The "Reform UK" party now has more members than the British Conservatives, its leader Nigel Farage said, quoted by the BBC and BTA.
A digital counter on Farage's party website shows that its membership has surpassed the figure of 131,680 announced by the Conservative Party earlier this year. According to the counter, "Reform" has 134,283 members.
Farage thanked the people who helped his party "make history" and said that "Reform" is now the "real opposition" in the country. "The youngest party in British politics has just overtaken the oldest political party in the world," Farage wrote on the social network "Ex".
Its chairman Zia Yusuf said "Reform" had broken the "Tory's century-old stranglehold on the centre-right spectrum of British politics".
Earlier this year, the Conservative Party said it had 131,680 members eligible to vote for a new party leader to replace Rishi Sunak. This is the lowest number of Tory members in history and a significant drop compared to the internal election for a new leader in 2022, when the Conservatives had about 172,000 members, the BBC points out.
The Labour Party is the largest party in the country, but its membership has also fallen below 400,000 for the first time since 2015.
Comparing the number of party members can be difficult because there is no single definition of membership or way of measuring membership, says a document from the library of the House of Commons, the lower house of the British parliament.