In the far right’s warped and exaggerated fantasy world, one of two brave men stand between Britain and Andy Burnham’s Muslamic socialist hordes sweeping the country on a fleet of publicly owned buses. It’s time to choose your fighter.
In one corner, we have Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader who casually accepted a £5m gift from a Thailand based crypto-billionaire because he thought he was a special boy. In the other is Rupert Lowe, leader of even-further-right Restore Britain, who recently told Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg on GB News he would be “a true Tory if I were anything”. These are the last great hopes of the British working class, if you believe people with names like MarmiteReverieBrit with 500,000 followers on X.
Restore Britain was the result of a messy split between Lowe and Farage that made the shenanigans in Your Party look like gentle banter. Lowe’s party has since attracted the support of the world’s richest man Elon Musk and some of Britain’s most openly racist influencers and activists, and has cornered the market for saying uncompromisingly rightwing things that bait social media algorithms. The deep personal animus between Farage and Lowe is now playing out with potentially national significance.
When the Makerfield byelection was called, Reform supporters were looking forward to a free hit. Lose and Reform can write off the Andy Burnham factor as an exception which doesn’t interrupt the narrative of the party’s progress. But win and the prize would be enormous: it could vanquish the one Labour figure who might win a general election against Farage.
A spanner has been thrown in the works, however, in the shape of Restore. An early poll for the byelection puts Burnham narrowly in the lead of Reform, with Restore on a not insignificant seven points – enough to hand Burnham the win in Makerfield, opening the King of the North’s path to coronation as leader of the Labour party and potentially stopping prime-minister-in-waiting Farage in his tracks.
The stakes are genuinely high, but filtered through the eyes of far-right headbangers, things are coming to an apocalyptic head. Depending on your chosen fighter, either Farage or Lowe will save Britain from savagery and, by standing in his way, the other is the most dastardly traitor since Alan Carr.
As a result, rightwing media outriders and racist influencers you’ve never heard of – but who have social media followings numbering hundreds of thousands – are now engaged in an epic online pie fight. As the squirty cream settles before the next round, let’s grab a spoon and assess the damage.
Setting the general tone of critical friendship, culture war bore Brendan O’Neil wrote an article in Spiked!, in which he berated “Restore’s nerds nicking votes from Reform and then gloating about it on X because everything’s a fucking joke to them.” Steam visibly coming out of his ears, he called Lowe’s party “a virtual refuge for the socially inept”, adding with the panache of a narky teenager who has been sent to his room: “Its virtual fanbase is hands down the gayest political movement in Britain” due to “homoerotic AI meme[s] of a sexed-up Lowe about to do battle with the Muslims. Get a room, lads.”
Boris Johnson fan, former Tory minister and now Reform supporter Nadine Dorries asked in a column for the Daily Mail, “why is it that Restore has fielded a candidate who, by all accounts, has the intellectual capacity of Katie Price crossed with Rebekah Vardy?” and called Lowe a “typical posh boy”.
As you might expect, the discourse has a sprinkling of conspiracism. According to the Telegraph, there is a common belief among Restore supporters that Farage is “paid opposition”. For his part, Lowe took to one of the dozens of identical, anything-goes YouTube channels to say “there is a danger that Reform is managed opposition. I think the Establishment sort of knows that the reds and the blues may not win, so they need a safety valve.”
Or is it Restore Britain which is actually part of a secret Establishment agenda? TalkTV presenter Alex Philips speculated: “I know some Restore fanatics are fooled into thinking Reform is ‘controlled opposition’. I suspect the opposite is true,” pointing to links Lowe has with the Tories which even she admitted might be “circumstantial” as evidence. Look guys, we’ve all had our fun with the controlled opposition thing.
Dorries questioned the Tory connections too, as last year Kemi Badenoch placed Lowe on the prestigious Public Accounts Committee. “Could they be keeping Lowe on the end of a line, dangling carrots because they see him as a useful idiot in an effort to try to suppress the upwards march of Reform?” she wondered.
The infighting has become especially vitriolic on the issue of grooming gangs. The far right opportunistically claims to have a monopoly on caring about the safety of women and girls, but what happens when two separate parties are fighting over that status? Some very undignified point-scoring, is what.
On Saturday, Farage accused Burnham of engaging in a “conspiracy of silence” on the issue. Lowe replied accusing Farage of having broken a promise of delivering his own independent rape gang inquiry. “You did the media rounds and took the credit. Boasted about the headlines. Accepted the political gain. What did you do? Nothing. You delivered nothing. You never mentioned it again. I pushed you to act, you weren’t interested. You broke that promise.”
Lowe has run his own inquiry into grooming gangs, but it has no statutory power. In turn, Farage supporters accused Lowe of using the issue for political gain. “You’ve grifted off victims”, said former Breitbart editor and former Farage advisor Raheem Kassam. “Honestly disgusting”, replied BasilTheGreat, a Restore supporting account that has over 300,000 followers.
Failed Reform candidate Matt Goodwin weighed in, saying Restore “want you to think they are the ‘only ones’ dealing with tough issues like the Pakistani Muslim rape gangs. But this is classic Restore – it’s all smoke and mirrors”. He added: “Only Reform will bring truth and justice on the rape gangs.” When you’re fighting over the one true sword of righteousness, things are bound to get ugly.
Among the many ironies at play is a sense of Reform being hoisted by its own petard. It has used social media to its advantage and been willing to say incendiary things to ratchet the discourse further to the right. It is often said that Labour can’t “out-Reform Reform” and shouldn’t try and beat Farage on his own terms. Nobody had really considered what it would look like if someone actually was out-Reforming Reform.
What it looks like, so far, as an extremely vicious spat and a ratcheting up of rhetoric. The question is whether Farage and Lowe will end up diminished by their infighting and throw the Makerfield byelection, or whether they’ll hurtle ever further to the right and drag the country in their wake.
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