UK far
right lines up behind Rupert Lowe in challenge to Reform
MP who
fell out with Nigel Farage and has backing of Elon Musk launches
anti-immigration party in Great Yarmouth
Ben Quinn
Ben Quinn
Political correspondent
Sun 15
Feb 2026 14.58 GMT
On a cold
night in a dilapidated theatre tucked away at the end of Great Yarmouth’s
Britannia Pier, Rupert Lowe was launching a far-right revolution. “Millions
will have to go,” the MP said as he pledged a policy of mass deportations to
rapturous applause and foot stamping from the hundreds of people gathered for
what had been billed as the launch of a local “Great Yarmouth First” party.
But after
introducing five councillors who will stand at the next Norfolk county council
elections under that banner, the former Reform UK figure went further by
announcing that his Restore Britain movement would become a national party.
In an
electoral battlefield littered with failed startups, Lowe’s new party is, for
now, little more than a pebble in the shoe of Nigel Farage’s Reform, from which
he parted ways last year after a bitter falling out.
However,
over the weekend other parties and figures to the right of Reform quickly
rallied behind the new party. Advance UK, led by the former Reform deputy
leader Ben Habib and backed by the far-right activist known as Tommy Robinson,
said it would consider a merger.
Such a
force could cost Reform a number of seats – and potentially even power, in a
wafer-thin general election result – by splitting support among those drawn to
hard-right anti-immigration populism.
One
seasoned Tory strategist said: “We’ve had a general election with a big Labour
win but where a lot of their MPs had margins of around 1,000 votes, so you
could see small challengers on the right disrupting Reform’s attempts to follow
that.” In 2024, 46 seats were won with a margin of less than 2%.
While
Reform has placed great store in social media, Habib and, in particular, Lowe
have significant presences on X, where each have been amplified by Elon Musk,
who funded Robinson’s legal bills last year.
Musk, who
has taken a dislike to Farage in favour of Lowe, retweeted the latter on
Saturday, saying: “Join Rupert Lowe in Restore Britain, because he is the only
one who will actually do it!”
A cohort
of young rightwing would-be influencers pushing a more exclusive, ethnically
nationalistic view of British identity have flocked to Lowe, who had attained a
cult appeal among many Reform members.
Among
those at his event in Great Yarmouth was Lucy White, an activist and sometime
GB News contributor accused of racist tweets. Steve Laws, a prominent activist
and “ethnonationalist” influencer, tweeted: “Rupert Lowe is our leader. GET IN
LINE.”
Other
figures such as the millionaire businessman Duncan Bannatyne and the actor John
Cleese have also given approving signals.
Advance
UK, meanwhile, has cultivated street protest. Large numbers of its flags – in
some cases handed out to people unaware of the group – were prominent among the
thousands of people who marched through the town of Crowborough last month
against the use of a former military base to house asylum seekers.
“Reform
are vacating the part of the political spectrum on which it was founded. We’re
the old Reform, and Reform is becoming the Tories 2.0,” Habib said before the
launch of Advance’s first policies at the Emmanuel Centre, a Westminster venue
let out by an evangelical church. The former Brexit party MEP says he has put
£100,000 into the party and it has raised £600,000 from other sources.
“We have
people joining us because they’re fed up with the way Reform is run, or because
they have an ideological conviction and see Farage changing the message,” he
said. “Our original Reform manifesto had rejected the World Economic Forum and
yet there was Farage taking an Iranian billionaire’s money to go to Davos.”
An early
indication will come this month in the Gorton and Denton byelection where
Advance is standing Nick Buckley, who received an MBE for his charity work but
who has since become known for his extreme language on race and Islam.
Lowe’s
party, meanwhile, has adopted a decentralised structure that is likely to show
up the top-down approach of Farage’s party. The Great Yarmouth First party is
aiming to win all of the nine seats in the borough whenever postponed county
council elections take place. This will be a pilot for Restore Britain, which
will act as an umbrella for others.
Separated
from Reform, Lowe has proven himself able to attract attention. A self-styled
“inquiry” that he set up into the grooming gangs scandal attracted the
involvement of Tory MPs including Nick Timothy, Esther McVey and Gavin
Williamson.
In Great
Yarmouth, one of the English coastal towns with high levels of deprivation,
which Reform used as a springboard for its 2024 breakthrough, a clash between
Lowe and his old party looms at the next general election. “We won it last time
and we will win again,” Reform sources said.
But Lowe
remains a rallying point for others. Rightwing activists and former Reform
supporters had travelled from as far away as Scotland to attend the event. They
included Maria Bowtell, an East Riding of Yorkshire councillor and single
mother who was once regarded as a Reform rising star and who had driven down
with her young son.
“Reform
used to stand for something hopeful but it’s clear they won’t really change
anything, plus people like me just weren’t supported,” Bowtell said. “I went on
Woman’s Hour and was hung out to dry. I’m attracted now to the idea of
independents getting together.”
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