Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe have been at loggerheads over political strategy for months. But the Reform row burst definitely into the public domain last week after Lowe voiced his grievances in an interview with the Daily Mail.
Reform will fail if Farage maintains his “messiah” complex, Lowe suggested. He cast acid aspersions on the Reform leader’s management style, and warned that the party’s appearance as a “protest” vehicle is unserious.
Farage’s comeback spoke to his genuine fury. “It’s difficult to have a frontbench with only five MPs, isn’t it? And he’s one of them”, he told the Telegraph in response to a specific criticism.
Pressed on his colleague’s remarks about his delegating skills, he said: “Delegate? I’ve delegated everything.”
He added: “If we had 30 MPs, we’d have a frontbench, but with five, we can’t.”
Since their opening firefight, the feud between Lowe and Farage has escalated exponentially. A Reform statement on Friday announced that the party would be launching an independent investigation after it received “complaints from two female employees about serious bullying in the offices of the Member of Parliament for Great Yarmouth, Rupert Lowe”.
The statement, co-signed by Reform chief whip Lee Anderson and party chair Zia Yusuf, continued: “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.”
Lowe has vociferously denied any wrongdoing, going as far as to link the allegations to a “witch hunt” campaign to silence him and his criticisms. In one of his many posts to X/Twitter over the weekend, Lowe said he had received “a knife in my back over false allegations”.
As I write on Monday, the plot is still very much thickening. But even as Farage and Lowe’s mutual antipathy develops, it is possible to form some immediate conclusions about how a protracted row will affect Reform, both in the short and long terms.
Much of the commentary in recent days has linked Lowe to the long procession of right-of-Conservative pretenders who have come for Farage, and missed. Alan Sked, Michael Holmes, Richard North, Kilroy Silk, David Campbell Bannerman, Godfrey Bloom, Suzanne Evans, Patrick O’Flynn, Douglas Carswell, Steven Woolfe, Gerard Batten, Annunziata Rees-Mogg, Ben Habib and Howard Cox are some of the politicians to have taken on Farage in internecine scuffles over the past three decades. Their relative obscurity provides some indication as to just how well previous plots, coups and putches have gone for Farage’s critics.
The dustbin of history is brimming with unrealised right-of-Tory “talent”. Of that Farage has made certain. I defer to an old UKIP truism: “Nigel always wins”.
Of course, Farage’s historic issues with ego management mean there was something fundamentally foreseeable about this latest bust-up. And perhaps his record lends some credence to Lowe’s siren cries of conspiracy: the Reform leader does tend to fall out with party operators as soon as they near the verge of national prominence.
But just because we’ve seen this movie before, does not imply Lowe vs Farage will end happily. Rather, Lowe’s substantial online presence will ensure every aspect of this row is played out in public. That means recurrent poor headlines for Reform — as an array of significant political milestones await.
Unsurprisingly, new questions are being asked as to whether Reform can seize the ostensible opportunity presented to it by the local elections on 1 May. Then there is the matter of a potential by-election in Runcorn and Helsby. Reform’s campaign in Mike Amesbury’s seat, which was very much already underway, has suffered a serious setback.
Lowe also boasts an intriguingly different profile to some of his Farage-sceptic forebears. He is the MP for Great Yarmouth and stands to maintain his Westminster presence for some time yet. Lowe’s criticism is legitimised and bolstered by his presence at the heart of SW1; he cannot be hidden away in some unexplored corner of the European Parliament. Lowe, moreover, is an extremely active parliamentarian — and an ambitious one too.
In the age of the Online Right, which has accumulated as a noisy tendency on Elon Musk’s Twitter (X), Lowe has boundless potential for attention generation. Musk even appeared to endorse Lowe as a future Reform leader in January, after falling out with Farage. Since acquiring Musk’s support, Lowe has embraced some of the Online Right’s favourite talking points — including and especially on “mass deportations”.
There is no wide audience for this mode of right-of-Conservative politics in Britain, but the political nature of Lowe’s criticism affords it greater potency and therefore longevity.
All this said, the most important fact when considering Farage and Lowe’s beef is that the MP for Great Yarmouth is a political minnow — certainly when compared to his former boss.
Farage is frequently cited as one of the most successful politicians of his generation, a fact reflected by his wide renown. Lowe’s most significant political achievement appears to be the volume of written parliamentary questions he has lumped onto ministerial desks since the general election. Indeed, Lowe might not have won his seat last July had Farage remained on the political sidelines. (His majority in Great Yarmouth is 1,426 votes).
In this regard, the Farage-Lowe rivalry is plain to see and ideologically explicable. But in a political sense, there is no competition.
And yet, criticism from the right will complicate Reform’s search for a coherent policy platform over the coming months — which is largely assumed to be the next step in the party’s “professionalisation” initiative. Some sort of deeper schism, whereby a party is established on Reform’s right, stands as another possibility. Whatever the findings of the independent investigation into Lowe, his relationship with Farage is already irredeemably bitter.
Fringe criticism of Farage from the right is nothing new, of course; nor can you doubt the capacity of right-of-Tory egos to overestimate their political worth.
It follows that Farage’s dilemmas, after weeks of floundering on geopolitical developments, have deepened.
At present however, the most crushing aspect of this row for Reform is its optics. The party’s pitch this parliament has been that Farage is a prime minister-in-waiting. But if he cannot manage a diminutive bloc of five MPs, how can he govern a whole country?
Expect Reform’s political opponents to hone variations of this question over the coming weeks.
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