The Telegraph turns on Rupert Lowe’s race rhetoric – but who triggered it?

At the core of the row is a column Heath wrote last week taking exception at “Rupert Lowe’s repugnant dance with white nationalism”. 

Heath was urging Reform and Nigel Farage to reject Restore’s obsession with demographic change in Britain, saying Lowe “appears to be obsessed with race, not merely immigration”, centring this on a claim that “white Britons will become a minority by 2063”.

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Perhaps unsurprisingly given Heath’s seniority, the Telegraph machine has swung in behind him. Its online front page on one day last week featured articles headlined “The Britons who are not British, according to Rupert Lowe” – accompanied by a large picture of England men’s football captain Harry Kane – “Rupert Lowe has royal warrant despite refusing to say King is a white Briton” and “Restore co-founder ‘suggested Farage had been bought by Jews’”. It’s war.

Heath might find himself wondering, though, where Rupert Lowe got his oddly specific claim about the UK’s demographics from – why does Lowe believe that white Britons will be a minority by 2063?

Thankfully, Rats in a Sack is on hand to save Heath some research time: the claim originates from blogger and failed Reform candidate Matt Goodwin, whose analysis relies upon an assumption that only children born in Britain, to two parents who are each also white Britons born in Britain, would ever tick the “white British” form on a census. 

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Even one Irish, German or French parent or grandparent would, in his logic, be enough to make someone tick “white other”. Goodwin’s nonsensical definition, which excludes the King, Winston Churchill and many other notable Brits, has long been ridiculed.

How, then, did it reach such prominence, Heath might wonder. Happily, we can help: it was first published in the Telegraph, in June of last year. Goodwin’s research was prominently covered, under the headline “White British people will be a minority in 40 years, report claims”.

That article was written by Sam Ashworth-Hayes, who left the Telegraph earlier this year to become a senior policy advisor at Reform UK.

So, welcome as it is that Allister Heath has noticed what is happening on Britain’s right, he might have even more power to do something about it than he realised. After all, the demographic obsession is coming from inside the house.