I'm a polling expert – here are the exact areas Nigel Farage is going to hammer the Tories

The Tories have been warned by a polling expert that Reform UK will do “damage” to them in the upcoming General Election, with a risk to dozens of seats.

Earlier today, Nigel Farage revealed he is taking over Reform UK as its new leader, taking the baton from Richard Tice.

He also confirmed a major u-turn and will stand for election in the former UKIP constituency of Clacton, a seat polls suggest he stands a good chance of taking from the Tories despite Boris Johnson winning 70 percent of the vote in 2019.

Mr Farage also pledged to lead Reform UK not just for the election, but for the next five years in a longer-term campaign to become the real opposition to a Labour Government.

Polling expert Sir John Curtice warned Reform splitting the Tory vote is a problem in "many of the seats the Conservatives are actually trying to defend".

He told BBC News: "Even as support for Reform pulls back, despite Mr Farage now being at the helm, you just have to remember Reform did not fight the 319 constituencies that the Conservatives held before 2019.

"They are now going to fight those and Reform is the party to which more 2019 Tory voters are going than they are to any other party.

"They are going to do damage to the Conservatives in seats where the Brexit Party wasn’t on the ballot paper in 2019 - that is, many of the seats the Conservatives are actually trying to defend.”

Sir John also discussed why Reform chose Clacton as the seat Mr Farage will be running in.

He said: "Clacton is the constituency that Douglas Carswell, originally the Conservative MP for the seat, managed to win in a by-election under the UKIP banner - the principal Euro-sceptic party of the time - and then managed to win again in 2015.

"It is one of the most Euro-sceptic parts of the country and given it has voted for UKIP in the past, you can understand why Mr Farage might decide to go there. But it doesn’t lie necessarily in whether Mr Farage does or does not win the seat but the potential implications for the Conservative Party.

The polling expert added: "Five years ago, when Nigel Farage saw support for the Brexit Party fall away, he threw in the towel and withdrew candidates from Conservative seats.

"This time, he’s intervening in the opposite direction. Support for Reform has been holding up. It’s higher than support for the Brexit Party was in 2019 and there is no sign of the Conservatives making any progress.

"Mr Farage is on record as saying he would only go back into politics if he thought there was a serious chance of displacing the Conservative Party as the principal centre-right party in Britain. He has now, we must presume, have concluded that Reform has a chance of doing that."