Politics: consequences

By Richard North - March 9, 2025

With Ukraine temporarily off the front pages, I spent much of yesterday watching the developing spat between Reform MP Rupert Lowe – now suspended – and his party chairman, Muhammad Ziauddin Yusuf, and others.

As I observed yesterday, this issue is not unimportant. Even Golden Boy Farage is now conceding that “further infighting will damage Reform”, and that the treatment of Lowe has “dented [the] sense of unity”.

When I left it yesterday, the party had issued a statement under the names of its chairman, Muhammad Ziauddin Yusuf, and parliamentary whip, Lee Anderson, accusing Lowe of misconduct, stating that an internal investigation had been commissioned by an “independent KC” and that some of his behaviour had been reported to the police.

Coming so soon after Lowe had criticised Farage and the party structure, this had all the hallmarks of a Farage-inspired hatchet job, where typically he will work through proxies to do his dirty work – in this case Muhammad Ziauddin – while he stands aloof from the fray. Rarely will Farage’s fingerprint be found on the murder weapon.

With the spat developing through the day – mainly played out on social media and in the online Telegraph we had a direct intervention from Anderson which seemed to strike the final blow, declaring: “Reform cannot go on with Rupert Lowe as MP”.

This appeared in the paper even as Lowe was pleading for Farage to resolve their disagreements “over dinner”, making an offer which, in Lowe’s words, had been made multiple times over many months and been “refused of ignored” each time.

As the social media response escalated, it became very clear that the overwhelming majority of comments favoured Lowe, with one tweet from Muhammad Ziauddin on Twitter being “ratioed” by a factor of 16:1.

And it wasn’t only Twitter doing the heavy lifting. The comments on Facebook were just as brutal, reflecting the reaction of Reform’s core demographic, making the spat potentially very damaging indeed.

Then, Lowe was given space in the Telegraph to state his case, under the headline: “I’m the victim of a witch hunt – and I’m innocent”, the sub-head asking: “Is it a surprise that allegations about me were made public the day after I made reasonable criticisms of Nigel Farage?”.

Reform has removed me from the party before any investigation has started, stated, complaining that the allegations were not even directed at him – the party had deliberately conflated complaints to insinuate that he was guilty.

In an effective declaration of war, Lowe stated that he would not “tolerate these falsehoods, and discussions have already taken place with my legal team”, repeating the sub-head line that “Is it a surprise that these allegations were made public the day after I made reasonable criticisms of Nigel Farage and the Reform leadership?”.

“It is a witch hunt”, he asserted, “plain for all to see”, revealing that he had been entirely frozen out of the Reform machine over the last few months, in a deliberate and calculated way.

This, itself, is an interesting and highly relevant assertion, pointing to a long-standing breakdown of relations, where Lowe says he has “tried and tried to restore communication” and had “failed categorically”.

Despite repeated requests for regular meetings, policy debate and even just the most basic level of communication, he says, he has been “ridiculed and insulted”, with him now commenting that there were five MPs who could have fitted in a black cab. “Getting together for a weekly meeting is not beyond the wit of man”, he remarks.

Lowe went on to complain that he had been betrayed many times in my life, but never so ferociously by individuals I once called friends. Nobody, he says, “even bothered to call me to ask me what really happened”.

As regards the supposed accusations from staff, he asserts that parliamentary HR were involved at every step of the way and were fully supportive of the steps taken.

But the real issue, he argues, is about me and a complete inability for the Reform leadership to even accept the most mild constructive criticism. The allegations now made about him threatening the chairman relate to an incident in December, but he only reported them to the police the day after his reasonable questioning had been published. “Take from that what you will”, Lowe says.

By now, Ben Habib had also intervened with what I thought an ill-judged piece stating: “If anyone deserves to be removed from Reform, it’s Zia Yusuf”, asserting that many of the party’s problems can be laid at the door of the chairman, stating that “Zia Yusuf’s idea of professionalising the party has involved a setting aside of all that was Reform”.

But Habib also rehearses concerns about Farage himself, noting that, in the pursuit of power, he has been tacking to the Left. Farage is on the record saying he is not concerned by the rate of demographic change in the country, he is not in favour of the mass deportation of illegal migrants, and he thinks a united Ireland is inevitable, “amongst other views which are bound to have affronted Rupert [Lowe].

Amongst other sins, Farage has also been recruiting people who should be nowhere near Reform. Charlie Mullins, one such example, was apparently put forward as a Reform candidate, a surprise given that he is an avowed remainer. It is no surprise, says Habib, that Elon Musk saw through Nigel and identified Rupert as the man to lead Reform. Since then, “Rupert has had a target on his back”.

The point that emerges, though, as I was later to observe on Twitter, is that Habib had probably not been around long enough to understand that the guiding hand behind all the issues of which he complained was most certainly Farage, who has a long history of working though proxies in the exercise of power, to hide his involvement and keep his hands clean.

It was probably these two interventions – from Lowe and Habib – that forced Farage to break cover and show his hand – something he would have been loathe to do. In the early evening in the Telegraph had published an article from him headed, “Reform has acted responsibly over Rupert Lowe”, with a terse sub-head telling us: “The stakes are too high: my party has elections to win”.

If the last general election taught us anything, he wrote, it is that the public does not like political parties that engage in constant infighting. The never-ending civil war that came to define the last Conservative government resulted in the loveless, though large, Labour majority that Britain is saddled with today.

Continuing with this line, he added: “I’m acutely aware of this, which is why Reform UK has devoted so much time and effort since July to building a unified national party machine”. Now, he complains, “thanks to one of our MPs, Rupert Lowe, unloading a barrage of criticisms against our operations and its main actors, that sense of unity has been dented”.

There then followed, more or less a repetition of the original Reform statement, with a little more detail, but not the slightest attempt to address any of Lowe’s complaints.

Predictably, that brought Lowe back into the fray, responding on Twitter, again referring to the suspicious timing of the action against him, complaining that “the process has been handled so appallingly. I don’t even know if I remain in the party or not”. Amateur is generous, he says.

And there it stands but, with Farage’s latest intervention, I don’t see a way back for Lowe. Unless something remarkable happens soon, the schism looks to be permanent, replicating the party fractures we saw in Ukip’s MEP team after the electoral success in the European elections in 2004.

For my part, I’ve seen it all before. From Farage’s political assassination in 1997 of Alan Sked, who actually founded Ukip, to his removal of Michael Holmes as leader and his dirty dealing over Kilroy-Silk – to say nothing of his devious and unprincipled treatment of myself – Lowe is just another casualty of Farage’s Machiavellian grip over the parties he controls, and his inability to tolerate opposition or competition within its ranks.

Even now, though, this is not the end of Reform, although such is the popularity of Lowe that it is already damaged. Eventually, though – as I remarked in yesterday’s comments, the fall of Reform is inevitable. Nothing good was ever going to come of a party led by Farage.

But his rise points to a fundamental defect in the nature of our politics. The trouble is that so many people are easily led, wanting to believe in a saviour-figure who will lead them out of bondage into the promised land, whether it was the oaf Johnson in the recent past and now the Golden Boy.

Sadly, there is no limit to the self-deluding gullibility that stems from this, with quite sensible people ignoring the warning signs as they project their hopes and aspirations on a leader, the qualities of whom exist only in their imaginations.

As a collective, I wrote, we need to grow up, instead of bouncing from one false prophet to another in the hope that things will get better. They won’t, not until we are more discerning in our choice of political leaders and demand a role in their selection (or rejection, as in NOTA), as well as a greater share of power, as in direct democracy (Harrogate Agenda).

As long as the collective ignores the quite obvious flaws in people it accepts as its leaders, it will suffer the consequences of its own making – Farage is one of those consequences, and we have yet to see this drama play out to its fullest extent. When it does, we may be sadder and some of us may be wiser, but we will be no further forward.