13.03.2025
Big trouble in Little England
Though riding high in the polls, Reform UK has been plunged into recriminations. Paul Demarty assesses the party’s prospects after the Rupert Lowe affair
You would think it was a good time to be a supporter of Reform UK.
Reform is riding high in the polls - consistently neck-and-neck with the Tories and Labour. The Tories are still bruised from their rout last summer, with the new leadership largely anonymous. It may irk a little that the electoral system punished Reform so badly, but even that, I think, is a blessing. It has enough MPs to be unignorable, but not enough to have any actual responsibilities, which means that Nigel Farage can effectively continue his real career as a rightwing media personality.
Yet all is not well in the Reform camp. Farage is now in open conflict with one of his parliamentary colleagues, Rupert Lowe, the oh-so-honourable member for Great Yarmouth. Over the weekend, Reform initiated disciplinary proceedings against Lowe for alleged bullying of female members of staff (he strenuously denies all such allegations, of course). Meanwhile, Farage and his cronies - Lee Anderson and Richard Tice among them - reject any implication that this is in any way due to a power struggle between the two men.
Leaving aside the disciplinary allegations, it is scarcely credible that Farage and co are acting purely out of a high-minded concern for standards in public office, never mind any sensitivity to workplace bullying. The basic outline of the dispute has been visible for a while. Lowe has set himself up on the hard right of Reform, openly and repeatedly demanding mass deportations of migrants, while Farage is more cautious. Problems really began when a certain Elon Musk seemed to disagree with that caution, and clumsily attempted to initiate a coup, with Lowe as his favoured alternative. Shortly before the disciplinary action commenced, Lowe made pointed comments to the Daily Mail about Reform’s over-dependence on its “messiah”, Farage.
Skullduggery
All told, this looks very much like a political dispute being conducted via bureaucratic means; it is hard to stifle a laugh, given how familiar this sort of skulduggery is to us on the left these days. If it is good enough for the Socialist Workers Party, apparently it is good enough for Nigel. Explaining the matter to reporters from The Daily Telegraph - well-connected in Reform circles ‑ Farage could point to Lowe’s unpredictability. In one particular incident, parliamentary questioning of the transport minister ended in a near-altercation. As Farage put it,
Lowe … asked Mike Kane, the transport minister, a question about the MV Ruby - a damaged cargo ship which had docked in his constituency, while carrying hundreds of tonnes of the potentially explosive fertiliser, ammonium nitrate. Mr Lowe was unhappy with the answer that he received from Mr Kane and, at the end of the debate, he crossed the floor to make his feelings known. A confrontation ensued. Heated language was heard. The minister’s shoulder was pushed. In the end, the Serjeant at Arms had to step in to calm things down between the two parliamentarians.1
While he is undoubtedly the pre-eminent leader of the British far right in this era, Farage is a cannier figure than he may first appear. The periodic stories of stone-cold nutters showing up in his various parties have been used to make him look foolish, but he did, after all, get rid of them in general. His game was, for many years, triangulating between the Tory leadership and their rabid base - appeals to disaffected Labour voters came and went, but were largely pro forma. His game was to capture the energy of these largely older, largely suburban enragés without getting tumbled into the outer darkness of the British National Party, English Defence League and friends. He was a populist rebel, but a respectable populist rebel.
It is very noticeable that his departure from the Ukip saw the latter immediately collapse into extremely-online fringe rightism, with second place on the South West England list in the 2019 Euro elections being taken by someone best known as ‘Sargon of Akkad’ (Carl Benjamin to his mum). Farage has always kept a polite distance from such ranters. His overall project would seem to be to build up an organisation so threatening to the Tories that the latter will be compelled to seek terms with him. It has never looked more likely than it does now.
After the Brexit-powered ‘red wall’ landslide victory for Boris Johnson in 2019, things changed a little in his approach. When the Tories inevitably betrayed their new supporters, these votes would be in play again, and in no way guaranteed to flood immediately back into Labour. Reform has downplayed the rigorous Thatcherism that is, in the end, Farage’s true north star. But he cannot, for exactly that reason, offer them some Blue Labour/Red Tory Keynesian hybrid, and Brexit is not much use, since it has now taken place; he is pushed more and more into immigration scaremongering. That makes his dance with the online-right ranters all the more delicate, and renders him vulnerable to the whims of an Elon Musk.
Tricky
The Lowe affair is a tricky matter for him. It is the first real bump in the road for Reform, with the result surely being the permanent loss of one of his handful of MPs. Lowe will no doubt find some formal organisation to back him, from the fissile post-Ukip swamp or suchlike, and be defeated next time out. Four Reform MPs remain, including Farage. To lose one, as Oscar Wilde said, may be regarded as misfortune; to lose two begins to look like carelessness. A period of calm is surely necessary for Reform to regain its air of menace.
Can Farage deliver it? That is not guaranteed. His various political vehicles have been prone to fallings-out and squabbles. Reform - like the Brexit Party before it - is still formally structured as a limited company. The directors are largely allies of Farage. It is his show. This works up to a point, since he has succeeded in becoming a prominent media-political personality. For one of the Telegraph’s sources, part of the problem for Lowe is that he was starting to obtain an independent profile of his own, threatening Farage’s ability to impose an absolute message discipline.
As Henry Hill, an editor at ConservativeHome, wrote for Unherd, this presents problems for Reform as a long-term project. After all, Farage will not be around for ever - not with the quantity of ale he drinks, at any rate: “To have any hope of seriously challenging the Tories in the medium term, let alone replacing them outright, Reform needs to grow bigger than its leader. A thousand tall poppies need to bloom, but they can only do that if Farage learns to let them.”2
None of that matters, of course, if Reform is not a long-term project; and it certainly is not if the overall goal is not replacement, but realignment, of the Tories. There is good sense in taking the latter course. Nothing demonstrates it quite like Reform’s performance in last year’s election; it won a lot of votes, but almost all from the Tories, and in so doing handed a huge number of marginal constituencies - some very newly marginal - to Labour and the Liberal Democrats, by rendering the Tory candidates uncompetitive. Reform UK got roughly the same number of votes as the Lib Dems, but only five seats, compared to the Lib Dems’ 72. Electoral reform seems as far away as ever, so the way forward is very plausibly back into a new-model Faragist Tory party.
Should such a fusion be achieved, Farage would be a very competitive leadership candidate at the next time of asking, to say the least. There is a great deal of huffing about how unseriously he takes his job as an MP, but that did not do Boris Johnson any harm. The reality is that we have a quasi-presidential system of government, which via the royal prerogative gives considerable discretion to the prime minister; when people trot out to vote in a general election, they do not usually do so on the basis of localism, but to get in the candidate who supports the government they want to see in power. This rewards people who play to the media, be it the ‘traditional’ or internet media. Farage is incontestably superior, on this point, to all the candidates in the last Tory leadership poll put together.
Riding the wave
The likelihood of such a scenario seems, on the surface, to be a matter of British contingencies - the historic weakness of the Tories after the endless disasters of the last parliament, the bitterness which the Brexit referendum and protracted negotiations left in their wake, the very particular political neuroses of our petty bourgeoisie. Yet, having mentioned Musk and Trump, we cannot leave things there.
Britain is, after all, merely one minor stop on the global victory tour of the revanchist right. The German Brandmauer3 holds for now, but keeping Alternativ für Deutschland at bay seems like a losing proposition in the long term. Marine le Pen inches closer to the Elysée. Giorgia Meloni is happily running Italy. That is just western Europe - add in Trump, Modi, Netanyahu, Putin and all the rest, many of whom have been in power for years, and the picture is unmistakable.
The previous regime of pervasive official liberalism - what the rightwing populists call ‘globalism’ - in the end lasted roughly from 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, to 2008, which saw the global financial crash, the curdling of the global war on terror into a series of intractable quagmires, and the first piece of military resistance on Russia’s part to the expansion of Nato, in the South Ossetia war. The governments of Barack Obama and Joe Biden failed to restore American poise on any of these matters, with the result that the US state apparatus was entirely incapable of resisting the rise of Trump.
Now his government plainly backs the far right in countries where it has yet to take power; whether this turns into an enduring global policy - like the shift in the 1970s and 1980s from support for rightwing social democracy to neoliberal conservatism - remains to be seen. But Trump, Musk and friends are by all appearances riding the wave of history.
Paralysed left
The left has largely been paralysed in the face of these developments by its incurable addiction to popular frontism. In the name of fighting back against the right, innumerable political compromises have been made - up to and including open social-imperialism with respect to the Ukraine war, sold to progressive-minded people as a noble crusade against the world headquarters of this wave of reaction. On a smaller scale, British leftists - especially the SWP - have expended no end of energy on borderline-apolitical campaigns against the far right, including Farage’s various outfits, that have left them completely unable to meaningfully distinguish themselves from the increasingly shrill official liberalism of the times.
By such means, we have hooked ourselves onto a dying political trend. The reactionary wave was never a great conspiracy of Putin against the liberal west: the call was coming from inside the house. Until we learn the lessons, expect that Farage will have many successes ahead of him - regardless of the fate of Rupert Lowe.