It was so predictable as to be almost inevitable: a massive row has erupted within the leadership of Reform UK. Rupert Lowe, one of Reform’s five MPs and the Member for Great Yarmouth – an outspoken keyboard warrior on social media and popular with many grassroots party members for his outspoken online comments – kicked off the row after he launched an open criticism of party founder and leader Nigel Farage.
In an interview with the Daily Mail, Lowe, a millionaire businessman, said Reform was still a ‘protest party’ and that it was an open question about whether his ‘messianic’ leader would ‘deliver the goods’ and become prime minister. He suggested that Farage would only do so if he surrounded himself with the ‘right people’. No prizes for guessing that in Lowe’s mind he is one of those people.
This clash between them was as predictable as the certainty that the sun will rise every morning
Farage hit back immediately by saying that Lowe’s criticism was ‘utterly and completely wrong’, claiming that under his leadership Reform was far more than a party of protest. He questioned whether Lowe was after his job and wanted to be PM himself.
The open quarrel between Reform’s leaders follows the attack on Farage by Elon Musk early this year when the world’s richest man used his own online platform X to call for Farage to step down and make way for a new leader. There has also been a drumbeat of online criticism of Farage by Reform’s former chairman Ben Habib, who has quit the party but shares Lowe’s strong views on immigration and Islamism. Lately, Farage has sounded a more muted tone on these two issues, apparently wanting to appeal to moderate voters worried by any hint of racism or extremism in the insurgent party.
For seasoned observers of Nigel Farage’s career, this row will not have come as a great surprise. His spectacular switchback path to the forefront of politics is littered with the metaphorical bodies of friends turned enemies who have fallen out with him and dropped by the wayside.
As a former Ukip candidate myself, I regularly witnessed anyone seen as a threat to Farage sidelined and dumped. No one who knows the man who single-handedly upturned British politics and brought about Brexit would describe him as a team player, and the qualities that fuelled his rise: his charisma, his oratory, and his plain speaking ‘man of the people’ style are mirrored by a thin skin that he shares with his friend Donald Trump – not to mention an intolerance of fair criticism.
Since Rupert Lowe gives every sign of sharing Farage’s rampant egotism, this clash between them was as predictable as the certainty that the sun will rise every morning. The row will be music to the ears of the Tories – the party most threatened by Reform’s rise. The political questions arising from the row for now, though, are whether Lowe will stay in the party or strike out on his own to form a new one. And will this spat between Reform’s two leading personalities be noticed by voters and damage the party’s leading position in the polls?
Taking a punt myself, I predict that Reform is too small an arena to contain two such huge ego warriors. Since in so many ways Nigel Farage is Reform, not least legally, Rupert Lowe will either walk or be pushed out like so many before him who dared to challenge the biggest personality on the UK’s political scene.
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