Restore isn’t a threat to Farage – it’s his secret weapon

The momentum which Nigel Farage and Reform UK had before this summer has been lost. Farage’s finances and the rise of Andy Burnham have played a part – but so has the fact that Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain has emerged as a more right-wing alternative for voters disillusioned by Reform. Restore showed in the Makerfield by-election and Greater Manchester mayoral election it could eat away at Reform’s vote. But its hardline policies may well make sure it remains a fringe party – and make more moderate voters more likely to stay with Farage. So, will Restore destroy Farage’s dream of becoming prime minister? Zoë Grünewald and Henry Hill give their perspectives. If nothing else, the rise of Restore Britain has afforded a little schadenfreude to Conservatives who have spent years grappling with the rise of Ukip/The Brexit Party/Reform UK. Reform supporters may have a point when they insist that theirs is the only party capable of actually delivering change and that it is foolish to flirt with more radical alternatives, but they might recall that this line of argument did not endear the Conservatives to Reform voters when they were trying it. Setting that aside, however, it isn’t necessarily obvious that Rupert Lowe’s party ought to worry Nigel Farage all that much – at least not yet. There are some superficial similarities between Reform’s battle with Restore and the old Tory/Ukip wars, but the differences are perhaps more important. The most obvious difference is between the skillsets of Farage and Lowe. Both are uncommonly able politicians, but not the same sort of politician. Farage is a consummate campaigner, with great skill for stealing the spotlight and setting the terms of the debate even when heading what ought to have been only a marginal political force. Lowe, on the other hand, is much more diligent and vastly better suited to the actual role of Member of Parliament. There is a reason that, prior to his expulsion from Reform UK, he was alone responsible for about half of all the recorded parliamentary work done by its entire caucus of five (or six, if we include Jim Allister of the TUV) MPs. His problem is that those skills are badly mismatched with his circumstances. They are skills Reform would urgently need if it is ever to make a success of government, but they are not the skills likely to take a marginal party like Restore into government. For the moment, Lowe is an insurgent, and he doesn’t show much evidence of being half the insurgent that Farage was. The presence of Restore Britain on the political scene might help Reform in another way: by defanging it a little. When consumers make decisions, the relative position of the options sometimes matters as much as the contents, especially when people are not deeply well-informed about them. Fairly or unfairly, there will be some voters (particularly, perhaps, defectors from the Conservatives) who would be chary of supporting the most right-wing party – but who would be reassured in their choice if there existed a more radical alternative. By the same token, this dynamic might hurt Lowe’s prospects precisely because it makes Restore the more appealing proposition for those who want the most right-wing party going; whilst not all of this group will be racists or extremists, there is no doubt that this category contains racists and extremists. Farage has historically been pretty good about recognising the danger such people pose to his parties’ chances of crossing the respectability barrier, and won’t be at all unhappy to have another party siphoning them off. A particularly high-profile example of this is Elon Musk, as well as the wider US tech scene, which has a very poor image in Britain. Now this doesn’t mean that Restore is a risk-free proposition for Farage. It is at the very least a complicating factor in what is an already very delicate operation: trying to get Reform ready for government, and reconciled to the difficult choices that await any British government, without looking like it has sold out to the establishment and joined the “uniparty”. In The Netherlands, for example, no sooner had Geert Wilders’ far-right PVV got into government than no less than three new parties sprang up on its rightward flank. Governing in an age of disenchanted voters is tricky, and the transition to government for parties which got big trading on that disenchantment is trickier still. And Farage’s long siege of this country’s traditional party system was directed primarily at the Conservatives, a very old party with a strong institutional history and internal culture; this was surely part of the reason that he attracted relatively few defections. Reform is a very different and much younger beast; should it suffer serious internal strife, or have a deeply uncomfortable collision with the realities of office, it might be that its MPs are more willing to jump ship than their Tory predecessors. Farage would also be foolish, given his own history, to entirely dismiss the danger posed by a small challenger party. If nothing else, it could lead to him having to shore up his right flank, which would make harder the work of wooing voters from the Conservatives and, especially importantly given the current electoral map, from Labour. But even allowing that Lowe is not Farage, Ukip’s rise took decades of often thankless work to effect; it also had the great boon of the European Parliament, which allowed it to perform well in low-turnout PR elections and gave it access to a reliable source of funding. The conditions for such a long march by Restore Britain don’t seem to be present. For all that Lowe might want to stop Farage, it looks, at the moment, like his party will make Farage’s work easier rather than harder.