Andy Burnham won a byelection last Thursday that puts him on course to becoming the next prime minister. He owes his success to the people of Makerfield, Greater Manchester. But he was also helped by a man in Boca Chica, Texas, who is one of Nigel Farage’s main obstacles to high office.
Founded by Rupert Lowe, the former Reform UK MP who fell out with Farage last year, Restore Britain originated as a pressure group and registered as a political party only in February. Before Makerfield, it was regarded by many people as little more than a minor symptom of rightwing fracture.
But by getting 7% of the vote in Makerfield, Restore Britain has announced itself as a spoiler force that could split the right. Its outsized power is down to Elon Musk, whose SpaceX Starbase complex is based in Boca Chica.
“Musk has played a very significant role in giving Restore any kind of political presence,” said Daniel Trilling, author of If We Tolerate This, a book on the normalisation of the far right. “Restore has tried to mobilise a small minority of people immersed in online far-right content. What matters there is numbers.”
On 24 May, Musk reposted a tweet from Lowe in which the Restore Britain leader claimed his party was “under brutal assault by the establishment” and wrote that “Makerfield will show Britain the way”. It was viewed more than 32m times, despite Lowe having fewer than 800,000 followers on X at the time.
This post forms part of a pattern of amplification that has favoured Lowe. According to analytics platform Benchmarker, Lowe’s posts received at least 9 million likes on X in the month before polling day. For comparison, Farage received 812,039 and Keir Starmer received 442,632. Both Farage and Starmer have well north of 2 million followers, but their posts are not regularly endorsed by Musk, who has more than 240 million.
Musk’s relaxed attitude towards content moderation on his site has also helped Restore Britain. Some of the party’s most prominent online supporters include Steve Laws, who campaigns for the “total remigration” of all non-white people, and Jared Taylor, founder of a white supremacist magazine.
“Restore doesn’t have a voter base that is brought together via traditional political means,” Trilling said. “It’s their online clout that is giving them the influence they have, and they wouldn’t have that had Elon Musk not turned X into an environment that is welcoming to racist and fascist views.”
Musk has a mixed record when it comes to political interventions. Last year, the trillionaire poured millions of dollars into a Wisconsin supreme court race, which he said “could determine the fate of western civilisation”, only for the Democratic party-backed candidate to win.
It would be spin for Musk to claim Makerfield as an unmitigated success. Labour won by 20 percentage points and Restore Britain came a distant third. Burnham would have won even without Lowe’s party. But the fragmentation of UK politics means that the 7% achieved by Restore Britain could make the difference in tighter contests.
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This is a problem for Farage, who has put energy into courting former Tory ministers as defectors. “Reform’s main aim this year was to move further along the road towards being a party of government,” Trilling said.
“The big challenge there was to convince traditional Conservative voters that they could be trusted. Just as that was under way, you had Restore saying Farage is a sellout and that Reform are too moderate. That’s forced Farage to tack rightwards to keep those bits of his base on side.”
After Makerfield, it’s possible that Farage will rethink this strategy. But for anyone worried about the normalisation of extreme political views, that brings its own risks. “Farage may end up using Restore to sanitise Reform’s own ideas and positions by comparison,” Trilling said.
“There is so much alarm at what Restore is saying that we’re paying less attention to the fact that Reform has promised to deport hundreds of thousands of immigrants if it ever gets elected to national office.
“Musk has been very important in determining what’s regarded as acceptable or not in general political discourse. He has played a huge role in helping shift Britain’s political debate further to the right.”
Burnham has promised to “lay out a new path for Britain” now that he is one step closer to No 10. Trying to do so with the world’s richest man in the opposite corner may end up being his defining mission.
Photograph by Ryan Jenkinson/Getty Images