Might Rupert Lowe – the Reform MP now sat on the backbenches after publicly criticising the Dear Leader – be in line for a shock transfer to the Conservatives?
Lowe, the MP for Great Yarmouth, had been reportedly mulling over a move to Advance, the even harder right party formed by another Reformer to have fallen foul of Nigel Farage’s tall poppy syndrome, Ben Habib.
Suggested Reading
GB News’s random local was a Reform councillor
But now the whispers in Westminster are that with much of her party opting to go the opposite way, Kemi Badenoch is eyeing an unusual Reform-to-Tory switch. Conservative whips have made the decidedly odd decision to gift one of their prized places on the Public Accounts Committee, one of the Commons’s most prestigious scrutiny bodies, to Lowe.
Committee places are decided by parties’ sizes in the Commons and, as an independent, Lowe would not be expected to get within 50 miles of one. The Tories say that “having someone who has run a business and shares our values on cutting waste” on the committee will help it scrutinise public spending, but the large number of Tory backbenchers currently twiddling their thumbs in Parliament might wonder why that didn’t apply to them.
Lowe has been flirting with the Tories in recent months, appointing Susan Hall, the leader of the Conservatives in the London Assembly, to the advisory board of his new political organisation that promises to “carpet-bomb the cancer of wokery” and wants to send hundreds of thousands of Londoners with the legal right to live in the capital back to their countries of birth.
Most popular
Paul Marshall, the man who owns the right
Matt Goodwin’s fall into the abyss
Student antisemitism and the socialism of fools
Why Trump should never be given the Nobel peace prize
