Rupert Lowe's sim-plistic approach to counting migrants

Rupert Lowe, the independent MP for Great Yarmouth too bonkers even for Reform, has been doing some digging into the true figure for the UK’s population – admittedly by using a rather blunt method.

“I’ve been trying to estimate the UK’s true population. Official estimates have it at 69.3 million. I believe that is way off…,” he wrote conspiratorially on, inevitably, X.

And how! After submitting a written question to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology – one of an incredible 2,101 he has pinged off since being elected, to no little cost to the taxpayer – Lowe discovered that “the number of active mobile phone subscriptions in the UK was 91 million as of the end of September 2025”.

That’s an increase of 895,000 – or one per cent – over the previous year, and Lowe has only one possible answer as to why the 91m figure is so much bigger than 69.3m: they’re all being used by illegal immigrants.

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“Current estimates of the illegal migrant population are SO wrong. It is millions out,” he wrote. “I’m going to explore this further, and continue urging Government to do the same. So far, they have refused my requests.

“There are FAR more people living in the country than the authorities realise. The size of our illegal migrant population is VAST. They all must be deported.”

It is of course possible, albeit incredibly unlikely, that there are 21 million undocumented migrants living in the UK. Slightly more possible, though, is that huge numbers of people possess more than one device containing a SIM card, including separate phones for personal use and work, tablets with 5G subscriptions, smartwatches and data SIMs in cars. Then there are the facts that smart meters carry SIMs and an increasing number of vending machines are cellular-connected.

Lowe did briefly consider that, but decided that “not that many” people have more than one phone (even the phone companies say the number of connections equates to 127% of the population), while of course “millions of children won’t [have a phone], nor will some elderly people”. All of which suggests he hasn’t met many children or elderly people in the last decade.