Weekend at Rupert's

Rupert Lowe is wildly popular on X because he’s serving up what his audience wants. They’re satisfied with low(e) effort Ukippy slop and they will defend it to the death. They will circle the wagons and die on the hill that they do not need anything approaching a plan or policy.

They will deploy endless excuses to defend Lowe and deflect from the fact that Restore is run by amateurs with no attention to detail. There is no “policy” so absurd that they won’t defend it. They don’t see the problem.

But y’know, that’s ok. They’ve always been like that. This is benchmark Ukip vibes from 2014. There is no point riling them up. It only matters that the party leader sees the problem. And I don’t think Rupert Lowe does. That really is a problem because it sets the tone for the whole organisation.

This was always the problem with Ukip and it’s currently the problem with Reform. We have yet to see whether James Orr and Danny Kruger can give intellectual direction to Reform. Many have failed before them. It’s all contingent on the leader having the self-discipline to learn it and accept direction. With Farage, it’s herding cats.

Being that Lowe and Farage are remarkably similar people (even if their views are divergent) I don’t expect Restore to be any more serious than Reform. While Lowe may have lambasted Reform for its lack of policy, I’m starting to think he doesn’t know what actual policy looks like, and the bullet point tropes he’s firing off on X apparently meets his criteria for what policy should look like.

This, in my view, is in urgent need of correction but it’s all contingent on whether his lieutenants can bring him to heel. I happen to know for a fact that his own staffers think he’s an engagement-farming slop merchant and they’ve been trying to rein him in without success. They can do their level best to backfill the website with policy papers to give the outward impression of a serious organisation but that doesn’t make it one. It’s all just an illusion.

Moreover, because Lowe is firing off Ukippy tropes, he’s locking his lost boys in a trap where they have to produce post-facto justifications for this thoughtless posturing, which will result in bad policy based on all the usual empty right wing tropes. They couldn’t now produce good policy even if they wanted to. Worse still, if by accident they did produce a good policy, Lowe wouldn’t know how to utilise it and it will sit rotting on the website, read by neither the leader nor his devoted fans.

As such, this is all taking on a Weekend at Bernie’s dynamic, where Rupert’s lost boys parade the corpse of the leader in the hope that nobody notices he’s braindead. I think this explains why we see the likes of Carl Benjamin defending him. They all know I’m right about this, but they also have a point. As far as the right is concerned, Lowe really is the best we can dredge up. This is as good as it gets, folks.

On that basis, I don’t suppose it’s very sporting of me to point out that Bernie is actually dead, and I can understand the Swindon man-baby’s frustration. But the stink coming off the corpse means I won’t be the only one to notice.