Who? Before last week, that would have been the response of practically every Brit if you brought up Rupert Lowe, the now-former Reform MP for Great Yarmouth, cast out of the insurgent populist party following allegations of bullying, threats and a spectacular falling out between himself and party leader Nigel Farage. Unless, of course, you were talking to a fan of Southampton FC, where Lowe spent 12 unloved years as chairman, earning him the chant: ‘Swing Lowe, swing Rupert Lowe, swinging from the Itchen Bridge.’
And yet, scrolling through Reform-adjacent sections of X this past week, you’d have thought a mighty oak of British populism had fallen. There have been calls for Farage to step down over his treatment of Lowe. Elon Musk has let it be known he might support a breakaway, Lowe-led challenger to Reform, following Musk’s own falling out with Farage back in January and his subsequent, excitable retweeting of Lowe. Over on hard-right YouTube, a procession of fart-sniffing pseuds are currently insisting that Farage, with his supposed inability to brook dissent or tolerate tall poppies in his party, is ackshually holding Reform back.
Now, there is certainly reason to question Farage’s handling of this. The sequence of events, though bitterly contested by both sides, certainly raises some eyebrows. To those blissfully unaware, it seems to go like this. Reform launched an investigation into claims of bullying in Lowe’s parliamentary and constituency office. Then, after an interview in the Daily Mail was published, in which Lowe criticised Farage for leading a ‘protest party’ in ‘messianic’ fashion, Reform withdrew the whip and reported him to the police over an alleged series of threats against Reform chairman Zia Yusuf, between December and February. You don’t have to be a cynic to wonder how 38-year-old Yusuf could be left so fearful of 67-year-old Lowe that he waited a full three months to call the cops on him.
The newly independent MP not only denies the allegations, he also accuses Reform HQ of giving the media the impression that the bullying allegations were made against him, rather than those who worked in his offices. Or at least not going out of its way to correct them. Unpleasant briefings have also been doing the rounds, accusing Lowe (he says baselessly) of suffering from dementia. Meanwhile, Lowe himself has been rebuked by the KC investigating the bullying claims after he tweeted that she was ‘shocked’ at Reform’s mistreatment of him given there was ‘zero credible evidence’ of guilt. She says she never said this.
Time will tell if this is a grubby stitch-up, a very public mental breakdown or somewhere in between. Lowe deserves due process. But what’s abundantly clear is that the chatter about this ‘scandal’ and its implications on the airwaves and on social media is totally divorced from reality. For one thing, calling Lowe a political nobody isn’t a mean-spirited jibe – it’s an empirical fact. Pollster JL Partners showed a photo of him to voters and found that 86 per cent had no idea who he is, including 71 per cent of Reform voters. And that’s after he’d been plastered over the newspapers for days. The notion he is a profound loss to Reform, or that he’d actually be an upgrade on the pint-glass populist Farage, easily one of the most consequential politicians of his generation, reveals the bubble the online right now lives in. Indeed, Lowe’s ‘huge following’, oft-cited by his fanboys, refers to his almost 350k X followers, which has been boosted in large part by Musk’s endorsement. Many if not most of them probably don’t even live in the UK.
X brain could prove to be as fatal to the right as Twitter brain was to the left. And this runs deeper than confusing online buzz for actual popularity. The slow-curdling feud between Farage and Lowe is also about a growing political divide within Reformworld. On the one side are those like Lowe, who seems to think the freaks in his replies – who have a chub-on for ‘remigration’ and think Tommy Robinson is the English Nelson Mandela – are representative of the British public at large. On the other are those around Farage, who knows that embracing, or playing footsie with, the extremes would be both wrong and electoral Novichok.
It’s worth remembering that the reason Musk turned against Farage and had his head turned by Lowe was that he felt Farage was being too mean about Robinson – a convicted criminal and serial liar whose name is mud with most of the public. Lowe, for his part, has struck a more conciliatory stance, saying that Robinson, while ‘not right for Reform’, should be credited for doing ‘more than anybody else’ to tackle the scourge of grooming gangs. Which will be news to those who were blowing the whistle for years before the EDL came along – and to the victims in the Huddersfield grooming-gangs trial which Robinson nearly collapsed, due to his attention-seeking ‘reporting’ on the case.
Lowe and Farage also disagree over the need for ‘mass deportations’. Lowe talks of little else, while Farage has called it a ‘political impossibility’. (It’s also fraught with moral peril; the Windrush scandal showed us that ethnic-minority Brits, with every right to be here, can easily be swept up in rash, shock-and-awe immigration crackdowns.) But Lowe hasn’t stopped there. There’s a line in that explosive Mail interview in which Lowe talks about how he’d deal with illegal migrants: ‘I would put them in a tented camp with a minimum amount of food. There are islands off the Scottish and English coast where they can be detained. Put them there… and let the midges do the rest.’ These are not the words of someone who is concerned about migration. This is drawing from a very dark well indeed.
There are plenty of things one could criticise about Nigel Farage. But being some kind of crypto-wokester is clearly not one of them. Similarly, his critics are right that Reform cannot be a viable long-term proposition if it remains dominated by one man and run in a top-down, less-than-democratic fashion. But the answer is obviously not to ditch your greatest asset and replace him with a nonentity who spends too much time on his iPhone. These Very Online rightists are as dodgy as they are dim. We would all do well to ignore them.
Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater
