With the inevitability of night following day, former Reform MP Rupert Lowe has launched a new party – and it’s already attracting support from some of the worst people on the far right fringes of politics.
Lowe, the Great Yarmouth MP who fell out with Nigel Farage after describing Reform as “a protest party led by the Messiah”, has announced the creation of Restore Britain, a national party even further to the right than his previous one.
The launch was announced with a bonkers social video featuring images from Britain’s past, including red squirrels, the opening credits of Dad’s Army, World War II bomber planes, the theme music to Grandstand and, bizarrely, Test Card F, the BBC image of a girl playing noughts and crosses with a clown.
Were one of Restore Britain’s policies to be reinstating the test card it would be no more esoteric than those it has already announced. These include allowing anyone to kill burglars, abolishing HR departments in private firms, banning the trans pride flag, giving parents “the right to take their children out of school for a limited number of days per year without getting fined” and outlawing halal and kosher food as “in Britain, we treat our animals with care” (Lowe recently had his labrador shot dead by his gamekeeper).
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Lowe has already won the support of Elon Musk, who posted on his X platform: “Join Rupert Lowe in Restore Britain, because he is the only one who will actually do it!”. Musk was once very supportive of Reform – while Farage has always liked having something to his right to make his own party look relatively mainstream, he might not appreciate it if some of Musk’s millions he once thought was coming his way ended up in Restore Britain’s coffers.
While welcoming Musk’s backing, though, Lowe may wish to downplay some of those who have already thrown their weight behind his start-up. Among those at his launch event in Great Yarmouth was Lucy White, a GB News contributor accused of racism last year after arguing that the House of Commons deputy speaker, Nusrat Ghani, should not be allowed in Parliament because she was born in Pakistan.
Other backers include Steve Laws, associated with the Patriotic Alternative group, who posted on X “RUPERT LOWE IS OUR LEADER”, and Callum Barker, a former Homeland activist best known for leading ani-migrant protests outside an Essex hotel. Sam Wilkes, an online conspiracy theorist who posts videos defending the legacy of Adolf Hitler under the alias Zoomer Historian, said “We’re with Lord Protector Lowe” and “Rupert Lowe is our Ian Smith” (a reference to the Rhodesian leader and not Harold Bishop from Neighbours, presumably).
“We have a bloody good chance of winning the next election,” said Lowe at his launch. It seems unlikely – but what with Restore Britain and Advance UK, the party set up by ex-Reform deputy leader Ben Habib after he too fell out with Farage, the Turquoise Tories will soon have more spin-offs than Star Wars.
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