Reform’s sustained fall in the polls over the past six months has not come as a result of Farage’s ‘corruption scandals’ or because the public has warmed to Kemi Badenoch. Badenoch’s polling has barely changed since the July 2025 nadir, she is still hovering around eighteen percent in most polls. The only thing that has materially changed since last year is that Restore, which did not exist, is now polling at around 6% nationally. If all of those voters defected to Reform, Reform would be beating Labour in the polls and on course for a majority.
Anybody who writes about British politics and is not examining Restore closely simply isn’t in the game, Lowe’s antics are driving change more than anything else. As it stands none of the parties of the right, the Tories, Reform or Restore seem capable of reaching thirty percent of the vote which would give a government enough strength to leave the ECHR and set up a third country forced removals destination like Rwanda. So long as this deadlock continues the ‘small-boats crisis’ will continue apace and more innocent men and women will be attacked by illegal migrants.
To help get us out this situation we must understand how it came to pass. A blindspot in most people’s political memories is the post-1997 rebuilding of the Conservative Party. Most people’s understanding what we call Tory modernisation period begins roughly with David Cameron beating David Davis and then letting gay people get married to help make the Tories look more ‘modern’, eventually leading to the rise of UKIP. In fact the period before Cameron became leader did more to shape the eventual texture of the British right.
Soon after William Hague became leader in 1997 he set out to improve the image of the Conservative Party by making it a more democratic institution by giving the membership the final vote on who could be leader. These reforms were also motivated by the sentimental memories of the Tory party functioning as a mass membership organisation in the post-war period (there are still ‘Conservative Pubs’ dotted around the country), which it was hoped would be renewed by enfranchising members further.
The result of this has been to repeatedly place wholly incompetent individuals at the head of the Conservative Party because of the membership’s strange pathologies – in particular their overwhelming preference for women. Every time that a woman has reached the voting stage of a Tory leadership race she has gone onto win (May, Truss and Kemi). All three of these women were unsuitable to the task, but had been grossly overpromoted because of their sex. All three of them were psychosexually compared to Margaret Thatcher by the Tory press, only to be revealed as weak, emotionally incontinent individuals. Theresa May nearly destroyed the country because she was too weak to carry out Brexit, the incontinent Liz Truss ‘crashed the economy’ (a folk belief which is still carried) and Kemi Badenoch is a feckless, mercurial woman who has brought the Tories to the brink of death. Other structural changes in the modernising years (e.g Women2Win) have biased the pipeline greatly in favour of women. By 2005 Hague was already publicly admitting that he had made a dreadful error.
It is important to grasp that if Hague had not made this change, the Conservative Party would still be the dominant party of the right. Boris was able to rescue the Tories from Theresa May and the Brexit Party. Sunak was able to save the Tories from utter annihilation by Labour. Contra Mrs Lintott the recent history of the Tory Party is women making a dreadful mess and men having to come around the corner to clean it up. Just before his dramatic exit it seemed like Robert Jenrick would fulfil the same function for Kemi. Hague’s reforms are very difficult to reverse (no leader could be elected to remove the franchise) and so there is a permanent leadership problem with the institutional party of the right. Katie Lam is the only candidate of the 2024 intake who is being spoken about as a future party leader and all of the same canards are being crowed (Tough on borders! A bold, pragmatic right-winger! Like Mrs T!) Last year she went onto television to announce that the Tories were planning to deport legally settled people based on amendments they had tabled on ILR. Kemi then denounced this and said amendments were withdrawn. Either the new black Thatcher or the new White Thatcher was lying/incompetent but, as has been the case since the Tories fell below Reform, there was almost no scrutiny of this apparent volte-face. It is important to grasp that the institution has been wrought from a deeply crooked timber and will continue to produce incompetent leaders for the foreseeable future. The problem is structural and nobody within it has the bravery to challenge it; so believing that the Tories might rise at the expense of Reform but this is ok because the former is committed to leaving the ECHR is wrong.
Throughout Hague’s time as leader the Conservatives also went through a series of race rows. For a long time the Tory Party had been remarkably tolerant of ‘extremist’ views on ethnicity. Although Enoch Powell was expelled after the Rivers of Blood speech there was an explicitly Powellite wing of the Tory party and formal bodies like the Monday Club which would openly advocate for the deportation of all non-whites in Britain throughout the 1970s and 80s (which luminaries like John Bercow were members of). But there was also a more porous relationship between the Conservative Party fringes and bodies such as the National Front.
In the 1990s Mark Cotterrill and other National Front members left the National Front to create the Patriotic Forum which, alongside the Revolutionary Conservative Caucus, worked within the Conservative Party to drag it to the right. Cotterill was able to become a Conservative Party member in 1993 despite having been part of a political party (the NF) led by John Tyndall, who was at one time in his life an explicit Nazi who called for armed violence.
Another illustrative figure from earlier in the century is Jane Birdwood, the wife of a Hereditary Peer who wanted the original Edict of Expulsion against the Jews to be enforced on the grounds that it had never been legally overturned, opposed abortion on the grounds that White babies were being killed and became friends with Banderites who had organised pogroms during the Second World War. Birdwood did this all while being a member of the Monday Club (later going to the BNP).
The ongoing associations between the extreme right and the Tory party became a political target for the Labour party during Hague’s premiership. Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary who would later resign over Iraq, attacked Hague over extremists in the Conservative Party, focusing particularly on Right now!, a magazine which interviewed explicit fascists like Nick Griffin and Peter Brimelow (VDARE) alongside Conservatives like Roger Scruton, Anne Widdecombe and Bill Cash.
In Hague’s last year as Tory leader he was beset by a scandal when one of his backbench MPs, John Townend, attacked Robin Cook for asserting that there is no such thing as a British race (sound familiar?) Townend had been explicitly racist for most of his career, in the 80s he called for England to be reconquered by the English, but Hague also had to contend with a new BAME faction within the Conservative party hierarchy. An attack was led on him internally by Lord Taylor. Lord Taylor was a Jamaican Barrister imposed by central office of unwilling associations in both 1987 and 1992 as part of an effort to show warmer attitudes on race. John Major personally campaigned in his seat in the 1992, but Taylor managed to lose the seat to the Lib Dems (during a general election in which the Tories earned the most votes that a British political party has ever managed). After failing twice to make it in as an MP the Tories made him a Lord – a routine they also did with Sayeeda Warsi after failing to parachute her into the Commons.
Hague survived this episode but his successor Ian Duncan Smith was much more aggressive on the ‘right-flank’ of the Conservative Party. It was Ian Duncan Smith who formally proscribed the Monday Club and forced three MPs to step down from it. The hard right of the Tory party attempted to mount a defence of themselves by setting up the Conservative Democratic Alliance in 2001, the architect of which was expelled before defecting to UKIP in 2005. While Hague had dithered about Townend, IDS made a show of sacking one of his shadow ministers for making a racist joke at a rugby club dinner – again at the behest of Lord Taylor.
So the link between the Conservative Party and the far-right was formally severed, again changing the mechanics on the right of British politics. Before IDS ideologically motivated activists could kid themselves that changing the Tory Party would be more fruitful than setting up an alternative organisation, and this also provided a home from racist voters. Eurosceptics were able to take advantage of flexibility on Europe, paving the way for an eventual Brexiteer coup. But on immigration the story was quite different. It is in the early 2000s that we begin to see a resurgence in the extra-parliamentary right in Britain. The BNP began to win councils in the North of England and in East London. At the same time Nigel Farage of UKIP sensed an opportunity to tie the Eurosceptic cause to immigration after the 2004 EU enlargement (which gave Romanians et al passports to Britain), taking the party from being a hobby-horse for fringe academics to a national political force.
Now that we understand the relationship between the Tory Party and the far-right we can begin to grasp what the Restore phenomenon really is:
Restore is a return to the pre-IDS settlement, whereby the Tories absorb the lawful elements of the extreme right to make them impotent within a larger body.
This is the role that Rupert Lowe serves, this is why Gavin Williamson, May’s dark Prince, worked on the fake Rape Gangs Inquiry. It is why Rupert never criticises Badenoch and writes tweets attacking all parties except the Tories. That is why he feels comfortable telling a room full of his supporters (the Cromwell Club) that he is in constant messaging contact with Kemi Badenoch. Many people working within Restore have attempted to work for the Conservative Party and they maintain relationships with individual advisers within it. The leader of Restore wanted to defect to the Tory party as recently as last year. He has done them an even greater service by using his heft on social media to attack Reform relentlessly and draw a portion of their voters away into miniscule fringe party whose only power is to weaken Reform.
The fact that so little has been made of the relationship between Kemi and Rupert belies the truth that Britain has neither a meaningfully free press nor an intelligent enough population which are both necessary for real democracy. It is as if Nick Griffin was in constant contact with David Cameron during the early 2010s when UKIP was damaging the coalition. A very basic centrist line of attack would be that Kemi is behaving like Imperial Germany releasing Lenin into Tsarist Russia, that she is opening a crack in the door for vicious antisemites and holocaust deniers (who use Lowe as a figurehead) to save herself from Farage. If the press was hostile to Kemi, they would connected this to her attempt to push a former Nazi convicted for harassment against Luciana Berger forward as a councillor (and then doubling down by giving him an advisory position). We would be hearing non-stop about the Conservative Party’s antisemitism crisis as we did writ Labour during the Corbyn years.
Instead Kemi is actively celebrated by centre-right journalists whilst they hound Polanski (who is himself Jewish) on charges of antisemitism because his activists may have expressed scepticism in some Google Document questioning the Ben Gvir to snuffle starving Palestinian children’s food. Remember that many of the people going after Polanski on this issue have also been praising Shabana Mahmood (who once led a mob into a Sainsbury’s to protest the stocking of Israeli goods, and called for mobs to protest MPs offices if they did not support Palestine), telling us with a straight face that she would be tough on immigration (reader, she was not). You are entitled to your own views on all of these matters but the sheer hypocrisy is bloody vomit inducing.
