The Facebook star wrecking Farage’s 30-year dream of power

Welcome to The Fight for the Right, The i Paper’s new opinion series exploring the ideas, personalities and parties battling to shape the right of British politics. • The Tories’ birthplace reveals a party fighting for its life • Farage could walk away from Reform – this is how • Badenoch is borrowing a maligned Tory leader’s playbook to beat Farage Nigel Farage is struggling with a political challenge he will recognise with bitter irony.

Farage built his political career as the right’s provocateur-in-chief. His parties – Ukip, the Brexit Party, Reform UK – were effectively one man’s branding operation. He dragged the Conservatives rightwards on Brexit and then on immigration. Forcefully spoken, uncompromising, he threatened to take just enough votes to deny the Tories a majority. Rupert Lowe and his Restore Britain party are now pulling the same trick on Farage. Just two years ago, Lowe stood alongside Farage as the Reform gang arrived in Parliament.

Lowe left the party in 2025 amid a row over bullying allegations, which he dismissed as vexatious. That personal dimension must make this all the more galling. Those who lost fights with Farage in the past faded away, but not Lowe. He leveraged his social media presence and money to do things differently. Where Ukip broke through by outbidding the Tories on Europe, Lowe does the same to Reform on migration . Where Farage’s party often focuses on the future – stopping small boats, reducing net inflows and changing rules to make migration more temporary – Restore looks backwards.

They embrace “remigration” and mass deportations, politically extreme ideas Reform has shied away from. This includes reviewing already granted citizenships, reversing schemes such as the Afghan Resettlement, and abolishing asylum entirely. Restore’s policies offer a full-fat alternative to Reform, almost entirely focused on voters who rank immigration and demographic change as their top issues. Restore is not the first party to be more right-wing than Farage but is the first to do it successfully.

Polling averages put the party at around 4 per cent, with some surveys showing support more than double that. The party came third in the Makerfield by-election , beating the Conservatives and got nearly 9 per cent of the votes in the subsequent Manchester mayoral election. It has also picked up 40 councillors across the country, mostly through defections from Reform. Restore’s success is about more than simply outbidding Farage on immigration.

The party has established a smart online presence. While Farage has flirted with TikTok fame , Lowe has come to dominate Facebook , a platform increasingly used by older, more conservative voters. He now has more than two million followers across Meta platforms, more than double Kemi Badenoch’s reach. Lowe is also increasingly recognised, picked out more often than the Tory leader in surveys and focus groups . In direct, head-to-head polling, he even beats out Farage.

Such reach is incredible for a first-term backbencher in a very minor party. Lowe’s personal fame also allows for a shrewd political manoeuvre. His presence is avuncular, drawing on his business background, and often feels like someone sharing their opinions over a pint at a country pub. He regularly invokes “common sense”. This disguises the radicalism of Restore. Many voters see the party as more moderate than Reform. Where Farage often seems pugnacious, Lowe is more patrician.

Yet his upstart party has a clear darker edge. Farage has always built firewalls against those further to his right: BNP members were banned from Ukip, he distanced himself from figures like Tommy Robinson , and has tried to avoid overt racial politics. Farage’s political strategy was always to appear just radical enough for the right-wing fringes, but without scaring more moderate Conservative voters. Lowe’s Restore takes the opposite approach.

Their mantra is closer to “no enemies on the right”. There is little firewall or cordon sanitaire there. The party has tolerated, and at times openly courted, far-right and nationalist groups. Lowe has voiced support for Tommy Robinson , and the party has welcomed members from far-right groups like the Homeland Party and Patriotic Alternative. On social media, Lowe’s videos about fly-tipping and farming sit alongside those stoking fear about Islam and the “belonging” of migrants.

Having his own popular pages gives Lowe a valuable resource: a channel that Farage can’t intrude on. Rupert Lowe has his own base now. It is fomented on social media, backed financially by Lowe himself and a handful of wealthy donors. He also has a political gap. Reform’s polling decline this summer, largely driven by its own scandals, has changed the landscape. No party has a real upper hand in the right bloc, and Labour’s rise under Andy Burnham has boosted the left.

Farage is now in the position he put the Tories in for so long. Ape his rival to the right and he loses moderates, lowering the ceiling of his popularity. Ignore him, however, and his right flank remains open to a party that can sell a more radical message. Restore’s ceiling is likely low. It is the most radical party Britain has seen achieve success in decades. Mass deportations and a rejection of civic nationalism appeal to some but scare many, even on the right.

So do their flirtations with Covid conspiracism and anti-Ukraine positions. But when one right-wing party has a real chance at winning, it makes sense for the more radical voters to fall in behind it. When Reform looks less likely to win, voters have less reason to think tactically and instead favour purity. Farage has shown how much influence you can wield without winning power.