of Brexit which satisfied Mr Farage sufficiently to withdraw his candidates from all Conservative seats, which had the effect of doubling Boris’s majority on polling day.

Now Mr Sunak is reaping the whirlwind from that process: the leaders of Reform UK, the successor organisation to the Brexit Party, say that the fraught negotiations and the failure of the Conservatives to effectively implement Brexit, has ‘poisoned all trust’ between them and helps to drive a determination to wipe them out at this year’s general election.

‘Our experience in 2019 showed us that the Conservative Party cannot be trusted. They are totally devoid of principle and corrupt to the core,’ Mr Farage told The Mail on Sunday. 

‘They combined the carrot of bribery with the stick of intimidation. They seem to think that is acceptable behaviour’.

As the deadline for registering candidates neared in November 2019, Mr Smith met Richard Tice, who now leads Reform, in a nondescript office building south of Westminster Bridge. 

A knighthood was dangled for Farage - because he had already said he wouldn’t accept a place in the Lords - along with peerages for Mr Tice and selected Brexit MEPs if Mr Farage agreed to a public photo-op on the Tuesday declaring his support for Boris.

When Mr Farage’s intermediary, Brexit MEP Robert Rowland, relayed the news to him he demanded that the room be cleared.

‘I was told that no-one had ever heard me shout that loud,’ Mr Farage said. ‘I sent a very rude message to Boris. He did not respond’.

Mr Tice is also understood to have been separately offered the safe Tory seat of Rutland if he supported Boris.

Allies of Mr Johnson stress that the former prime minister ‘knew nothing’ about the meeting with Mr Smith, the offer of peerages or any other inducements.

One source said that the atmosphere in the meeting with Mr Smith was ‘full of suspicion and mistrust - which turned out to be well-founded’. But the source added: ‘Richard was very clear the issue was about policy not preferment. He wanted to see us out of the EU quickly and cleanly - he wasn’t interested in baubles.’

It is perhaps inevitable that Mr Smith led the attempted shuttle diplomacy. 

In her book, The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson, former culture secretary Nadine Dorries identified him as a key part of a cabal, which also included Levelling Up Secretary Mr Gove and Mr Johnson’s former adviser Dominic Cummings, who plotted to give Boris a large enough majority to deliver Brexit - and then plotted to remove him when he ‘won too big’ for them to control him.

Reform has now closed to within 5 per cent of the Tories and is on course to deny the party dozens of seats. 

But this time, a pre-election deal seems unlikely: Mr Tice has described the notion as ‘absolute b******s’, with the only negotiations being conducted with individual Tory MPs to discuss their possible defections.

A Reform party source said: ‘The 2019 deal could not be repeated because the trust has gone.

'I mean, there wasn’t much trust then - but there is absolutely none now, We agreed to it then because we hated the idea of a "rainbow alliance" Government of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, the SNP and the Liberal Democrats which would frustrate Brexit. But, in classic fashion, Boris let us down. 

'Once he had his stonking majority, with our help, he could have gone back to Brussels and renegotiated Theresa May’s deal. But he didn’t. And all those candidates we stood down found it hard to take’.

A Tory party source said: ‘Dougie was the main player in this process. It was never clear whether Boris knew, or suspected, what was going on, but he knew enough to film that video which gave Farage the room to climb down.'

But it was definitely a time of bribes and threats. There was a lot of tension on the Farage side, because the clock was ticking down to the moment where he had to decide whether to keep all his candidates in place and risk handing the country over to Jeremy Corbyn and a potential swathe of Liberal Democrats winning power because the Brexit Party would have split the Tory vote in the West Country.

A Reform Party source said that Boris’s video clip, in which he promised to deliver Brexit within a year, fulfilled Farage’s conditions because it met the red line of no regulatory alignment with EU laws.

In response, two days before nominations closed, Mr Farage announced that his party would not stand in the 317 seats won by the Tories in 2017. 

He said that he had been satisfied by the signalling of a ‘big shift of position’ in his approach to Brexit, by pledging not to extend the transition period that would follow the UK’s departure from the EU.

Speculation continues to swirl about Mr Farage’s intentions. Former prime minister Liz Truss, who was a prominent guest at his recent 60th birthday party and is helping to build a Faragiste movement of ‘popular conservatives’, the so-called PopCons, denies Westminster rumours that Mr Farage promised her: ‘I’m coming back’. 

But his friends do not rule out a final dramatic bid to win a Commons seat by standing in Clacton, or taking a place in the Lords as part of a post-election deal with a like-minded Tory leader such as Priti Patel or Suella Braverman. Equally, he could take a job in America - he is close friends with Donald Trump - and watch the Tory civil war from afar.

He told the MoS that he will make his final decision after he returns from a ten-day trip he is about to embark on to the US, giving him time to digest Thursday’s local election results.

Mr Smith declined to comment.