Farage, Lowe and the fight for the right to be the nastiest party

The father of Henry Nowak made a moving appeal that no one should exploit his murdered son’s horrifying death to foment hatred and division. Nigel Farage was not to be denied his meat and drink. In a pompously-entitled “emergency address to the nation”, he linked the case to “anti-white prejudice” while calling for “the rest of us” to “respond to this with pure cold rage”. Rage followed in the form of violent disorder on the streets of Southampton. When Mr Farage made an appearance in the Commons, the chamber reverberated to cries of “Shame!”. Leaders of other parties condemned him. “It shows exactly who he is,” pronounced Sir Keir Starmer.

So it does, but people have been saying this kind of thing for many years. If he cared a jot about being denounced, Mr Farage would have slunk off long since.

The more illuminating observation to make about the leader of Reform is that he is beginning to look a bit desperate. He had been flirting with trying to present his party as one maturing into “respectability” in an effort to persuade voters who are Reform-curious but queasy about racism and extremism that they no longer have anything to worry about. He has previously disavowed the label “populist” and even called his party “centre-right” as if it is some kind of one-nation Tory outfit. So what explains his ugly turn towards the politics of racial paranoia? Panic is probably the best answer.

One thing to worry him is the pervasive sense that Reform may be past its peak. The high point of its rating in the poll of polls came last summer when it hit 31%. Support has since drifted down into the mid-20s. For sure, Reform still leads all other parties, but any deflation of its bubble is disconcerting for a leader who has prized momentum as the definition of success.

Another source of discomfort is the revelation that £5m was funnelled into his pocket by Christopher Harborne, Reform’s Thailand-based sugar daddy. There’s been much derision over Mr Farage’s wild claim that this was leaked because his phone was hacked by the Russians. Having changed his story about what the money was for, his failure to declare that payment is now under investigation by the parliamentary standards commissioner. Mr Farage calls it a “gift” and says there’s nothing improper to see here. If so, why did he keep it secret in the first place? He used to revel in hosting regular news conferences, but has become terribly bashful about facing interrogation from the media in recent weeks. Usually inescapable at byelections, he has been largely absent from the contest for Makerfield, where he might be exposed to questions about that donation.

Also troubling to him is the durability of the Conservative party. The Tories are not exactly in fabulous shape, but they are resolutely refusing to concede to Mr Farage’s demand to be recognised as the undisputed master of the right in British politics. Defections from the Conservatives, much fanfared at the time, have caused more strife for Reform than they have trouble for the Tories. Robert Jenrick, the ex-Conservative who is now Reform’s so-called shadow chancellor, was recently embroiled with Zia Yusuf, the party’s home affairs spokesperson, in a row about precisely who a Farage government would deport. Such is their self-discipline that this spat was played out on social media.

Kemi Badenoch has joined Sir Keir in repudiating Mr Farage’s incendiary language about the disastrous police response to the killing of Mr Nowak. Cue poisonous attack ads from Reform viciously targeting Mrs Badenoch. An especially mendacious item of race-baiting propaganda pictures the Tory leader with the quote: “I Don’t Want To Hear About White Lives Matter.” That is a grotesque inversion of the meaning of remarks made during an interview with Good Morning Britain. What she actually said was: “We need to find what we have in common, not what separates us. I don’t want to hear about Black Lives Matter. I don’t want to hear about White Lives Matter. We all matter.”

What matters to Mr Farage is that he is threatened by a new competitor he hadn’t expected. After a quarter of a century menacing the Tories from the right, now there is a fireship aimed at his own party from the even further right. Restore Britain is the party for you if you think that the most deplorable thing about Mr Farage is that he is a simpering liberal, a flabby hedger and a pathetic compromiser. In the arms race of outrage about Mr Nowak’s death, Restore is calling for the execution of the murderer.

Restore has just the one MP, the businessman Rupert Lowe, who sat in Reform’s ranks until a pyrotechnical falling-out. He enjoys the aggressive support of Elon Musk and the billionaire’s social media algorithms. That is especially unnerving for Mr Farage, whose own Mar-a-Lago bromancing with the tech mogul ended in bitter tears. If you think relations between Reform and the Conservatives are bad, those between Reform and Restore are ferocious.

Mr Lowe loathes his old party. He describes Reform as a “cult”, which is a bit ripe from the leader of a one-MP party, and calls Mr Farage “a coward and a viper”. The latter has often claimed that he has done the UK a service by suppressing support for parties of the far right and has dismissed Restore as an irrelevance. Yet polling has put it at 7% to 8% in Makerfield. Nerves will jangle even more painfully in Camp Farage if the split on the right hands the seat to Andy Burnham and rolls him a red carpet to Downing Street. Though none would ever be likely to admit this publicly, Labour MPs who have Faragist challengers snapping at their heels take some comfort from the thought of Restore splitting off Reform votes.

For those of us watching from a safe distance, there is a temptation to smile at this cage fight on the extremes of the right. It is the ethno-nationalist’s version of the People’s Front of Judea versus the Judean People’s Front. Opponents will enjoy the spectacle of them cannibalising each other. But there is also a disturbing dimension to the grim grapple over who can be the most nasty party of the right. If this grisly competition has so little respect for the wishes of a grieving family, you can be sure it has absolutely none for the rest of us.

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Photograph by PA/Alamy