Reform UK has put paid to the rumours surrounding Liz Truss joining the party after she refused to rule it out on Sunday.
The ex-prime minister was asked whether she would join Nigel Farage's party at a fringe event at CPAC Australia, the country's largest gathering of the conservative right.
Facts4EU’s Australian correspondent, who witnessed the exchange, tells GB News that Ms Truss initially avoided addressing the host's question directly, saying: “In Britain, it’s feeling existential. It is feeling existential about whether or not our country remains like it is, or it falls apart. This is how bad it is.
“People have given up on the main political parties,” she went on to say, before adding, “Neither party has stood up to the Globalist blob.
“Those forces are very powerful, they’re very dominant in Britain, and we are seeing now a popular uprising against them."
Liz Truss refused to rule out joining the ranks at a conservative event on Sunday
|YouTube
When pressed by Rowan Dean, Editor-in-Chief of The Spectator Australia, on whether she would jump ship, Ms Truss paused and gave a nervous chuckle.
This prompted Mr Dean, who is also a co-host on Sky News Australia, to declare, “I’ll take that as a yes”, before telling the crowd, “You heard it here first”.
To which Ms Truss replied: “My point about Nigel Farage, who is the bookie’s favourite to be next Prime Minister of Britain - If it is the case that he ends up in Number 10 and the system doesn’t change, if the bureaucrats remain the same, if all the Blairite laws stay in place; the human rights act, the equality act… Nothing will change.
“So, what my obsession is, is how do we achieve a counter-revolution in Britain?”
Clarifying her position on Reform, Truss said: “I see myself as being on the front line of the counter-revolution”, before adding, with a mischievous laugh: “Exactly what role I will take, we will see."
At no stage in the interview - despite being pressed on the point - did the UK’s former prime minister rule out working with Nigel Farage.
When GB News approached Reform for comment, a spokesperson said: "Liz Truss will not be joining Reform UK."
Ms Truss's spokesperson referred us to an interview she did with the New Statesman, where she was asked the same question.
She told the reporter: “I’m not thinking about those things.”
Speculation first swirled around the former PM's defection after her one-time party chairman, Sir Jake Berry, made the jump in July.
Liz Truss's one-time party chairman, Sir Jake Berry, made the jump in July
| GB NEWSHe became the fourth former Tory MP to join Mr Farage's party in a matter of weeks, following David Jones, Ross Thomson and Anne Marie Morris.
Then, former Tory culture secretary Nadine Dorries defected to Reform UK in September. The most significant defection would come days later when the first sitting Conservative MP, Danny Kruger, made the jump.
While some hail the slew of Tory defections as a sign that the party is professionalising, others fear history repeating itself.
"I do not embrace his [Nigel Farage] policy of accepting boatloads of senior Tories into Reform, wrote Kelvin MacKenzie in his column.
Mr Farage has consistently rejected the claim that he's leading the Conservative Party by a different name.
“There is no pact, there is no deal. We’re not the Conservative Party. We’re not Conservative-lite. We’re not Tory-lite," he said back in March.
In fact, Reform has reportedly set up a dedicated defections unit to vet Labour and Conservative politicians "looking to save their own skin" as the party leads opinion polls.
"We're very, very conscious of that," Reform MP for South Basildon and East Thurrock James McMurdock told GB News in February.