I’ve been stewing on this since the news broke on Friday last that there had been a major falling out in Reform UK between two of its MPs, the leader Nigel Farage, MP for Clacton and Rupert Lowe, MP for Great Yarmouth, and that Lowe had the ‘whip’ removed and been expelled from the party.
The sheer stupidity of what has happened takes one’s breath away. Here was a rapidly rising political party with a steadily growing membership. It had won five parliamentary seats at the last General Election with 600,000 more votes than the third party, the Liberal Democrats, which had won over seventy seats. It has since been making spectacular gains in the opinion polls, passing the Conservatives and leaving the Liberal Democrats for dead in the rear-view mirror as it began seriously to challenge the incumbent Labour Party in the opinion polls.
The hopes for national recovery of millions of patriotic English, Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish people have been resting on the advances that Reform UK had been making. At the next general election there was not only just a likelihood that it would supplant the Conservative Party as the main opposition party in Parliament, but also an increasing chance that it could actually win an overall majority in the House of Commons and form the next government of the United Kingdom with Nigel Farage as the Prime Minister.
All that has been put in jeopardy, well and truly. Why? When it stood on the cusp of being able to make political history, just why?
The row that blew up was ostensibly about a falling out between Farage and Lowe after the latter had told the Daily Mail last Thursday (6th March) that Reform could not go on being a protest party led by a Messiah, that the time had come for it to have a serious suite of policies to lay before the British people at a General Election with some serious, articulate spokespeople to promote and explain them in the media.
On Friday afternoon, the Reform Chairman, Zia Yusuf and its Chief Whip, Lee Anderson released a joint statement:
"It is with regret that we feel obligated to disclose that the party received complaints from two female employees about serious bullying in the offices of the member of parliament for Great Yarmouth, Rupert Lowe," they said in a joint statement.
"Evidence was provided to us of workplace bullying, the targeting of female staff who raised concerns, and evidence of derogatory and discriminatory remarks made about women, including reference to a perceived disability.
"We feel we have a duty of care to all our staff, whether employed directly or indirectly. Accordingly, we appointed an independent King's Counsel to conduct an investigation into the veracity of these complaints. To date, Mr Lowe has yet to cooperate with this investigation.
"In addition to these allegations of a disturbing pattern of behaviour, Mr Lowe has on at least two occasions made threats of physical violence against our party chairman. Accordingly, this matter is with the police.
Taking that last allegation first, this really doesn’t seem likely. Lowe is a 67-year-old and the natural reduction of testosterone with age will have played its part in reducing any youthful aggression he might once have had. Yusuf is 38 years old. Being an old chap myself, I am completely clear about the folly involved in offering violence to a mature man 30 years my junior even if I were to be a former SAS trooper and considered myself in tip-top shape for my years. No, that doesn’t hold water.
Much more likely is the comment that Elon Musk made on ‘X’ when he posted that he thought Nigel Farage ‘was not the right man’ to be Reform’s leader and that Rupert Lowe was a better leader and possible future Prime Minister. This no doubt had its roots in the prolific posting of Lowe on mass migration, the Muslim rape gangs and the high number of pertinent Parliamentary questions he has been asking, videos of which have been online in his personal ‘X’ account. Ministers seem to have no answer to many of them, either because they don’t know, or their civil servants have withheld information. These have all been making Rupert Lowe very popular with the majority of Reform members and the wider online right.
There were two incidents in December, one between Mr Lowe and Mr Yusuf and the other between Mr Lowe and a government junior transport minister, Mike Kane. Lowe’s brush with Kane centred on the former’s quite legitimate parliamentary question about the dumping of 300 tons of ammonium nitrate off-shore from Lowe’s Great Yarmouth constituency, the threat that it posed to the marine environment and who authorised it. He got no satisfactory answers but both men have put it behind them and neither has made a formal complaint about the other.
The allegations of bullying in that Reform statement don’t directly accuse Lowe. The allegations are about serious bullying which occurred in his office and are written in the passive voice. They ‘occurred’. Well, just who ‘occurred’ them? It’s all a bit ‘Nessa’, the ‘Gavin and Stacey’ character, isn’t it? “What’s occurring?”
It has since transpired that the allegations were made by two women, themselves under disciplinaries for misconduct, who made vexatious claims against other members of staff as they were being shown the door. One of them used to work for the former Conservative and then independent MP, Andrew Bridgen. She has told Bridgen who has published it on ‘X’, that the allegations had nothing to do with Lowe.
Rupert Lowe put out a statement and his staff have added their weight with the following which is supportive of their boss.
“As Rupert’s entire parliamentary team, we feel obliged to take the unusual step of publishing this statement on the record. Rupert has had no involvement in the organisation or drafting of this letter.
Some of us have worked with Rupert for years, some for months. One for nearly 30 years.
We want to state this unequivocally: Rupert is a good, decent, and honest man.
We have never seen any violent or vicious behaviour from him, ever. Nor have we heard any concerns, from anyone, about this before last Friday. It has never been discussed with any of us.
He is courteous, loyal and unfailingly polite to us. A family man, who cares deeply for his wife, four children and one young grandson. Rupert has been nothing but kind to all of us, going above and beyond to make us feel comfortable and welcomed in the office. To put simply – we all love working for him.
We would all like to put our sincere appreciation to him on the record.
Wider allegations of ‘bullying’ are entirely untrue. These were only issued after the two individuals in question admitted to separate serious offences and the disciplinary process had started against both of them. They are vexatious complaints, sadly submitted to cause as much damage as possible.
We are all uncomfortable to see processes designed to protect staff weaponised in such an unpleasant and malicious fashion. Not just tarnishing Rupert’s name unfairly, but also our office and subsequently us. This is not fair. Nobody from Reform has ever raised these concerns, or any about Rupert, with any of us before this ‘investigation’. If they were so concerned about Rupert’s behaviour, why were we not ‘warned’?
Any allegations, of any bullying, against anyone, are robustly denied by all of us. It is simply not true. We will all happily and openly talk to any official investigation. There has been no contact to any of us from relevant official Parliamentary schemes or processes.
We are a team. Everybody is treated fairly and everybody is treated equally. We all get on well, have fun and work together to support Rupert. That is what we want to focus on. Not this.
Rupert is a good MP, a good boss, and a good man – he does not deserve what is happening to him.
Rupert’s team.
Jonathan Wedon
Kateryna Petrenko
Liam Porter
Alistair Harrison
Will Peacock
Jess Rodgers
Jane Sheldrake, Private Secretary
It is tempting to think that matters took a turn when Farage brought in Zia Yusuf to be Party Chairman on July 11th last year in exchange for a large donation and had his name entered as a director of Reform. The party is still, despite promises of giving it to the members, a private for-profit company under the control of Farage. As far as Yusuf is concerned, it is easy to find out about this former Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs man who set up Velocity Black, a VIP concierge service. He was still a Conservative Party member for a few weeks after he became Reform’s Chairman and there have been suggestions that he has attended Davos.
Yusuf will not have liked Rupert Lowe’s comments about mass migration and the rape gangs, and it is probably he who was behind instructions to Lowe to tone down the contents of a speech he made in the Essex constituency of Kemi Badenoch in December. That may be what the altercation with Yusuf was about. In contrast to Farage, who appears to have gone soft on migration, refusing to countenance mass deportations, Lowe speaks his mind and makes no bones about it. He says what people up and down the land think. That’s why he has become popular within Reform.
And there’s the nub of it.
We have been here before with Nigel Farage. Anyone within an organisation which is headed by him, who starts to gain a profile and popularity which might grow to rival or even outshine him, has to go. The list is long of people, good hard-working talented people, who have fallen out with Farage and been ‘thrown under the bus’. He did it in UKIP after taking that party to a prominent position in the EU Parliament. He fell out with Richard North, he fell out with Robert Kilroy-Silk, with Steven Woolfe, Suzanne Evans, Godfrey Bloom, Douglas Carswell, Mark Reckless and had severe criticism of Gerard Batten when he took on Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka Tommy Robinson, political prisoner, as an adviser.
His last victim in Reform prior to Lowe had been Ben Habib who was replaced in his joint role with David Bull as deputy leader by Richard Tice when Yusuf arrived. He quit Reform UK on 28 November 2024, citing concerns over the party's structure as well as "fundamental differences" with the party’s leader, Nigel Farage, over Brexit, and disagreements over immigration, with Habib in favour of mass deportations. Habib had been too outspoken, too articulate and too popular with the membership.
Reform has sunk to new depths when it suggested that Lowe was suffering from ‘early-onset dementia’ and used the journalist Isabel Oakshott, who is Mrs Richard Tice in all but name, to mock and sneer at him on live television. This is the woman who has decided to fight the current regime from a distance by decamping with her children to Dubai for the duration. I once had some time for her opinions. No longer.
Tice has said that even if Rupert Lowe is exonerated by Reform’s investigation into the allegations against him, there is no way back to Reform for him. He is not getting the whip back. He has become too popular for them, too popular for Farage who is now, by his own admission, the non-populist populist.
This all chimes. When he was leader, Richard Tice refused to invite Andrew Bridgen to join Reform because of his ‘ant-vaxx’ stance. Reform has set its face against ‘uniting the right’ by extending the hand of welcome to other minor parties and groupings such as the Heritage Party or the re-emerging UKIP. Both Tice and Farage want nothing to do with Tommy Robinson and his supporters, or Katie Hopkins, despite the large followings they have who are all likely Reform voters. They are not prepared to take advice or ideas from any of the ‘online right’ such as the Lotuseaters, or Dr Neema Parvini aka the Academic Agent, or the New Culture Forum or even Dr David Starkey. They even went so far as to deselect Lotuseater Beau Dade as a candidate because the Marxist organisation Hope Not Hate objected to him. What on Earth is a party which claims to be patriotic and conservative doing paying any attention whatsoever to the likes of Hope Not Hate? Why are they even concerned about what ANY of the left-wing media thinks or says about them?
Reform has lost a few thousand members since Friday last but where does that leave the more than 200,000 people who are still signed up? Are they just following a Messiah who throws brickbats, but who seems to be incapable of building a team who will be seen as a credible prospective government.
It’s all about Nigel, it seems. He cannot abide anyone else in his organisation outshining him as Rupert Lowe was doing. This is no good. Whether it’s in the field of business, politics or warfare, a good leader needs to have around him (or her) the strongest possible team, any number of which are able to provide ideas, positive criticism and stand in where and when necessary. It cannot all be left to one man. There need to be others capable of immediately taking over in the event the leader is incapacitated or worse.
There needs to be communication, frequent, frank and open. And there needs to be a strategy. People are desperate for a British political movement which can win a General Election and immediately on taking office start to dismantle the overweening state in the way the new Trump administration has been doing in the USA. They are desperate to end net zero. They are desperate to get the country out from under the diktat of the international banking cartel in all its manifestations under the auspices of the UN and the WEF. That will need planning and a determination to be utterly ruthless in repealing all the damaging legislation put in place during the Blair/Brown years and giving all non-co-operative and obstructive civil servants their P45s.
Reform UK needs to be what Alternative für Deutschland is in Germany, what Le Rassemblement Nationale is in France, and Fidesz is in Hungary. If we are even to begin to get our country back as Farage supporter Matt Goodwin wants, nothing less will do. That is what Rupert Lowe realises.
Contrary to what the Reform leadership thinks, the political career that may be coming to end is not Rupert Lowe’s but Nigel Farage’s. He has seriously misjudged this. One need only go to YouTube or ‘X’ and take a look at the comments on any of the short videos he has released since Friday. It has not been going that way he might wish; countless numbers of commenters are telling him he has made a mistake, to reinstate Rupert Lowe, and to get rid of Yusuf. Snap online polls show support for Lowe well ahead of support for Farage. Lowe was interviewed by Dan Wooton on his Outspoken podcast on Tuesday to give his side of the story. Have a listen and make up your own minds.
Where now for Rupert Lowe if he’s no longer acceptable to Reform? The Tory vultures have been circling but it would be a disaster if he took the Conservative whip to disappear into that corrupt party and be deselected at the next election. A much more intriguing prospect is that it has been reported that Elon Musk has said that if Lowe and Ben Habib decide to get together and form a party, he will make a very large donation. However, with four years to go to the next General Election at most, it’s a very tall order to get anything up and running in time that will be a serious player.
In Farage’s case, he is known. He is a household name. Lowe isn’t yet. Farage has been at the politics game for 25 years or more and has heft despite his shortcomings as a leader which are more than just having a narcissistic tendency and an inability to tolerate talented people who might threaten him. He is also someone who wants to be accepted by the establishment and to that end he will not push the boundaries of acceptable discourse unless someone else has done it first and taken the ‘blow-back’. He may be a gifted orator, but he is no leader. That may still be enough to keep Reform in the game to pick up more seats, but its brand has been tarnished by this, and the losers will be the long-suffering British people.
The trouble I have is that, after this episode, I don’t believe Nigel Farage is the man to save Britain. On the contrary, I’m leaning towards the views of those who say he is controlled opposition at best, a pied piper for the dissident right in the country. At worst he may actually be a deep state operative, kept in position to be sprung at the right time to ensure Britain retains its current Marxist government which will see the completion of the country’s destruction and the birth of the globalist technocratic hellscape. No borders, no countries, no religion, no Heaven, as that cretin John Lennon ‘Imagined’. Only, there will be Hell.