Is Rupert Lowe heading toward the exit?

Though I’m doing the majority of my writing over on X at the moment, the fortunes of the Reform Party are something best reported here, if only for consistency. I’ve not written as much about them lately being that I’ve largely lost interest in them as a party. I’ve said all I really need to say, and everything that follows is just little scraps of vindication. On that particular score, we have a report in the Daily Mail with comments from Rupert Lowe.

Increasingly, Lowe is seen in Reform circles as the MP most likely to take over if Farage was struck by the proverbial No 9 bus. And since the polls show Reform ahead of Labour and the Tories, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he could then be Prime Minister. As it is, the Reform leader is going nowhere. But does Lowe think Farage would make a good PM?

'It's too early to know whether Nigel will deliver the goods,' he replies carefully. 'He can only deliver if he surrounds himself with the right people.

'Nigel is a fiercely independent individual and is extremely good at what we have done so far. He has got messianic qualities. Will those messianic qualities distil into sage leadership? I don't know.'

Lowe is thrilled with Reform's lead in the polls, and predicts they will take more votes from Labour than the Tories. But he is under no illusions about the challenge facing the party under Farage.

'We have to change from being a protest party led by the Messiah into being a properly structured party with a frontbench, which we don't have. We have to start behaving as if we are leading and not merely protesting.

'Nigel is a messianic figure who is at the core of everything but he has to learn to delegate, as not everything can go through one person,' he says in a clear reference to Farage's management style.

'So we have to start developing policy which is going to change the way we govern. I'm not going to be by Nigel's side at the next election unless we have a proper plan to change the way we govern from top to bottom. We can't raise the hopes of people who are so frustrated with the way we are governed and then flunk it.'

Lowe has won considerable admiration over the last year, being (probably) the most effective opposition MP, taking the hardest line of all Reform MPs on the matter of immigration. Personally, I’m not that taken with him in that it’s punditry rather than policy. He’s out on his own, suggesting actions the party (under Farage) will not necessarily take. As such, he is actively misleading us.

Belatedly, it seems, Lowe has realised that sloganeering and media showmanship is not the basis of an effective government, and that if Reform is to achieve anything then the party has to be more than just its leader. Something I’ve been saying for quite a long time now. It’s good of him to catch up, for sure, but he has seemingly yet to realise that Farage himself is the primary barrier to doing all the things that would evolve Reform beyond a messianic cult.

As I’ve often remarked, you don’t really understand Reform if you don’t understand Farage’s psychology. Fundamentally, Reform is Farage’s gang. You can be elected into the inner circle (or buy your way into it), but you only get to stay in it so long as you’re no threat to him. As such, Reform is unlikely to cultivate a serious front bench. Serious people cannot work with Farage. Or rather, Farage cannot work with serious people.

On policy matters, meanwhile, it is unlikely that the party is ever going to produce anything coherent since neither Farage nor Tice knows what coherent policy looks like. I was repeatedly told that the party was consulting with “very serious people” only for Tice to call a press conference to announce some new net zero slogans - which fell flat even among Refrom’s supporters. Even Farage’s admirers are beginning to notice the lack of credibility.

This point is further explored in The Spectator. There is an effort (apparently) to give Reform heft with its own thinktank, headed by former chief operations officer Jonathan Brown, to sketch out an agenda for Britain in 2029. “There’s also former professor Matt Goodwin, who takes time out of his media career to offer advice. Yusuf has meanwhile been touring existing institutes, who are keen to connect after years of overlooking Farage. ‘We’ve never had so many invitations,’ says one gleeful aide”.

You can make of that what you will. Goodwin’s basic manifesto sketch is not that dissimilar to my own, and I know that plenty of others in the business have arrived at the same conclusions, but it all hinges on whether Farage would ever stick to the script and take the time time to learn his own party’s policy.

Then there’s the other thing. The unshakable amateurism. Even if Reform is presented with good policy, they will somehow manage to mangle it. This is what they do. It’s who they are. They’re more on the right track than the Tories, but when it comes to delivery, they fudge the details and fill in the blanks with waffle, leaving serious questions unanswered.

This, I think, is going to be the case when it comes to leaving the ECHR. Dismantling the ECHR framework in domestic law is very obviously necessary, but what replaces it is a far trickier question. Knowing what’s wrong is the easy bit. Fixing it is a whole other thing. If the party fails to present as a coherent alternative then they simply will not break through the inherent ceiling that goes with populism.

Lowe’s remarks have been described as a “warning shot” to Farage, but if Farage remains true to form, it probably marks the beginning of Lowe’s departure from the party, or at least from Farage’s inner circle. Ben Habib made his pitch to drag the party into some sort of shape and that didn’t end well. He wasn’t the first and won’t be the last.

When asked why Lowe had gone public with his remarks, Farage said: “Perhaps he wants to be prime minister. Most people in politics do”. He added: "His comments are wrong, we are making gigantic strides”.

This is actually more telling than Lowe’s remarks. There is definitely friction there, and Farage attributes Lowe’s remarks to personal ambition rather than a sincere desire to see the party get its act together. Such is his fragility. Again we see that Farage does not believe there is a problem. That, fundamentally, is why the necessary changes will not be made. Tice and Farage think they’re getting it right, as evidenced by the polls. Ultimately, if the party was addressing some of the issues outlined by Lowe and Habib, we’d have seen some evidence of it by now.

On present form, I simply do not believe the hype about Reform. The party is faring well now the penny has dropped that Badenoch is a hopeless lightweight, but I think her tenure has only a few more months to run. Her position is irrecoverable. Not only does she turn up to meetings late, she turns up to politics late, and has little of interest to say when she chimes in. Meanwhile, Robert Jenrick’s leadership bid never ended. I wouldn’t write the epitaph of the Tory party just yet, even if we would be well rid of that party.

It may also be that Farage proves to be a liability in the months to come. Farage is out of step with the public on his views on Ukraine, even if he’s more of a realist than the establishment warmongers. He at least appreciates that this war didn’t begin in 2022, and that Ukraine is largely living with the consequences of some poor choices. But with Farage being sketchy on the details, he struggles to articulate that case, and this makes him vulnerable to attacks from all sides, with the suggestion he is a Putin sympathiser. Making the case that Zelensky is not quite the hero of the hour, in a country that generally disapproves of Donald Trump, is bad politics, even if it happens to be true.

One also supposes that the penny might drop if Lowe is relegated to the bench. It was easy to write off Habib’s departure as “sour grapes” from one who didn’t get elected last year, but for Farage to alienate his star performer, for saying what just about everyone who’s paying attention is saying, it might just be enough for the scales to fall from the eyes of reform cultists. With Farage taking a more emollient tone on immigration and Islam lately, losing Lowe would risk losing Reform’s activist base, who are already voicing their concerns about the party.

Early on I predicted that it wouldn’t take very long for Reform MPs to be fighting like rats in a sack. Frankly, I’m surprised they lasted this long, but this particular spat has been coming for a while. I’ve seen no indication that Farage has changed in all this time, thus I do not expect different behaviour. Meanwhile Farage’s inner circle are still hardcore loyalists and will gang up to attack Lowe if he put his head above the parapet again.

As such, Lowe has two choices. He can either pipe down and put up with Reform’s inadequacies, or wait to be kicked out. Either way, his warnings will not be heeded. Reform is what it is, and will remain ineffectual for as long as Farage leads it. On that basis, a Reform government would flop as hard as Trump’s first administration. The difference, though, is that nobody will ask Reform back for a second term.