Politics: the fate of the right

By Richard North - June 16, 2026

Given the ramifications of the Makerfield contest and the many cross-currents, unpicking the result when it comes in during the early hours of Friday morning is going to be an entertaining if not taxing exercise.

One of the things to watch for – even if it will be difficult to unravel – is the effect of the legacy media on the outcome of the by-election. There was a time when the endorsement – or otherwise – of a single newspaper could make or break an election (or so they like to believe).

By that measure, the influence of the Mail group of newspapers should be decisive. Firstly, the Mail on Sunday took a front-page swipe on Restore Britain, accusing activists of being associated with neo-Nazis and then, far from backing off, the Daily Mail doubled down the next day, linking the party with Tommy Robinson and firming up on the “neo-Nazi” accusation.

Not content with that, the paper enlisted one of its columnists, Stephen Glover, to do a hit piece on Rupert Lowe, under the headline: “Only Rupert Lowe can save us from a monstrous coup. The trouble is he’s self-serving, arrogant and a political extremist”.

Warning that a successful Andy Burnham, with the keys of No 10 in his pocket, would probably install his pal “Red Ed” Miliband as chancellor and return Angela Rayner to the cabinet, ready to whack hard-pressed employers with a further raft of workers’ rights.

To add to the horrors, Glover predicts that Louise Haigh will also join the Burnham team, the lady who resigned as a senior minister in November 2024 after it emerged she had falsely told the police a decade earlier that her work mobile phone had been stolen.

Given that Burnham, would unleash a raft of policies for which there exists not the slightest trace of a mandate, Glover brands this as a coup-in-waiting, suggesting that only one man could save us from that fate – Rupert Lowe.

Glover is conscious of the effect Restore is having on Reform’s vote, and the possibility that it will pave the way for a Burnham victory, but suggests that there is no point in appealing to Lowe’s decency and good sense, “because he has none”.

Since there’s no point in appealing to Rupert Lowe’s better nature, he writes, the only hope is that prospective Restore voters will wake up in time to the reality that the party they’re thinking of supporting harbours some pretty nasty secrets.

This cross-cuts with the front-page “news” pieces – repeating the essence of the claims – in particular pointing to Steve Laws who has been described as an ethnic-cleansing extremist and has advocated the mass deportation of British Jews. He has been prominent in lauding the success of Restore’s campaign in Makerfield.

In the longer term, Glover doubts that Restore will present much of a threat to Reform. Lowe, he says, “isn’t a serious politician. He is driven by hatred of Farage”, adding: “He’s a multi-millionaire maverick and extremist, supported by the world’s first trillionaire, who preposterously portrays himself as an enemy of the establishment”.

Thus, Glover professes himself to be surprised if Lowe stays the course. He thinks he will probably fizzle out but, in the meantime, is capable of depriving Reform of victory on Thursday, “and thereby of delivering us into the hands of a government that would ruin Britain”.

With two hit pieces in the bag already, the Mail then goes in for over-kill adding a third, picking up on the Tommy Robinson link and doing a hatchet job on him.

The piece then concludes that “anyone on British soil with eyes in their head and more than a couple of brain cells to rub together can see him for the toxic, hate-filled rabble-rouser that he is” – except, it says “Rupert Lowe”.

One might have though that the accumulation of four attacks over the space of two days might be enough, but in what begins to look like an obsession, the paper churns out another piece today, an article by Tory turncoat Nadine Dorries, one of the many who have joined the ranks of Reform.

Heralding a low-grade personal attack, the title of the piece says it all: “I could never vote for a man like Rupert Lowe who ordered his staff to shoot his elderly labrador. His excuse is utter nonsense – and it tells us everything about him”.

This is a canard which was raised last year with a furious Lowe then having accused former colleague Lee Anderson of leaking the story to the media to smear his name.

Lowe’s action was hotly debated in animal welfare circles at the time, but there are arguments for and against his treatment of the dog. Some might think that now to use it as the basis for a political hit piece is the lowest form of gutter politics.

If that is the Mail’s last word, though, The Sun also takes up the cudgels today, with its columnist Trevor Kavanagh mirroring Glover’s line about the need to block Andy Burnham.

If you believe the polls Burnham is a racing certainty with about 46-49 per cent of the vote, he writes, but then expresses his concern that the right is dangerously split.

In a call to stop “shape-shifter Andy Burnham” in his tracks, Kavanagh calls on the voters of Makerfield to seize the precious moment – and Vote Reform, having declared that “the wise men and women of Makerfield should worry about Lowe’s alliance with extremist bovver boy Tommy Robinson and his Kremlin-worshipping neo-Nazis”.

As to the substantive points about “neo-Nazi” links, and the MoS “slur” about the attendance of Restore activists at a “white supremacist” event, one of the targets of attacks, Martin Sellner, explains.

In reality, he writes, our summit was about remigration: how to enable the return of millions of foreigners to their countries of origin. “We did not discuss the supremacy but the survival of our nations and peoples”, he says.

He asserts that the conference brought together leading politicians, intellectuals, activists, and public figures from across Europe and beyond. It was, he adds, a respectable, serious and successful networking event, one of the most important patriotic gatherings of 2026.

On that basis, there is a good case to be made that the Mail and others are over-egging their attacks on Restore although others will say, as has Pete, that there is no smoke without fire.

Old hands at this game know full well that, in the rough and tumble of politics, criticism can be merciless and dangerous – and not always rational. Danger comes not only from expressed views and policy stances, but also associations and linkages with less savoury activists. The wrong links can damage reputations and undo years of hard work.

A long piece in TCW explores this issue, relying heavily on Pete’s work, as Reform and Restore battle it out for the soul of the right.

The reality here is that there is a dark underside to the nationalist (or nativist, as some call it), which embraces antisemitism and drifts perilously close to Nazism. Lowe has not taken any measures to exclude people holding such views from his party and they represent a caucus which gives critics an easy path to condemn the party as “toxic”.

This is what we’ve been seeing in the Mail, in the Guardian and now, to a lesser extent, in The Sun. This was a dynamic which we were always fighting in Ukip and the battle goes on to maintain the integrity of the right and distance it from those who would drag us into a new darkness.

And this is Lowe’s problem. If he does realise the danger, he is doing nothing about it, despite the possibility that his failure to act could destroy his party. But there again, when challenged, Lowe confidently declares, “I don’t care”.

Come the results of the by-election, we will see if the power of the press has diminished. That will determine whether that insouciance is warranted or it represents a suicide note for Restore, with untold damage to the right, which could rub off on Reform.

On the other hand, without really trying, Lowe could be moving the Overton window, giving Reform more space in which to manoeuvre – indicated perhaps by the series of policy announcements which we have seen from Reform of late.

Makerfield, therefore, is living up to its reputation as a pivotal by-election. There is far more at stake than just Andy Burnham’s ambition. The fate of the right is on the line.