How seriously should Reform and the Conservatives take the new “third force” on the British right? X-shuns may not be on board with this development, but Rupert Lowe, the former Reform MP for Great Yarmouth, is busily building a new political party to challenge Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch from the far right.
Lowe, a former owner of Southampton FC, a product of public schools and City, a ruddy-cheeked country bloke with a gruff voice, is an odd sort of political insurgent. After being elected as part of the UK Reform group in the 2024 general election, he could be seen wandering the parliamentary corridors with his reading glasses perched on the end of his nose or hanging around his neck on a piece of string. Unlike, say, Lee Anderson – who had gone on a veritable romantic journey from former coal miner supporting Scargill, to Conservative deputy leader, to Nigel Farage aide – Lowe seemed like a throwback to the old right wing of the Tory party: a Maastricht rebel lost in the 21st century (in Conservative House of Commons, 193, at Common Room, 19,3). when he left the party over Maastricht).
But now he’s on the cutting edge of something new, an overtly ethno-nationalist politics that thrives largely on X. The only person known to ever suggest that Rupert Lowe could become Prime Minister of Great Britain is Elon Musk.
After falling out with Nigel Farage and being kicked out of Reform, Lowe aired grievances on X and whined to anyone who would listen about how badly he had been treated, all the while his online output grew harsher in his expletive-laden disdain for those he deems “un-English”. This was part of the split with Farage, who likes to say that he has been the most successful bulwark of British politics against the true heads of the far right.
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Two weeks ago, Lowe’s anger came to a head with the registration of a new political party: Restore Britain. The choice of verb was intended as a credential of Lowe’s more hardline conservative approach. Farage wants to reform the United Kingdom, to turn the country into something new, resolving the legacy of successive waves of immigration and cultural integration. Lowe wants to bring it back, to return it to a past that will be recognized by the ethnic makeup of these islands after a program of brutal mass deportations that flies in the face of basic principles of natural justice.
Some are content to laugh at Lowe and his current, slow efforts: he announced on Wednesday that he would field just a handful of candidates in May’s local elections, all in his Great Yarmouth constituency. “Rebuilding Britain starts in Great Yarmouth, then we take it national. That’s the plan,” he told his social media followers in an Alan Partridge-style flourish. But despite these extremely small aims, and with a shortlist of less than a dozen candidates for the councils, Lowe insisted this first electoral test for Restoring Britain would be “history in the making”.
Lowe said, “We’re just not ready to field thousands of qualified candidates.” He said doing so would mean many candidates would not be “properly vetted”. You may ask the question, what is he so worried about? What has he collected from the people who support him?
But creating a political party and fielding almost no candidates fits with the overall novelty of Lowe’s enterprise, which is still largely an online phenomenon. It means Restore can still be polled without facing the public. In the polls it could absorb parts of the right disaffected with Farage or those looking for a new vehicle separate from the existing, explicitly neo-fascist outfits. Lowe now regularly quotes a poll he commissioned putting his party at 8 percent. The main effect of this, in fact the only effect since he barely has a candidate for election, is the possible weakening of Reform.
The conspiracy theory among some reformers is that Lowe’s venture is an elaborate Tory plot to undermine Reform by drawing votes to its right – doing to Farage what Farage has done to Tory leaders for most of his career. A bit elaborate, perhaps. Those with a close eye on the once-mighty Tory operation now say the days when they could pull off such Machiavellian schemes are over. And yet Lowe has had contact with the Old Tories since his break from Reform last year. A former cabinet minister told me at last year’s Conservative conference that they were in regular contact with him. Their goals are quite reliably aligned. If Lowe’s main aim now is to hurt Nigel Farage, he may have a chance of succeeding.
(Further reading: The psychological consequences of Mr. Trump)
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