Reform has topped every national poll for a good long while – benefitting, as the Greens also have and the Lib Dems haven’t (because there are limits), from a combination of public fatigue and disgust with the two old main parties. But there are other new kids on the right-wing block, both fronted by ex-associates of Nigel Farage and former Reformers. We now have Ben Habib’s Advance and Rupert Lowe’s Restore.
First things first. These both sound like team names from The Apprentice. And this is fitting, because the kind of spatting, squabbling and blame-throwing that we see in Lord Sugar’s boardroom is now being acted out on the political stage.
If everybody who finds Nigel Farage irritating starts up a party, we will end up with ballot papers a mile long
If everybody who finds Nigel Farage irritating starts up a party, the ballot papers will be a mile long. Why stop with just two? We could all have our own right-wing party. I think I’ll call mine Revive Albion. I’ve already got my launch video planned: a drone camera swoops down, alighting on my wax-jacketed form as ‘In a Monastery Garden’ plays. I look out at a foggy fen or misty peak, jingle some heavy pre-decimal coinage, then throw the dog a stick.
Its all so tawdry, the kind of hair-splitting and purity spiralling that we normally associate with the left; there is a reason that the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front in Life Of Brian were coded as left-wing. Nowadays the right cannot join in that laughter quite so heartily.
The launch of Restore Britain, in particular, is an only very slightly less camp version of the storyline in Dynasty when spurned ex-wife Alexis Colby ran in the gubernatorial election for the state of Denver against Blake Carrington. I can see Rupert Lowe in shoulder pads striding into Reform HQ: ‘God damn it, Nigel, you and your floozy Zia tried to put me in prison, but so help me I will tell the world the truth about the great Farage.’
These personal animosities are being adorned in the oddest of veils. Restore is accusing Reform of being more of the same establishment politics. If Reform had welcomed Rishi Sunak or Jeremy Hunt, they might have a point. But painting Suella Braverman and post-semaglutide Robert Jenrick as pillars of the Old Order is positively scatty. Whatever else they might be, they are not that.
Restore also comes with some ill thought-out carping about the centrality of Christianity and ethnicity to the British identity. These are interesting concepts to mull over in the abstract, but putting them front and centre in a political campaign in 2026 is astonishingly tin-eared. It feels like a debate from a hundred years ago, as if Restore might suddenly shout: ‘Down with William Joynson-Hicks!’ Turning the clock back a century is a big ask. To be brutally frank, given the current diabolical state of things, I’d be happy enough just to get it back to 2009.
All of this interpersonal sniping, roasting, dissing and dunking between politicians – and I include Farage vs Kemi in this too – is hugely unconvincing. We all surely know by now that it counts for absolutely nothing. Farage and Kemi throwing bricks at each other would seem more plausible if Farage and Jenrick hadn’t been doing exactly the same just weeks ago.
As a right-wing voter, I quite like them all – Farage, Habib, Lowe and Badenoch. They have all impressed me, and they have all also tested the strength of my patience. All this sordid squabbling clouds the central issue.
The problem wasn’t the system. The problem was, and is, the wet end of the Conservative party. All of this fussing and fiddling on the right of the right is a direct result of indulging the other end. The Brexit vote and the majority won in 2019 were instructions from the electorate that were resisted and/or ignored. The influence on the Tories of the Rudds, Barwells and Gaukes – the cautious, mustn’t-scare-the-horses continuation of Blair – are the only reason that Reform exists at all, and the only reason this terrible Labour government is in power (though obviously the Truss interlude didn’t exactly help).
As with Truss, this is silliness at a time of great seriousness. The rape gang scandal is one of the very worst things that has ever happened in this country. Leftists are now going door-to-door seeking non-compliant Jews. The government is sneaking in blasphemy laws and cooking up the forbidding of ‘Islamophobia’. Fresh outrages occur at the rate of about three per day. It is not a time for bickering and argy-bargy, particularly as the public won’t have the chance to vote in a real poll for years.
Because though Starmer may well be kicked out in a few weeks, Labour are not going to abandon government until the very last possible moment; after all, they have no reason to. That last moment is 15 August 2029, which is another 1,274 days – I make that another 3,822 outrages. By then we could well be ready for anything else, and some kind of an alliance, however constituted. It is ludicrous that Farage, Badenoch, Lowe and Habib are not pulling together.
My message to the right is to bury your hatchets, suck up whatever you have to suck up, and save us.
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