Rupert Lowe: Britain’s Cincinnatus

When he was elected as one of five Reform UK MPs in July 2024, I suggested that Rupert Lowe was Britain’s Caesar-in-waiting. A year later, Lowe has joked that blades have been embedded into his back by Nigel Farage. In March, the now-independent MP fought off an attempt to besmirch his reputation with workplace bullying allegations — based on the same Equality Act that Reform have promised to “axe”. He was then cleared of a bogus police investigation concocted by former party Chairman, Zia Yusuf, which saw his farmhouse raided by the police, and his firearms confiscated and carted off in a wheelbarrow. He is now launching legal proceedings against his former colleagues, after Reform insinuated he had dementia, and dragged his staff into the bitter battle. Even those who have supported the party and see its potential regard this as shameful.

Perhaps Lowe is more Cincinnatus than Rubicon-crossing dictator: a patrician who retired to a life of farming, only to be summoned from his plough to assume the highest office of state, and renounce power once he saved his nation. The 67-year-old grandfather would certainly rather be cultivating his crops in Oxfordshire. But he gave up a quiet retirement and committed himself to public service. Before his exile, he was responsible for half of Reform’s total Parliamentary activity. Unlike most who seek to prolong problems in order to profit from them, Lowe donates his entire Parliamentary salary to charity. Despite being the most successful Parliamentarian on social media, he remains an eligible political divorcé. Lowe refused to join Robert Kilroy Silk, Steven Woolfe, Ben Habib in the great political career graveyard in the sky. Everyone is wondering where he will go next.

I had the privilege of interviewing the farmer turned elder-statesman last week. We discussed the prosecution of Hamit Coskun, the man attacked for burning a Quran in protest outside the Turkish Embassy in London. “We should not have any blasphemy laws”, Lowe insisted, parting from his political hero Oliver Cromwell, who introduced them in 1650. “I don’t think any religion should be singled out for special treatment.” Lowe put forward a motion in Parliament “recognising that in a free society, no religion or belief system, including Islam, should be immune from criticism, debate, satire or offence”. To date, only five other MPs have signed it. I suggest more should find their spine while there’s still time.

On other matters of free speech, Lowe would repeal “all of this legislation that has distorted common sense, logic, and fairness”. Nothing is off limits: the Race Relations Act (1968), the Public Order Act (1986), the Equality Act (2010); anything which makes the state a leviathan, meddling with the free association of individuals, must go. Laws that appoint the police as arbiters of politically correct opinion must go too. “It doesn’t matter what political opinion is. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong; and if it’s right, it’s right, and the police should be dealing with the law”, Lowe said, condemning in Biblical fashion how diversity, equity, and inclusion doctrine has produced two-tier policing.

Maintaining “social cohesion” and fears of being “branded a racist” were the reasons given for why police officers, local councilors, social workers, politicians, and journalists covered up the Pakistani rape gangs for decades. But Lowe remains unafraid of the pejoratives levelled at him for asking tough questions. “You shouldn’t be treated differently if you’re running a white rape gang to if you’re running an Islamic or Muslim rape gang. The evil is the perpetration of rape upon young underage young girls”, Lowe said, with a moral clarity scarce in Westminster. In May, Emily Maitlis disgraced herself by accusing Lowe of pocketing funds raised for his rape gang inquiry, and calling him racist for being concerned about the grooming, gang-rape, torture, trafficking, and murder of white working-class girls by Pakistani Muslim men. She mangled the statistics, and still has not issued a correction or an apology. Lowe was unbothered by the smears, and ploughed on.

The same cannot be said of his former Reform colleagues. When Steven Edginton cited research by Reform-supporting academic Matt Goodwin, finding that white Britons will become a minority in their own country by 2063, deputy leader Richard Tice responded, “I’ll be long gone. … Let’s see what happens.” How is “On we go” an acceptable response to an unprecedented demographic and cultural experiment, with no democratic legitimacy, which your own voters are principally concerned about? Reform will befall the same fate as the Conservative party if it dismisses the concerns of its voters, and carries itself with the conceited, flippantly apathetic “I’m alright, Jack” attitude of Boomer caricatures. “I want to leave a better country for my grandson and his children”, Lowe wrote in response. “That’s what I care about.”

Worse still, when Edginton queried why Tice is content to continue playing Ship of Theseus with Britain’s population, Tice accused Edginton of being “juvenile” and “obsessed with this stuff”. He was angered that Edgington had asked the question, concerned about external perceptions: “People watching this will say, ‘Oh, Tice is a dreadful individual, he wants to deport everybody tomorrow’.” It shows that Reform has not learned that the media is full of their enemies who would rather see Britain destroyed and their party disbanded than that they succeed.

Edgington pressed for clarity on the party’s immigration policy because they have not published the plan when they promised. Previously, Nigel Farage had told Edginton that he was opposed to the mass deportation of every illegal immigrant in Britain because it was “a political impossibility to deport hundreds-of-thousands of people, we simply can’t do it”. He reiterated that it was not even his ambition, the difficulty of delivering aside, and said:

“I’m not going to get dragged down the route of mass deportations, or anything like that … if I say I support mass deportations, you know, that’s all anybody would talk about for the next 20 years, so it’s pointless even going there.”

Rupert refuses to mince words: “If somebody comes here illegally, they’re breaking the law. They should be detained and deported.” Farage called such talk “a very grave, dark and dangerous use of language” in March, and told Lowe to remove the term “mass deportations” from a speech in January. But after I received a round of applause at Reform’s annual conference calling for mass deportations, and Adam Wren’s polling found 99% of Reform voters expect the party to remove every illegal immigrant in Britain, Farage changed his mind. He promised a Minister for Deportations, and acted like he had never said anything to the contrary. Straight from the playbook of his Brexit opponents, he accused those saying otherwise of being misled by foreign disinformation — “sponsored by Indian bots”.

Farage made the same unsubstantiated claim in defense of Zia Yusuf: blaming “vile trolls”, “the alt-right”, and “Indian bots” for criticism of the former Chairman. Yusuf had deterred donors, sacked loyalists like Gawain Towler, alienated local branch chairs, and tried to have Rupert Lowe thrown in prison on false charges. But all Farage had to say, after Yusuf posted on X that “I no longer believe working to get a Reform government elected is a good use of my time”, was “Thank you”. Farage had previously praised an article by Daniel Finkelstein, which included Cameron’s characterization of UKIP under Farage as full of “fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists”. There seems to be a trend here, of insulting Reform supporters in order to protect Zia Yusuf from fair criticism. Finkelstein also wrote that, “because he is a Muslim and has worked for Goldman Sachs, Yusuf is a symbol of the modernisation — the broadening — Farage believes essential”. It seems Farage is set on repeating the same mistakes that David Cameron made in 2010.

Yusuf’s treatment of Rupert Lowe has not adversely impacted Reform’s pre-election polling. It did nearly cost them the Runcorn by-election: which Reform won by only 6 votes, after losing 95 to Catherine Blaiklock’s anti-Farage ticket. It will also impair their ability to govern after an election. Lowe has called his former party leader “a beech tree”, under which nothing grows. To not squander this once-in-a-century chance to reconfigure British politics, Reform must cultivate talent, and not dance to the tune of those who would rather see them disband than succeed. When I warned that these inconsistent answers would cause problems for Reform in the future, Tice dismissed me as “delusional garbage” twice. Given my predictions were born out with the exile of Rupert Lowe, now resignation of Zia Yusuf, I would like to remind them that it’s not too late to listen.

But it is too late for Rupert Lowe to return to Reform. So where to next? An hour before we spoke, Lowe was in the bowels of Old Queen Street talking to The Spectator’s Madeline Grant and editor Michael Gove. As a permanent Cabinet fixture, Gove is an avatar of accomplishments (or lack thereof) of fourteen years of Conservative government. He best embodied the repudiated Cameronite attitude when he told Grant at NatCon in 2023 that the Tories’ greatest achievements were Universal Credit — which helped balloon the welfare budget by £100bn since 2013 — and that “our cabinet, our Parliament, and our leading institutions are I think more diverse visibly diverse and more meritocratic than ever before”. Said diversity was achieved by nepotistic race-and-gender quotas imposed by David Cameron, because he thought “a sea of white male faces” was a problem. I wonder why the patriotic majority abandoned the Conservative Party?

Lowe held Gove’s nose to the beltsander, repeating that the Tories squandered Boris Johnson’s 80 seat majority, entrenched and exacerbated malign legislation passed by Tony Blair, and committed the “vast error” of COVID lockdowns. “How much did you hand out during COVID Michael?” Lowe asked. “His department handed out billions. Billions! You were chucking it around like confetti.” He described lockdowns to me as “a bunch of halfwits handing out money on a scale that’s never been seen”.

Gove, like a Tinder date who turned up looking nothing like his profile, tried to move on and flatter Lowe into coming back to the Tory party’s flat. He’s not the only Conservative flirting with letting Lowe into the Carlton club. Nine of them signed his motion to “implement a comprehensive national strategy to identify, detain, and deport all individuals found to be residing in the United Kingdom illegally”.

“A reformed Tory party is probably the most potent vehicle through which to do this”, Lowe admitted, referencing his plan for a Great Repeal bill to reverse Blair’s revolution. What would it take for him to accept the whip? To clear it out, “like the Augean Stables”, of all the “dark arts masters” who led them to a historic defeat. Depending on who the new head of candidate selection is, Lowe may get his wish. But if Tom Tugendhat tweeting “Eid Mubarak” in Arabic is anything to go by, most of those on the green benches remain an insurmountable obstacle to the Conservatives being credible again. After all, unapologetic architect of the Boriswave, Priti Patel, is still Shadow Foreign Secretary. Unless Badenoch is prepared to expel those who betrayed the Brexit mandate — as Boris did Dominic Grieve and 20 other turncoat MPs in 2019 — they will remain at a permanent fourth place in the polls. There’s not a WordArt meme in the world that can save them.

Lowe is clear about what must be done:

“We have to win this next general election on a first pass the post basis And we have to then be ruthless about how we repeal and then pass legislation which is going to empower the individual and drive the economy and take statism out of our lives.”

But how? He now has the luxury of choosing which rosette to wear next. Since he can’t speak Urdu, the Labour party is unlikely. Ditto for Lib Dems and the Greens. Until the Conservatives rid themselves of those still wedded to the reviled record of Cameron, May, Johnson, and Sunak, it would be a cul-de-sac. The charismatic Cincinnatus figure could well reconfigure the Tories, or start something new entirely.

Wherever he goes next, we should be thankful to have such a valiant crusader before he returns to tending his fields.