Nigel Farage has put Boris Johnson's Conservative party on notice saying he is ready to return to front-line politics and campaign for the UK to adopt a tougher stance on China.

He said the Chinese government had shown its "true colours" since the coronavirus pandemic with an increasingly aggressive diplomacy, including its treatment of Australia and the 80 per cent tariff imposed on barley, widely viewed as a retaliatory measure for Australian demands for an international inquiry into the pandemic. "The cat’s out of the bag, we now know what we're dealing with," Farage said

"If Trump wasn't there who would take the lead on this?" Farage said. "Certainly not, certainly not Joe Biden. And Australia on its own is going to find it very difficult to do it; Boris Johnson's going to need a hell of a lot of kicking to do it; and the European Union are, I'm afraid just appeasers, of China at every level. "In terms of stopping China effectively taking over the world - whatever people think his faults may be - the reelection of Trump is actually central to it."

Asked if Brexit had left the UK exposed to China, with Brexiteers keen to strike new trade deals once outside the single market, Farage said the opposite was true. "In fact, if we stayed in the European Union we would have kept ourselves more beholden to China because that's what the EU intend to do."