The vanity of Rupert Lowe

The right of British politics is having its Your Party moment. Rupert Lowe MP, ousted last year from Reform UK following a spectacular falling out with Nigel Farage, has re-launched Restore Britain, turning his erstwhile ‘political movement’ into a fully fledged political party, positing itself as the purer, ‘patriotic’ alternative to the supposed sell-outs and subversives around Farage.

Restore Britain is what happens when you confuse online buzz with actual electoral support. Just as a decade or so ago, the left convinced itself that Twitter was Britain, only for 14 years of Tory rule and Brexit to ensue, now Very Online rightists with more mobile data than sense are making the same mistake on X. They have memed themselves into believing that not only will Restore Britain make inroads at the next election, but also that Rupert Lowe could be our next prime minister.

It’s adorable. It reminded me of when Owen Jones said Labour had the 2015 election in the bag because Russell Brand had Ed Miliband on his YouTube channel. Only this is infinitely more mental, because most people in 2015 knew who Russell Brand and Ed Miliband were. The same cannot be said for Lowe now. While he may boast north of 600,000 X followers, when he was booted out of Reform last year, pollsters JL Partners showed a photo of him to voters and found that 86 per cent didn’t know him from Adam, including 71 per cent of Reform voters. His profile has undoubtedly grown since then. A poll commissioned by Restore claims 10 per cent of the public would be tempted by a party led by him. But even if those numbers were borne out at the next election – and that’s a monumental ‘if’ – this would, at best, make Restore a potential spoiler party for Reform, in an election expected to come down to the tightest of margins, in the presumably few seats Restore could manage to get any kind of ground game together.

When people talk of Lowe’s rise, they are talking almost entirely about social media. The former Southampton FC boss was one of the less prominent Reformers elected in 2024. Then Elon Musk began giddily retweeting him, leading Lowe to get so carried away with himself he began openly beefing with his then party leader, saying Farage was leading a ‘protest party’ in ‘messianic’ fashion. The manner of Lowe’s expulsion from Reform was rather shady. He was accused of making death threats to then chairman Zia Yusuf, which were apparently so terrifying it took Yusuf three months to report them. (The Crown Prosecution Service decided not to press charges, citing insufficient evidence.) Since then, he has become the standard bearer of those cranky enough to believe Reform has gone woke.

The critique, such as it is, goes something like this. Reform is soft on illegal immigration, despite pledging to deport up to 600,000 illegal migrants in the first parliament alone. It is also soft on radical Islam, purely, it seems, because British Muslims – like Yusuf and London mayoral candidate Laila Cunningham – hold prominent roles. That both Yusuf and Cunningham support banning the burqa, and are vocal critics of Islamic sectarianism, isn’t enough for those who want Muslims, regardless of their views, banned from office.

They are also upset about so many Tories flocking to Reform, even though high-profile defections have been an essential ingredient of any insurgent party’s story, from the rise of Labour to the breakaway of the SDP. While many Reformers were scratching their heads about Nadine Dorries, president of the Boris Johnson fan club, or Jake Berry, who was on TV defending Net Zero all of five minutes ago, the same can’t really be said for Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman or Danny Kruger – who, whatever else you might say about them as politicians, are clearly on the same teal-blue page.

‘At the next General Election, we will put forward hundreds of qualified candidates from outside the existing political establishment’, said Lowe on Friday, suggesting Reform are the Tories 2.0. ‘They will not be failed ministers. They will not be politicians.’ I can’t help wondering who these people are going to be. Those who couldn’t clear Reform’s vetting procedure? He might think Reform has become a retirement home for failed Tories, but if it’s not careful, Restore will become a clown car for people too batty or racist for Reform.

I know there are many people who like Lowe because they see him as another noble crusader against grooming gangs, mass migration and all the other very real ills of multicultural Britain. But he has also turned the heads of the racist freaks who just want to deport everyone who isn’t white British. People like Steve Laws, a ‘remigration’ influencer, who has offered Restore Britain his enthusiastic support, calling on his fellow travellers to get involved. Paul Golding, of BNP offshoot Britain First, has also rowed in behind. I doubt they’ll be on the candidates list. Lowe hasn’t gone as far as them himself. But his dark, plodding diatribes – he once said we should detain illegal migrants on an island and ‘let the midges do the rest’ – clearly appeal to more hardcore ethnonationalists, who are electoral kryptonite.

Almost a year on from his break with Nigel Farage, everything Lowe once said about Reform is much more true of himself. If Farage was ‘messianic’, and leading a ‘protest party’, what does that make Restore Britain, built entirely around one MP and his X account, who clearly fancies himself as Britain’s white-steed-riding saviour? A party for whom the best-case – though still unlikely – scenario electorally would be depriving Reform UK of votes, and risking some Lab-Green-Lib Frankenstein coalition. All so he can bathe in those sweet retweets. The vanity of it all would make Zarah Sultana blush.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_.