Rupert Lowe's inquiry LARP

Rupert Lowe is bitterly complaining that the media, the BBC especially, has largely ignored his grooming inquiry hearings. There's a reason for that though. Media follows power. The media certainly would attend a real inquiry with the power to call hostile witnesses and hold them to account because there's news there. What Lowe is doing is closer to Live Action Role Play, while platforming known quantities like Ayaan Hirsi Ali who aren't adding anything new to the discourse. She is part of the Spectator pundit gilded circle, and she’s been recycling much the same material for at least a decade.

The fact is that Lowe's inquiry LARP has no authority or institutional prestige, and as such it is not going to garner the interest of the media, especially when nothing it's unearthing could compete with news like the Mandelson affair.

If by some means this enterprise was able to compel testimony by a police chief who didn't want to be there, that would be the entertainment X factor the media needs to take an interest, but what we're getting out of it is drab footage with poor lighting, interviewing relatives of victims and the victims themselves - some of whom have obviously been misled into believing this will make the damndest bit of difference. Let's be honest here. It's a lowkey dog and pony show that was ill-advised from the outset.

Ultimately, it cannot project authority because it only has the backing of a lowly regional MP, who is regarded by the system as an outlier. A man who frequently mistakes activity for productivity. And since we're being honest about this, it's a pretty shabby operation.

The inquiry has a website consisting of one static page (which doesn’t show up in Google search results unless you know exactly what to search for), with no documentation or published methodology (to at least be consistent with academic levels of compliance), no updates, no embedded social feed, no live reporting, and no dedicated YouTube channel (that I can find). It's all being funnelled through Lowe's personal X account. To my knowledge, Lowe has at least three staffers, yet nobody's been tasked with live administration for this. Planning looks to be non-existent.

That said, it hasn't been a total flop. Rupert Lowe has a gravity all of his own and at time of writing the Facebook footage has 376k views, which is not too shabby, but not earth-shattering. It could have done better had they given bloggers and tweeters a personal heads-up. I’d have gladly promoted it. Regardless, though, this has gone about as well as I expected.

But then we should recall how this came about. Originally, it was crapola Reform lark they quietly dropped because it was self-evidently a bad idea after giving it five minutes of serious thought (which they should have done before announcing it). It was subsequently picked up by Lowe as part of his personal animosity to Reform. He took it on without the first idea what it would entail, or how to promote it, meaning it's now just a fringe endeavour in which he's actually parading his impotency - leaving the average liberal normie with the impression that it's a hard-right exploitation exercise.

The sad truth is that direct action generally has no value if it isn't picked up by the legacy media, and it was never going to be. There's a food chain when it comes to Westminster media, and Rupert isn't anywhere near the top. This endeavour might have some future use if the testimonials are used as part of an FOI campaign in conjunction with consensus building exercises within Westminster (in order to mobilise the power of select committees), but Lowe doesn't have that kind of influence in Westminster, not least because Reform MPs are under orders to keep him at arm's length. It's a rotten world, but that's how it works. Lowe has influence over his fans as a popular "based grandad" mascot, but that's as far as it goes.

It doesn’t bring me any pleasure to dump on this initiative. I just see it as my role to tell a few home truths, and since I'm being entirely frank here, I might as well go the whole hog. Regardless of how much we might agree with Rupert Lowe, and disagree with the direction Farage is taking Reform in, there is a game to be played in elite politics, and Reform's job was to break out of the “based grandad” fringe in order to get elected, and Lowe's undisciplined outbursts were hardly conducive to that. The party line is to give the ethno-right a hard swerve and maintain a cordon sanitaire between Reform and Tommy Robinson. Lowe ignored this. It pains me to say it, but in Farage’s position, I might well have sacked him too.

Lowe can play the "I'm not a professional politician" card, but if he felt that way, he shouldn't have got himself elected as a professional politician. The game (and it is a game) requires self-discipline Lowe simply does not have. If he wanted an inquiry so badly, he'd have stayed the course to ensure that in 2029 there was a government guaranteed to hold one.

Everything about this inquiry LARP reeks of pathological amateurism - the only thing that's actually consistent about the populist right. Lowe broke from Reform saying "I simply cannot endorse a party that has put so frighteningly little thought into what it would actually do with power" - only to set up a wasteful and useless pressure group that's guilty of the exact same failings, lack of coordination, and a similar lack of policy impact. This is a tragedy because it utterly wastes the serious talent of Pitt, Downes and Brackpool who've got more brains between them than the entirety of Westminster think tankery.

The reason this matters is that Lowe is now signalling that he will launch a rival to both Reform and Advance UK before 2029, at which point the fragmentation on the right descends into egotistical farce. If there is a gap in the market, it is for a right wing entity that can break with the pathological amateurism of the populist right, and what we’ve seen today is that Rupert Lowe does not have the talent to break the mould. It’s painful to say it because nobody wants an alternative to Reform more than I do.