The argument for Farage

J'accuse blogs

“I want to put on the record my sincere thanks to Kemi Badenoch for following and supporting our Rape Gang Inquiry.

A number of Conservative MPs have attended, and I want to thank each and every one of them – particularly Esther McVery, who has done so much work behind the scenes helping us put it all together.”

Rupert Lowe – February 15, 2026

Before we address how Reform should deal with Restore, we must address a quick question: should Farage care about Restore at all?

My view is that Restore matters a great deal, and that it is qualitatively different to other formations which have attempted to outflank Reform to the right so far. That is because Restore has received Elon Musk’s backing which means it will be juiced very hard on the algorithm for the foreseeable future. You can see the impacts of this yourself if you choose to tweet about Restore GB - you will get a big boost. The tie-clip mafia is no doubt cognisant of this fact, which is partly why they have inveighed themselves with this new organisation, as it will allow them to grow their own audiences regardless of it failing to win an election.

Lowe is a sitting MP and is personally wealthy. His political party may be able to receive funding from US Tech companies with bases in Britain (e.g Tesla), but even if this is not possible thanks to Labour’s new legislation restricting foreign political donations, online estimates have Lowe with a net worth in the tens of millions. These assets are enough for Restore to have a greater impact than the various fringe right-wing parties like the SDP, UKIP and the BNP which exist only so their leaders can live off donations made in wills and fees from their rump memberships (NB this is why Tenconi et al will not fold into Restore).

Having dominance on X and a bit of money to fight elections will not get you to ten percent in the polls, but if Restore can reach three percent - mostly at the expense of Reform - this will have an outsized impact during the 2029 election, and may prevent Farage from achieving an overall majority. The margins in many seats will be very thin at the next election and lots of strange things happen electorally when there are four parties running at around 20 percent. James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party - perhaps the best historical analogue to Restore - managed to seriously damage UKIP and eliminated scores of Europhile Tory MPs with only 2.6% of the vote in 1997. Similarly the BNP and UKIP both prevented each other from making electoral progress during the 2000s. It takes a churlish lack of imagination and understanding to reflexively dismiss Restore as an ‘Online Right’ phenomenon.

Which brings us nicely to how Reform is attempting to deal with the sudden emergence of Restore, and for the most part that is to engage in a combination of obnoxious sneering about the ‘online right’, and shouting about ‘Neo-Nazis’. Or the worst sin of all, citing Luke ‘The Nuke’ Tryl’s topsy turvy opinion polls about Disengaged Scrollers not recognising Rupert Lowe. If a given voter believes that Reform has been captured by the Uni-Party, what sort of message does it send when Reform politicians act the same way that Tory MPs have for the past decade when they have been attacked from the right? It is as if you had accused me of being a homosexual and my response was to kneel down and start unzipping your trousers to prove you wrong.

As somebody who generally wishes well to Reform, I also have serious reservations about some of the presentational choices the party makes. I am especially exercised by the recent habit of Reform UK politicians, including Farage, to talk of themselves as being the ‘centre-right’, which is the same phraseology that the Tory Wet think tank Onward uses to describe itself. It is cuckspeak, attempting to implore an imaginary left-wing observer that you are not a nasty right winger but instead are ‘centre-right’, please, please don’t call me a Nazi.

If you still support Reform, I assume that you are disillusioned with the two main parties and believe in particular that the Tories are lily-livered liars who betray the voters when they are in power. Restore voters believe that Reform is also in this Uniparty category. This is not a massive epistemic gap, and it is something that can be addressed with a polite and reasonable manner instead of howling about extremism like a Searchlight press release.

I will spend the rest of this article attempting to persuade Restore supporters that Reform is not part of the Uniparty, and that by supporting Rupert Lowe’s new outfit they are actually strengthening the hand of the Establishment, thereby missing an opportunity to begin democratically addressing demographic change and the grooming gang crisis. This is also addressed to an American audience, many of whom seem to have adopted a Muskian line on these developments – which they can be forgiven for, as it is very difficult to grasp the politics of a country when you can only read about it – but it is important that transatlantic friends understand that their support for Rupert will not help us out of this mess.

At the core of my thesis is “Farage’s wager”, based on Pascal’s wager. In case you didn’t pay attention during your Religious Studies lessons, Pascal’s wager is an argument in favour of worshipping God on the basis that he may well exist, and if he does it makes sense to support him, as the other outcomes are hell or nothingness after death. The following matrix is used to advance this argument:

I make much the same case for Farage at length in this piece. The crux of my argument is that even if you think Farage may secretly be part of the Uniparty, or that he is incompetent, but that the chance he is neither of those things makes him worth supporting – because there is no viable alternative – if Restore do well, you will get the Tories, and we miss a chance to peacefully and democratically change course.

Rupert Lowe will not be Prime Minister in 2029. This is not because Lowe is too extreme and Farage is closer to what the public writ large believe. That is not relevant. It is because there is only one person who has the name recognition in Britain which can overcome that of both the Tories and Labour – Nigel Farage. Farage has been dividing opinion in Britain for the better part of twenty years now. I have written this before but it is important to grasp.

It is extremely difficult to become a household name in the internet age. Everybody single voter in the country knows who Farage is and has an opinion about him. Rupert Lowe is not going to get anywhere near this level of recognition in the next three years before the election. You cannot summon up fame from nothing in Britain. How much attention the broadcast media gives to politicians is decided by law (inc how many councillors/MPs they have); Restore has no realistic way of getting enough airtime for enough voters to hear their message. They can be safely treated like a fringe party by the media and ignored.

This is not just because Britain still has an extremely powerful legacy media, outsiders from any country will inevitably fail if they do not have fame from elsewhere. Trump would not have become leader of the Republican Party if he had not already been a household name, Zemmour would have failed faster if he was not a well known public intellectual in France. There are hard limitations on public attention to politics that cannot be wished away.

The one person this fight is helping is Kemi Badenoch. The thing which is killing the Tories right now – the reason that the crisis is existential for them – is that Reform is the largest party on the right, meaning that voters who want to kick out Labour are best off voting for them. This has never happened to the Conservative Party before, not once in its long history. ‘Vote Tory and get Labour’ is a death knell. They can no longer blackmail the electorate with the threat of even worse government.

Now, if Restore is able to rise a few points in the polls, and bring Reform down to the low 20s, that picture changes. Without a clear dominant force on the right, voters will default to the groove of voting Tory to push out Labour as this is how politics has worked for decades. The Tories will start to climb in the polls again as they were before Badenoch became leader and gave Reform a chance to shine.

This brings me to the conspiratorial part of this article. Do none of you remember that Rupert Lowe was in discussions with Tory MPs for much of last year about defecting to the party? And that the original dispute that Farage had with Rupert was that he decided to withdraw from the 2019 election when he was a Brexit Party candidate, in order to let the Tories in? Do any of you remember that, as recently as October of last year, the Tories took the extraordinary step of awarding Rupert Lowe a seat on the Public Accounts Committee despite him not being a member of their party? Rupert is still tweeting positive things about Badenoch. Earlier this year Chris Philp even publicly encouraged him to join the Tories. Mel ‘Mel Stride’ Stride even refused to rule out letting him back in. It should not take a genius to connect the dots here.

I cannot yet prove that the Tories are in cahoots with Restore UK and Rupert. But I do know that there are Tories who are ecstatic about this new development. If you are a Restore UK supporter, I assume that you would prefer that Nigel Farage become Prime Minister instead of Kemi Badenoch, for reasons of racial and gender prejudice if nothing else. I personally think it was insulting to the dignity of the electorate for the Tory establishment to present this obviously unsuitable individual as candidate for leading a country with the fifth largest economy in the world and Nuclear weapons.

Nonetheless, you must understand that a battle to the right of the Tory Party which undermines Reform is one of the only scenarios in which she is able to thread the needle and become Prime Minister. Labour collapsing and losing the next election is already bolted on. The Conservative Party collapsing and ceasing to be a national electoral force is not.

If Farage was part of the establishment, they would not want to destroy him. It is a matter of historical record that the security services in Britain have been monitoring Nigel Farage for years. Norman Tebbit revealed in 2001 that Mi6 infiltrated UKIP (the reasoning being that British government policy was to seek closer ties with Europe, and that UKIP was undermining this effort).

The deep state and its many tentacles, its lobbying groups masquerading as charities are fighting Farage. They are trying to pin him with connections to Russia to knock him out. They are sending journalists to talk to people who knew him thirty years ago to dog him with antisemitism allegations.

You can reasonably infer from this amount of effort that the Deep State is putting into defeating him that Farage is the genuine article. When Keir Starmer said that he could sleep at night if the Tories won, but that a right-wing party getting in would be unconscionable, he was not lying. This deep-state plant, who crawled out of the Northern Ireland security apparatus to frustrate the British State’s attempts to deport paedophiles for decades as a Human Rights Lawyer, before being brought in as a Labour MP to crush Brexit believes that Reform is a fundamental threat to the establishment.

That is because, once Reform are in power, they will implement a policy agenda which is very, very similar to the one put forward by Rupert Lowe. Farage’s plan, in brief, is to form a government which survives two terms. He wants to leave the ECHR to facilitate the deportation of illegal migrants whilst appointing an evil accountant as Chancellor to stop the economy from crashing.

I have read through Restore GB’s mass deportation document and it does not put forward anything more radical than Reform has, indeed, a large section is dedicated to a Badenoch-esque disquisition on how difficult it is to leave the ECHR (another hint as to the provenance of the organisation). It also mistakenly asserts that the British government has never used the issuance of visas as a threat to force countries to take back their migrants (p90), ignorant of the fact that Mahmood has already done this. It then goes on to state that the British government should try and apply this leverage to China, implying Restore would come to power and then immediately start a trade war/confrontation with Beijing (whilst being very careful to appease avoid offending Irish Catholics).

I do this nitpicking to point out that, despite the constipated exertions of the tie-clip Mafia, the idea that Restore has more of ‘a plan’ than Reform for executing mass deportations just isn’t true. Some of the more ‘based’ ideas that Lowe has put forward, such as deporting entire families if one member was involved in a grooming gang is self-evidently stupid.

Consider what will happen once it emerges that we have forcibly deported a seven year old Pakistani girl from Britain because her father, who was also molesting her, was molesting kids in her school. What happens when she is killed by her relatives in Pakistan for telling the British police what happened to her? A scandal like that will see you government fall apart, because voters do not like that sort of thing, and they will then vote Woke back.

There is no need to create entirely new legal frameworks or to engage in collective punishment to solve the grooming gang crisis. You can just use capital punishment (which to Lowe’s credit he has called for). But the point here is that it does not make you more ‘based’ to support collective punishment for Pakistanis, it just shows a lack of reasoning, and the tie-clip mafia should be explaining this to Rupert instead of writing his tweets for him. These people do not think, for a moment, that they are actually in with a chance of running the country, which should make you ask what their other motivations are likely to be.

So in sum, my argument for why a reader who is disillusioned with Farage and thinking about Restore is that Rupert Lowe has no chance of becoming Prime Minister, that boosting him will only help the Tories, that Farage must be a threat to the establishment if they are so desperate to destroy him, and that there is very little policy difference between Restore and Reform – so it makes more sense to support the party which has a chance of winning and doing what you want.

I am sure that many readers will disagree with much of what I have said. Please do leave a comment with your thoughts – I will take the time to reply to each of you over the weekend.