How seriously should Reform and the Tories take the new “third force” on the British right? Those who avoid X may not be abreast of this development but Rupert Lowe, the erstwhile Reform MP for Great Yarmouth, is busily engaged in 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 the public schools and the City, a red-cheeked countryside type with a plummy voice, is an odd sort of political insurgent. After being elected as part of the Reform UK cohort in the 2024 general election, he could be seen doddering around 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 genuinely novel journey from former Scargill-supporting coal miner to Tory deputy chairman to Nigel Farage acolyte – Lowe seemed like a throwback to the old right-wing of the Tory party: a Maastricht rebel lost in the 21st-century House of Commons (incidentally, he was a Conservative member until 1993, when he left the party over Maastricht).

But now he is at the cutting edge of something new, an openly ethnonationalist politics that thrives mainly on X. The only person of note to ever suggest that Rupert Lowe could become the prime minister of Great Britain happens to be Elon Musk.

After he broke with Nigel Farage and was expelled from Reform, Lowe aired grievances on X and moaned to anyone who would listen about how badly he had been treated, all the while his online output became more hard-line in its expletive-laden contempt for those he considers “not English”. This was part of the breakup with Farage, who likes to say that he has been British politics’ most successful bulwark against the real headbangers of the far-right.

Two weeks ago, Lowe’s anger culminated in 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 UK, to make the country into something new while settling the legacies of successive waves of immigration and cultural integration. Lowe wants to restore, to return it to a past that will be recognisable by the ethnic composition of these islands after a programme of brutal mass deportations which fly in the face of the basic principles of natural justice.

Some are content to laugh at Lowe and his current, piddling efforts: he announced on Wednesday that he would only stand a handful of candidates in the May local elections, all of them in his Great Yarmouth constituency area. “Restoring Britain starts in Great Yarmouth, then we take it national. That’s the plan,” he told his followers on social media in an Alan Partridge style flourish. But despite these remarkably parochial aims, and with a slate of fewer than a dozen council candidates, Lowe insisted this first electoral test for Restore Britain would be “history in the making”.

Lowe said: “We are simply not ready to field thousands of qualified candidates.” He said that doing so would mean lots of candidates would not be “properly vetted”. You might ask the question, what is he so worried about? What has he gleaned about the people supporting him?

But establishing a political party and fielding barely any candidates fits in with the general novelty of Lowe’s enterprise, which is still a largely online phenomenon. It means that Restore can still be polled without facing the public. In the polls it can suck up bits of the right unsatisfied with Farage or those seeking a new vehicle separate from existing, explicitly neo-fascist outfits. Lowe now regularly cites one poll, that he commissioned, putting his party on 8 per cent. The main effect of this, in fact the only effect since he is standing barely any candidates for election, is to potentially weaken Reform.

The conspiracy theory among some Reformers is that Lowe’s enterprise is an elaborate Tory plot to undermine Reform by siphoning votes off to its right – doing to Farage what Farage has been doing to Conservative leaders for most of his career. A little elaborate, perhaps. Those who see the once mighty Tory operation up close now quip that gone are the days when they could pull off such Machiavellian schemes. And yet Lowe has had contact with senior Tories since his crash out from Reform last year. One former Cabinet minister told me at last year’s Tory conference that they were in regular contact with him. Their aims quite plausibly align. If Lowe’s main goal now is to hurt Nigel Farage, he may be in with a chance of succeeding.

[Further reading: The psephelogical consequences of Mr Trump]

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