Nigel Farage kicked off his party's local election campaign for Cambridgeshire County Council by being tattooed with a British bulldog and posing with a novelty key to 10 Downing Street. Sitting in the tattoo parlour, the Reform UK leader drew a smile from his party's mayoral candidate for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, Ryan Coogan, who is also standing for election on May 1.

Mr Farage, 60, posed with the stencil tattoo design prior to going under the needle at the Pennyroyal Tattoo Studio in St Neots. The tattoo, which is not permanent, featured a picture of a bulldog with the slogan "Vote Reform" underneath. On March 28, the veteran Eurosceptic rode into the Arena Birmingham on a JCB to announce his party's "most ambitious" local election campaign ever.

Mr Coogan, who is on the campaign trail to take the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority mayoralty from Labour's Dr Nik Johnson, said today: "We've got to entice the retail back in [to the area].

"I'm a businessman. Whatever it takes to get people around a table to get Peterborough thriving is what I'm all about."

The businessman also wants to bring in a Donald Trump-style Department of Government Efficiency, or 'DOGE', into Cambridgeshire's local administration. "It's not quite what they're doing in the States but it works similarly. I'd like to audit everything and work out where money is going", he said.

"Where contractually money can be saved, I'd rather save the money, especially with the debts mounting, than spend it on vanity projects", he told the Peterborough Telegraph.

"If something is genuinely benefitting the electorate then absolutely we need to ensure that it continues.

"The savings are there to be had but it comes from people having an outlet to be able to tell the combined authority where the issues actually lie. It's not top-down it's ground-up", he added.

On March 28, Mr Farage told a 10,000-strong audience in Birmingham at the party's local election campaign launch: "When we win these county councils, we'll send in the auditors, we'll get rid of the fraudulent contracts, we'll cut spending and we'll do our utmost to fulfil all of our promises."

As well as vowing to contest nearly every local council seat in the country, the former UKIP leader told the audience his sights were firmly on the General Election in 2029.

"I came back out of retirement to do this, I'm not mucking about", he said. "I've got one very clear, simple goal and that is that Reform win the next general election and turn this country around."