Every so often, a Land Rover Defender pulls up outside the Reform Party’s Makerfield HQ, on an industrial estate in south Wigan, and disgorges a group of largely male political activists.
They shout mildly abusive slogans before posing for photographs waving dark blue placards, which carry the slogan: ‘We’re voting Restore Britain.’ Then they get back in the noisy 4×4 and drive off.
The bizarre spectacle serves as a metaphor for the state of what is arguably the most important by-election in Britain’s recent history.
On paper, the poll, which culminates on Thursday, was expected to be a showdown between Reform and Labour. Victory for the latter would, of course, propel its candidate, Andy Burnham, back to Westminster and on a seemingly unstoppable path to Downing Street.
In practice, something very different has been going on.
For during recent weeks, an astonishing amount of oxygen has been consumed by – and some might argue wasted on – ferocious disputes between Nigel Farage’s party and their rivals in Restore, a hitherto-obscure hard-Right outfit which only came into being last year and is led by the 68-year-old former Reform MP Rupert Lowe.
The effect of this spat is now laid bare in polls, which suggest that the most important by-election in Britain’s modern history will end one of two ways.
If turnout is high, Burnham is likely to win comfortably, perhaps by as much as 10 per cent of the vote. If it’s lower, the race is likely to be much tighter: although he’s still favoured to win (the bookies put his chances at 84 per cent), the margin could be a mere couple of percentage points.
Recent weeks have seen ferocious disputes between Nigel Farage’s party and their rivals in Restore, a hard-Right outfit led by the 68-year-old former Reform MP Rupert Lowe
Lowe has a combined 1.8 million followers across social media sites Facebook and Instagram
Both scenarios will, of course, place Britain on course to being saddled with its most Left-wing Prime Minister in history.
Yet Andy Burnham is unlikely to be carried to victory in Makerfield by tub-thumping socialists. Instead, he will almost certainly owe his success to the unexpected popularity of Restore, the most Right-wing party in the contest.
An internal, constituency-wide Labour poll, which leaked yesterday, set out this unusual state-of-affairs in black and white.
It shows Farage’s candidate, a plumber named Robert Kenyon, on 24 per cent, some 11 points behind Burnham. Restore’s Rebecca Shepherd, a local businesswoman, meanwhile commands the support of 13 per cent of likely voters, more than double the number a few weeks back, and more than enough to hold the effective balance of power.
Were Restore not to exist, Reform might very well hoover up that 13 per cent, placing it on the path to victory. Or, to put things another way, Lowe is doing to Farage what Farage once did to the Tories: eating his lunch.
So how – and why – has this happened? And what has elevated this upstart party, which remains unknown to many voters, and didn’t even exist a year ago, into what is potentially a history-making role?
The answer revolves around an extraordinary tale of middle-aged male egos, a poisonous and at times extremely petty feud, allegations of aggressive behaviour and sexual abuse – as well as an astonishingly clever and effective use of social media.
With the help of a relatively tiny group of aides, led by a former UKIP staffer named Alistair Harrison, Lowe has cultivated enormous followings on X, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, where his accounts are adept at producing viral content, carefully tailored to specific platforms.
Lowe appeals to varying algorithms in a technique observers describe as ‘the many faces of Rupert Lowe’ (pictured with Makerfield’s Restore candidate, Rebecca Shepherd)
The team, some of whom are said to affectionately refer to their boss as ‘Grandpa Simpson’, are adept at creating posts that appeal to varying algorithms in a technique observers describe as ‘the many faces of Rupert Lowe’.
On Facebook and Instagram, where he has a combined 1.8 million followers, political messages and video clips of Lowe laying into civil servants at parliamentary committee meetings are interspersed with picturesque shots of his Gloucestershire farm, with captions such as ‘proper England’.
On X (800,000 followers), he tends to be far feistier and more combative, in keeping with the medium’s argumentative nature. His TikTok (90,000) is even more shouty. Regardless of the platform, much of his content, which has helped Restore acquire a reported 120,000 members, revolves around highly divisive issues such as immigration, crime and reinstating the death penalty.
The party’s policy platform includes meme-friendly measures such as banning the burka, restricting halal and kosher slaughter, and repatriating illegal migrants. Followers recently donated more than £500,000 to a crowd-funding appeal to finance Lowe’s recent unofficial inquiry into grooming gangs.
They have helped him build huge support not just in Britain but also across the pond, where Maga supporters regard him with great affection. Viral posts on X, whose proprietor Elon Musk is an outspoken fan, has seen him paid £26,411.68 from the site’s content creation fund so far this year.
While Lowe is in person impeccably polite and well-mannered –very different from his aggressive persona on X – with centrist views on issues such as agriculture and economics, some of his fruitier positions on other matters have attracted distinctly questionable fans.
They range from former Chelsea captain John Terry (once fined by the FA for racially abusing a fellow player), who recently responded to one of Lowe’s tweets suggesting Britain ‘ban foreigners from claiming benefits’ with the word ‘100%Yes!’, to Steve Laws, a Restore member who runs an organisation called Remigration Now (which calls for the deportation of anyone of non-white heritage) and who has called Hitler ‘very much a misunderstood politician’.
Ironically for a former investment banker who was educated at Radley College, Lowe’s online posts also often lay into the ‘Establishment’, a bracket in which he now seeks to include both Nigel Farage and Reform.
A case in point came this week, when he has uploaded dozens of posts pointing out that the suspect in this week’s attack in Belfast arrived in Britain when Robert Jenrick (who now belongs to Reform) was the Tory immigration minister, and Suella Braverman (ditto) was the Tory home secretary. Some might call that opportunistic, others just politics.
The beef with Nigel Farage’s party is perhaps what motivates Lowe the most. Critics say that Restore isn’t so much a project to get into government and change the country as a campaign fuelled by spite and personal grievance.
Bad feeling dates back 2019, when Lowe – who also made a fortune from a care-homes business, and spent roughly a decade in charge of Southampton Football Club – agreed to stand for Farage’s Brexit Party at the general election.
Having been offered the key marginal seat of Dudley North, he pulled out minutes before nominations closed to allow the Tory candidate a better chance of victory, saying he did not want to split the anti-EU vote putting ‘country before party as it is highly conceivable my candidacy could allow [Jeremy] Corbyn’s . . . candidate to win’.
Farage was seriously put out. But he then quit politics shortly after the election and disbanded the Brexit Party. The incident was soon forgotten, and Lowe, who had been a regular in Eurosceptic circles since the 1990s, was forgiven.
In 2023, Lowe joined Reform. Then languishing at around 4 per cent in the polls, it was being led by businessman Richard Tice. Tice offered Lowe a speaking slot at the party’s spring conference the following February, only for the event at Doncaster Racecourse to descend into another row after he used it to call for Farage to return to front-line politics and replace his host as leader.
The politician also made a fortune from a care-homes business, and spent roughly a decade in charge of Southampton Football Club (pictured with Harry Redknapp in 2004)
A source close to Tice says: ‘It was a stunningly rude thing to say and humiliating for Richard. He actually wanted Nigel to come back, but this was not the place to call for it.’
Tice’s partner and future fiancee Isabel Oakeshott promptly confronted Lowe via text message, only to be subjected to what one witness calls ‘a tirade of abuse. She was basically called a nobody, and told she was just someone’s girlfriend, so should p*** off’.
In any event, Farage did indeed return soon afterwards, leading Reform at the 2024 election. Lowe won a seat in Great Yarmouth, becoming one of the party’s five new MPs.
Within months, however, he was clashing with Farage. ‘Essentially, they are both alpha males with strong views and robust egos,’ is how one Westminster source puts it. ‘Although they agreed on maybe 80 per cent of things, and perhaps even more, neither really does compromise, so Rupert soon became impossible to manage.’
Hostilities spilled into the open last January during a public dispute over whether Reform ought to offer support for Tommy Robinson, the far-Right former leader of the English Defence League who was then serving an 18-month prison sentence for contempt of court.
Lowe had voiced support for Robinson on X. But Farage, who according to insiders ‘knows that you’ll never win an election unless you have a zero-tolerance policy towards former BNP people or the far-Right in general’, used a rally in Leicester to publicly state that his party would have nothing to do with him.
This prompted Elon Musk, a fan of Robinson, to post a message saying: ‘The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.’ He added: ‘I have not met Rupert Lowe, but his statements online . . . make a lot of sense.’
Two months later, things went nuclear when Lowe gave an interview to the Daily Mail’s Andrew Pierce, complaining of Farage’s ‘messianic’ style, stating that Reform was still a ‘protest party’ and declaring that he wasn’t sure Farage could ‘deliver the goods’ and become prime minister.
Farage instantly took to the airwaves, claiming that Lowe’s criticism was ‘utterly and completely wrong’ and adding witheringly: ‘Perhaps he wants to be prime minister. Most people in politics do.’
Two days later, Reform’s then chairman Zia Yusuf and chief whip Lee Anderson released an extraordinary statement saying that they had withdrawn the party whip from Lowe following allegations which ranged from ‘workplace bullying’ to ‘derogatory and discriminatory remarks . . . targeting of female staff [and] threats of physical violence’.
Lowe was then accused of threatening violence against Yusuf, an allegation that was reported to Scotland Yard. Police carried out a lengthy investigation, at one point descending on Lowe’s home and confiscating his shotguns. But no charges were ever filed.
Lowe called the whole thing ‘a malicious attempt to drag my name through the mud’. More than a year down the line, he remains livid that Reform attempted to ‘have me arrested’, saying: ‘It was a character assassination. They were at one point briefing that I had early-onset dementia.’
Farage, for his part, said that in just eight months in Parliament Lowe had ‘managed to fall out with all his parliamentary colleagues in one way or another’, adding: ‘We did our best to keep a lid on things but, in the end, containment strategies invariably fail.’
After a brief spell as an independent, Lowe registered Restore as a political party in March this year. An opportunity for revenge then came at the recent local elections, where it fielded nine candidates for Norfolk County Council. Each of them won, trouncing Reform in the process and showcasing the party’s potential.
In Makerfield, its foot soldiers have so far focused much of their campaign on tearing chunks out of Team Farage, with a degree of success that has similarly dismayed Reform activists.
‘Our campaign against Labour has been positive and grown-up,’ says a local Reform source. ‘We aren’t at each other’s throats and everyone is behaving. But with Restore, things have become toxic. They are throwing mud and some of it’s sticking.’
Another adds: ‘Their people keep turning up at our office and trying to start disputes. At one point, the police were even called.’
There have also been ugly scenes at a nearby pub, the Primrose Carvery, from which various political activists are rumoured to have been barred.
One of the most senior figures in Reform tells me: ‘It’s all nihilism. Vindictive and very nasty.’
Another says that activists are ‘being shipped in from other parts of the country, and lots of them are people we’ve booted out for being too Right-wing’.
Lowe, for his part, insists that Restore isn’t just a protest party but is instead a serious political movement capable of one day winning high office.
‘I think the polls in Makerfield are underestimating us, and we are going to do a lot higher than 13 per cent,’ he told me last night. ‘My intention is to then run a slate of candidates across all constituencies at the next general election. We are tapping into something very real here, and people have had enough.’
The Tories, whose whips mischievously gave Lowe a seat on the Public Accounts Committee, are watching with amusement, in the hope that Restore’s attacks may help them win back support from Reform.
The alternative outcome, however, is the Right now descends into the sort of factionalism that characterised the Left during the 1980s, when Labour splinter groups spent more time arguing with each other than trying to win power, gifting their real opponents 18 long years in office.
Andy Burnham must be laughing his socialist socks off.
