LONDON — Rupert Lowe denies there’s anything personal about his drive to make Restore Britain a nationwide force — and squeeze his rival Nigel Farage from the right.
But there are plenty of reasons to suspect deep rancor between the pair plays a part.
“I don’t work with people who try and send me to prison for nothing. Would you?” Lowe said in a blustery phone call with POLITICO this week — as he ruled out the chance of a pact to unite the fragmented British right.
All eyes are on next week’s Makerfield by-election in which Farage’s Reform hopes to torpedo Labour leadership hopeful Andy Burnham’s chances of making it back into parliament and challenging Prime Minister Keir Starmer for the keys to No. 10 Downing Street.
But the rise of Restore — a hardline anti-immigration outfit that’s caught the approving eye of tech entrepreneur Elon Musk and far-right activist Tommy Robinson — adds another major plot-twist to the June 18 vote.
Lowe, a personally wealthy businessman, was kicked out of Reform earlier this year — and swiftly had criminal allegations leveled against him by his old comrades, although charges were never brought. Now the party he founded — which boasts a huge online presence even as it lacks a major ground-game — is threatening to chip away at a small but potentially crucial segment of the Reform vote.
And it has designs far beyond Makerfield. “We are going to stand somebody in every seat,” Lowe says of the next general election, which is not due until 2029.
Lowe’s national ambitions will alarm Farage’s team, not because they expect Restore to actually elect many MPs, but because Restore’s success could prevent Reform forming the next government. The U.K.’s first-past-the-post electoral system punishes splits between like-minded parties.
Restore has now set up branches in around 550 of the U.K.’s 650 parliamentary constituencies, according to an official granted anonymity to discuss how the party is scaling up. Lowe says they’re “springing up reflexively” and will provide a “springboard” for candidacy.
If Restore does manage to stand a full slate of candidates, research suggests they could deprive Farage’s Reform of around 70 seats — a hammer blow to the Brexiteers’ hopes of a nationwide majority. That’s despite Restore only registering in single digits in national polls.
Luke Tryl, the More in Common pollster behind that work, says that in an “era of fragmented politics” where Reform stands to win many seats by fine margins, a challenger further to the right could have an “outsized effect.”
“The moment you introduce a party siphoning off votes, Reform just lose loads [of seats],” Tryl says. Reform declined to comment for this piece.
Tory turn-off
Restore’s campaigning is already being felt on the ground in Makerfield.
One senior official in the Labour campaign told POLITICO they believe constituency polling putting Restore on 7 percent in the Greater Manchester seat is broadly correct. Part of this, they believe, is Restore picking up a lot of “non-voters, people who haven’t voted since the referendum” on Brexit in 2016.
One problem with Reform being raised on the doorsteps is, the Labour official said, Farage’s embrace of a tranche of former mainstream Conservatives. “Those kind of Tories are a huge turn off to former lifelong Labour voters,” they said.
So far, the Reform strategy has been to try and speak about Restore as little as possible, while running a messaging operation to stress that a vote for Lowe’s team could let Labour win in Makerfield.
POLITICO has observed voters wavering over whether to back Restore or Reform, both in Makerfield and elsewhere in Britain. At a campaign stop for Farage in East London’s Romford market, as May’s local elections loomed, a mum with a pram heckled Farage with chants of “it’s all about Rupert Lowe.” A butcher told the Reform leader “it was either you or Rupert Lowe” — before taking Reform’s anti-Starmer sign and hanging it up on one of his meat hooks.
Andrew Rosindell, who as Romford MP is one of Farage’s more high-profile Conservative recruits, acknowledged the risk of a split in the right-wing vote.
“Rupert Lowe says things that people agree [with], but don’t forget, Rupert Lowe was elected as a Reform MP, so he’s bound to have a similar view to Nigel — but that’s more of a personal fallout between them, which I don’t think I want to get involved in,” the former Tory told POLITICO that same day.
“Ultimately you can’t have a multitude of right-wing parties. You’ve got to try to bring it under Reform, because otherwise you split the vote and risk a Labour, Green, Lib Dem coalition.”
Signs of progress — and controversy
The local elections last month gave the first sign that Lowe’s outfit can trouble Farage’s Reform since the breakaway party’s inception in February.
While Farage dealt the governing Labour Party a bloody nose across the country, Restore-backed candidates managed to win all nine seats they stood for on Norfolk County Council, the only place in which the party chose to run.
Even before that, Lowe appeared to be pressuring Reform to tack right — with Farage announcing plans for “mass deportations” only after Lowe made noise on the issue. Such language has, until recently, been reserved for the extremes of British politics.
But Tryl, the pollster, reckons this kind of pressure risks trapping Reform in a “pincer movement” — where moderate voters essential for getting Farage over the threshold for government are put off by a push further to the right.
Even those who see potential in Lowe’s project have concerns about the far-right support he is attracting. Last week former Farage ally-turned-rival Ben Habib stood down his own right-wing splitter group, Advance UK, in an effort to help Restore.
Habib will be campaigning for Restore in Makerfield this weekend — but he told POLITICO he still has concerns about the party.
For one, Lowe has total ownership of the party. “I don’t see how you can wish to restore the country’s democracy through a dictatorship, it doesn’t make sense to me,” Habib said. And Habib also raises Restore’s “repugnant” support from “ethno-nationalists” like Steve Laws, who’s behind a “Remigration Now” pressure group.
Lowe insisted he does not harbor any similar views, telling POLITICO: “It is again an attempt by people like yourself to spread rumor and mistrust where it is not deserved.” Laws “is very welcome to support Restore Britain,” he adds, but has “no part in our decision-making progress.”
Tommy Robinson, the far-right activist with a history of criminal convictions who Farage has spent his career trying to keep away from his projects, is clearly welcome too.
Lowe praises Robinson’s work on “the rape gang issue” — the racially-charged subject of whether U.K. authorities failed to properly tackle perpetrators of organized child abuse. Restore has held its own shadow “inquiry” to rival the government’s own — and hopes to publish the results of this before Makerfield polling day.
“I think Tommy’s done a very good job on that,” Lowe says. “Whether he’s a member of Restore, you’ll have to ask him. I don’t check the membership every two seconds. I’ve got better things to do.”
Lowe says he won’t be taking the “dictatorial approach” towards the vetting of candidates that he believes other parties take. While Reform grapples with complaints about a string of controversial social media posts by its own Makerfield candidate, Lowe says Restore will forgive past “mistakes” if the “intent is basically correct in its thrust.”
“And we will actually stand by and defend them against this malign media, which has an interest in making sure that the current status quo prevails,” he adds.
It’s clear the media isn’t the only malign force Lowe sees out there. When asked about his split with Reform, Lowe stresses: “You need to be clear, I did not precipitate that situation.”
He reels off a list of grievances about how Reform “politically attempted to assassinate me,” peddling “lies” and “accusations of early onset dementia” as well as “accusations of bullying, of threatening to hit people.”
“All a load of complete and utter codswallop,” Lowe says.
Farage, he adds, “tried to destroy my political career. He’s done it to a lot of people, and most of them, he’s buried. He has not done that to me.”