What is Harrison Pitt smoking?

When you’re freelancing as a content creator, you can get away with talking to Renaud Camus and Martin Sellner. They are both, so I’m told, intellectual pillars of the ethno-right. But if you’re talking to them when you’re “senior policy fellow” of a new party, then people are going to draw certain conclusions abut that party. Restore is skimming the atmosphere of a political planet known as Far-Rightia.

Having dabbled in that kind of planetary exploration myself, I’m perhaps more aware of the political risks. It puts you in the same tent as some pretty unpleasant people, and if you stick around long enough, you soon realise you’ve made a wrong turn and you’re at the top of the horseshoe.

I didn’t especially care about the reputational damage while I was in the Homeland Party, or that I would see my name in Searchlight and Hope Not Hate more often than I’d like to (not least because both of those organisations have soiled their own nest in the credibility stakes), but then I’m not a teacher or a public servant or someone who has to consider their public reputation at work (the sort of people you want to join your party).

There’s also an ideological trap at this point. Planet Far-Rightia is not as right wing as billed. It is isolationist and very socialist, and it tends to be the domain of foaming anti-semites. It has a certain ick factor that’s political kryptonite if you want to bring conservative minded people along with you.

This is why I put so much stock in having a written party definition with an agreed lexicon, because if you don’t have one then you’re defined by your bedfellows. If you don’t have firm intellectual foundations, your ship can easily drift into choppy waters.

This is where you stand to lose a lot of your would-be supporters. Hardly anyone on the right disagrees that we need robust immigration measures, but most on the right are now just normies (90’s liberals) who’ve washed up on the right because the left have gone so completely off the rails. The gender wars brought them to our side.

As such, there is a new divide on the right between the civnats and the ethnats, where the ethnat side is up against the right wing media. Ethnonationalism is too rich for the blood of the Telegraph and Spectator (and the likes of Spiked). As such, you don’t have a sympathetic media ecosystem to rely on, and few friends outside the echo chamber of X.

This is why message calibration is especially important. In the current climate the ethnat side have the more compelling arguments, not least since the civnat side is away with the fairies and still talking about integrating hostile colonists, but having the more compelling argument is not enough to win. Like it or not, politics is a still a reputation game.

Of course, Restore should not fall into the same trap as Reform and have the likes of Hope Not Hate do their vetting for them, but any smart political operator still recognises there is a game to be played. There’s edge-lording to shift the Overton Window and then there’s shitting your own bed. For instance, you would not want a vocal party supporter using precious podcast air time minutes to dabble in Holocaust denial.

Meanwhile, it is a mistake to think the divergence in Restore will not be noticed. On the one hand, we have Rupert Lowe sharting out the crowd-pleasing populist tropes on X, but on the other, we have his trusted lieutenants dabbling in Christian revivalism and taking joyrides out to Far-Rightia. While the latter might galvanise the support of online zoomers, to everyone else it starts to look a lot like a crank party - and could very easily become one.

This is where there’s a major disagreement on X. The online right doesn’t think this matters. I think it does. Restore is not yet facing any serious media scrutiny. It’s big enough to have Nigel Farage a little hot under the collar, but not yet big enough for the media to divert any attention to it. But if that day comes, it will be a target rich environment. That’s why all the undisciplined noise-making right now has consequences.

You can, meanwhile, give yourself some armour plating (such as policy) that helps set the parameters of your party, to show that you are meaningfully different to a far right rabble, but if I understand Restore supporters correctly, the view is that policy is entirely superfluous. As such, the party is gambling that an obnoxious mob of angry boys on X is enough to win the day. That’s not a gamble I would take.

In some respects, Restore is turning into a repeat of the Homeland experiment; a little look at what it would have looked like if had a budget and millionaire patron (only without the attention to detail). It could crash and burn just as easily.

The problem here is that the parachutists are jumping out of the Dakota without having staked out a landing ground. There’s a certain line you do not want to cross lest you be cut to pieces by enemy machine-guns, but you don’t want to drop so far short of the target that you’re in the sea. If you have staked out a landing ground, you can plan your tactics accordingly, but right now it’s resembling the early hours of D-Day, with shock troops scattered all over, incapable of forming cohesive fighting units, having no clue where they actually are - and prone to walking into every enemy ambush.