Farage deciding to challenge Labour-held seats may not necessarily be a good thing for Johnson and his Conservatives
The main issue with why Farage has stood down from Conservatives-held seats is that he doesn't want to split the Leave vote and cause more of a fracture in achieving Brexit.
However, in deciding to challenge Labour-held seats, it may not entirely be a good thing for the Conservatives - despite the optics suggesting that it boosts their chances of a majority parliament in the coming election.
If Farage intends to only challenge seats in which the Conservatives have no chance of winning, that's fair enough and that will help.
However, if he also challenges seats in which are marginally held by Labour but strongly contested by the Conservatives, then he could potentially risk derailing Johnson's election bid in some other way.
Going back to the reasoning above, the whole point here is that Farage's Brexit Party shares the same sort of voters (for the most part) as Johnson's Conservatives.
As such, in Labour-held seats that are closely contested, Farage may end up hurting the Conservatives more than actually help them at the end of the day.
There will have to be a lot of number crunching and situational analysis involved here, but I think the overall sentiment may not be as good as what the optics suggest.
The pound may be rallying on the positive headlines yet but the devil lies in the details and I reckon the impact may not be as great as what we're seeing at the moment.
In my view, there's no doubt that the move by Farage is a boost for the Tories but the risk of a hung parliament is still very much present.
