French far-right leader Jordan Bardella to address Reform UK party conference

Speech part of effort to strengthen National Rally party’s international ties before Marine Le Pen’s presidential bid

The French far-right leader Jordan Bardella is to give a speech at Reform UK’s party conference in Birmingham next week as he attempts to boost international ties before Marine Le Pen ’s bid for the French presidency next spring.

Le Pen’s far-right, anti-immigration National Rally (RN) is high in the polls and she is predicted to reach the final round of the French presidential race in May.

Le Pen launched her presidential campaign this summer despite a Paris appeal court upholding her conviction for being at the centre of the embezzlement of more than €2.8m (£2.4m) in European parliament funds and funnelling the money into her party between 2004 and 2016. She has appealed against the ruling to France’s highest court.

Le Pen, the RN’s parliamentary leader in the National Assembly and the party leader from 2011 to 2021, has said she will run for president on a joint ticket with Bardella as prime minister. Under the French political system, the president, who is head of state and has authority on foreign policy and national security, directly appoints a prime minister as head of government to run domestic affairs.

Bardella’s team confirmed that he would travel to Birmingham to address the Reform UK conference next Friday and hold a joint press conference with the Reform leader, Nigel Farage.

Bardella, 30, and Farage, 62, held a private lunch in London at the end of last year, where they discussed anti-immigration policy.

“Nigel Farage is a great patriot, he has fought all his life to defend his country’s independence, freedom and sovereignty,” Bardella said after his talks with Farage. He said he hoped the Reform leader would be Britain’s next prime minister.

Bardella said: “We could perhaps tomorrow be at the head of our respective governments, in a situation where he would be leading a British government and me at the head of a French government. So we’re preparing our future cooperation.

“I think that we share a joint determination to stop immigration – to protect our countries from a wave of immigration to Europe that is just beginning. We’re conscious that our people want to protect their identity, and I think we can find extremely pragmatic and extremely firm solutions to control immigration together.”

Bardella, who is a member of the European parliament and president of RN, has supported tighter police cooperation between London and Paris on people crossing the Channel on small boats but wanted migrants returned to their countries of origin, not to France .

Le Pen has had a thorny relationship with Farage. In 2014, when he was the Ukip leader and her party was still called Front National (FN), they were competing to be seen as the EU’s leading Eurosceptics in European parliament elections. That year, Farage rejected a suggestion from Le Pen that Ukip could join a European parliament coalition with the FN, saying there was “prejudice and antisemitism” in Le Pen’s party. She rejected his comments, saying Farage had made “defamatory” and “extremely disagreeable declarations” in an attempt to boost his popularity.

The Reform UK leader was recently re-elected in a byelection in Clacton. However, parliament’s standards commissioner immediately reopened an investigation into whether he should have declared a series of gifts provided to him shortly before the last general election. These include a £5m personal gift from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne , first revealed by the Guardian, and further financial support from his friend and convicted fraudster George Cottrell.