Restore Britain is an exercise in stock pumping

What Restore, Reform and Advance all have in common is that they are organisations built around their leader and none can survive without their leaders. Even after all the defections, if Farage moves on, Reform is in serious trouble. There is no obvious successor. As such, this is not a battle of ideas. It is a battle of egos.

The reason for this is that the right is not willing to put the leg work in to build a sustainable movement. Because time is supposedly running out, everyone wants to take shortcuts. They build organisations around feral leaders, attempting to backfill supporting architecture as they go. But this doesn’t work. We’ve been here before.

I do seem to recall Will Gilpin, the former RAF pilot who flew Tornado aircraft for 10 years, appointed as UKIP's chief executive in December 2012. His role was specifically to professionalise the party’s "behind the scenes" operations and address the "inertia" of an organisation that he described as being used to working in a "relaxed" and "uncoordinated" manner.

He lasted all of eight months, resigning by "mutual agreement" in August 2013, after famously likened his attempt to manage the party to "herding cats". He later claimed that Nigel Farage viewed the party as being "all about him" and that his attempts to introduce professional management systems had been blocked. After his departure, he warned that "without reform", UKIP would remain a "bunch of enthusiastic amateurs". The irony was unintended.

We’re now seeing this repeated, with Danny Kruger attempting to give some ideological direction to Reform, to already be publicly undermined by Farage. My point, not that I need to reiterate, is that there is no reason to expect anything different from parties based on the same basic model where policy is whatever the leader says it is, and it comes as much as a surprise to their own staffers as anyone else.

This is why I haven’t approached Restore about policy. Effective political organisations are built around ideas, where even the leader is subordinate to the intellectual platform. But personality cults, built around the leader, are subordinate to the whims of the leader. While they tell me to be patient, assuring me that Rupert’s lieutenants will eventually backfill on policy, you still have a Potemkin village for a party that cannot outlast its leader.

I’ve not made myself very popular by stating this. I have committed the crime of “aggravated noticing” as one reader puts it. In this game, there is a political cost for being being right early on. It causes great upset among the high priests of the movement who have all issued fatwas against me. The Swindon man-baby is especially rattled.

They do, however miss the point. They think it will work this time around because Rupert Lowe is a better man than Farage. I’m not convinced of that. Attitudinally, they are peas in a pod, and it is not irrelevant that Lowe is driven by a vendetta agianst Farage (albeit for perfectly understandable reason). The objective of Restore is as much to damage Farage as it is to build a party. My hunch is that the latter is a secondary objective and that’s another reason it will fail. Ultimately, your party is only as good as the leader’s worst day. If you have a string of bad days at the wrong time, then its all over.

Many have asked how I would go about fixing this problem, but the sad fact is, it cannot be fixed. I certainly wouldn’t start from here. The first thing they’d have to do is lock Rupert Lowe out of his X account until they’ve settled on some core principles, a policy outline and a communications strategy.

I am told, though, that this kind of “professional polish” is the old way of doing things, and that voters crave authenticity. But this isn’t about image management. It’s about basic preparation. Attending to the details will always matter. Why would I as a voter think you can run a country when your own organisation is so shambolic?

As such, I’m not talking about “professional polish”. I’m talking about building an intellectual foundation. This is something I admire about the SDP. While it’s a small party, known only to those in the social media bubble, it serves as an example of how it should be done.

There is a working set of principles and they’ve made a decent stab of sketching out policy, and there’s evidence that they are building on that. Consequently, while William Clouston is a decent and interesting man, the party can outlast him. If the party builds according to a long term plan, developing new talent, putting the ground work in, without taking shortcuts out of blind panic, then it will be a future force in politics. Almost makes me wish I was a social democrat.

I’ve seen all manner of creative excuses from Restore supporters as to why this basic work has not been done, and instead I’m told to “have faith”. But that’s not how it works. You wouldn’t tell a potential investor to simply “have faith”. You would want to convince serious people that your product is better than the competition and that they are going to see a return on their investment.

And, in fact, party members are investors. They invest their time, money and energy. But I’m not going to invest any of my time, money and energy into propping up a messianic cult.

Of course, Restore doesn’t care about finding investors. It just wants to pump the numbers to give the outward impression of growth. It’s even lying about how many members it actually has. They’ve counted the 50,000 registers supporters from when Restore was a pressure group. In the investment world this would be viewed as stock pumping and market manipulation. This is why seasoned political investors like me aren’t touching it with a barge pole. It’s starting off on a lie, and it’s built on a foundation of sand.

What we’re seeing is an outbreak of hysteria, in a desperate panic, among people who just want a sliver of hope. This explains the outright hostility and aggression directed at me. The Swindon man-baby demands that I shut up, but supposing I do, it doesn't change the fact that most, if not all, of my observations about Restore are demonstrably true.

Much of this hostility stems from the widespread belief that if the right does not win in 2029 then it’s all over. Even Rupert Lowe believes this - so it’s starting off on a defeatist premise. In an interview with David Starkey, Lowe told us that if the left wins in 2029, then he’s off to pastures new. If, then, the leader himself sees no long term involvement in his own party, why should anyone else?

I’m of the view that even if native Britons do become a minority, we will still be the largest ethnic group in Britain, and that will be the case for a long time to come. As such, it’s not over by a long shot. If we want to win, we have to stop taking life-limiting shortcuts, and build a movement around something more sustainable than a vengeful old man with an X account.