This past Saturday was the 15th of March: the infamous Ides of March, when, in 44 BC, Julius Caesar was betrayed and assassinated by Rome’s Senators. They feared the celebrated dictator would reconstitute Rome’s republic into a monarchy, and so cut the tall poppy down before he outgrew them.
Eight days before, Reform UK’s leadership bared blades of their own for the shoulder-blades of Rupert Lowe.
How prophetic that, in December, on the Podcast of the Lotus Eaters, I once described Lowe as Britain’s “Caesar Figure”:
However, unlike Caesar, Lowe hasn’t been brought down by his former allies’ knives. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.”
and I discussed the ongoing Reform civil war, the inconsistencies in Reform UK’s account of Lowe’s character, and where Lowe will go next on this week’s Weekly Wrap, on Courage Media.You can watch the clip of our discussion here, and the full episode on YouTube:
For those outside the UK, or who aren’t addicted to the Westminster gossip-mill like me:
Rupert Lowe was banished from the party, which topped every major poll in February, when both Chief Whip Lee Anderson and Chairman Zia Yusuf signed a statement accusing Lowe of being embroiled in two bullying scandals in his Parliamentary and constituency offices and for making threats of violence against Yusuf.
Lowe has denied all allegations.
He explained to
on Outspoken that the investigations concern two women — one in his constituency office in Great Yarmouth, and another in his Parliamentary office — being investigated for gross misconduct, unrelated to anything he has said or done. Indeed, Parliament has no open investigation relating to Rupert Lowe; nor has it announced its intention to open one.In turn, Rupert Lowe’s staff made the decision to step outside the curtain of anonymity, and put their names to a statement, saying:
We want to state this unequivocally: Rupert is a good, decent, and man.
We have never seen any violent or vicious behaviour from him, ever. Nor have we heard any concerns, from anyone, about this before last Friday. It has never been discussed with any of us.
He is courteous, loyal and unfailingly polite to us. A family man, who cares deeply for his wife, four children and one young grandson. Rupert has been nothing but kind to all of us, going above and beyond to make us feel comfortable and welcomed in the office. To put simply - we all love working for him.
We would all like to put our sincere appreciation to him on the record.
Others came forward with their testimonies to Rupert’s good character: including Great Barington Declaration signatory professor Karol Sikora, Matt Le Tissier, who played for Southampton football club while Lowe was chairman, and a woman who worked with Rupert for decades.
As for the accusations that Lowe “made threats of physical violence” against Chairman Zia Yusuf: these were allegedly made on the 13th of December 2024, but were not reported until the 6th of March 2025 — the day before the statement released, the day after Rupert’s interview in the Mail with Andrew Pierce was published, and while Nigel Farage and Isabel Oakeshott were rubbishing him as an “amatuer” on Talk TV.
As I wrote in my article on the scandal, for Courage Media:
Given Yusuf is shadowed by bodyguards at all times, and it took him almost four months (13 December – 6 March) to make the criminal complaint, we can question how imminent and credible these “threats” were. Another accusation quickly followed, of Lowe “manhandling” Labour minister Mike Kane in the Commons — causing Tice and Sergeant at Arms Ugbana Oyet to intervene. Lowe was concerned that an unsecure ship with hundreds of tons of explosive ammonium nitrate was docked in his constituency. I would like to remind everyone that England has a tradition of men dueling in order to resolve disputes. These stories about Lowe getting cross because a possible bomb was floating off the coast of Great Yarmouth come off as histrionics. There is also hypocrisy, given Lee Anderson was ordered to apologize for breaching Parliament’s bullying and harassment policy after twice swearing at a security officer in November, 2024. The whole thing is a farce; but Reform have made a rod for their own back with this double-standard.
But even if Yusuf had called the police on Lowe in December, doing so for some surly words shows that he does not understand the anti-Woke appetite of Reform’s base. How can they criticize Keir Starmer for his Stalinist persecution of social media critics now? It would always look weak, and like a malicious attempt to oust one of few rivals to inherit Farage’s throne. I don’t know Yusuf — though the willingness of many to give him the benefit of the doubt will have diminished. But it really does look like he purchased chairmanship of the country’s most popular political party for a few hundred-thousand, and set about purging it of its most popular loyalists. To what end? We don’t know.
What we can see clearly is that Reform is fracturing into factions, all of which are loyal to a man they think should be leading in Nigel’s stead. As I warned in a previous piece for The Critic, which Tice called “delusional garbage”:
“Far from being the presumptive king of the British right, Farage looks more and more like Lear: alone in the wilderness, while his offspring squabble over who gets to inherit the crown. …. If he doesn’t exert authority, specifically on the issues his supporters look to him to address, then we will lose another five years to the Lib-Lab-Con consensus.”
This is what I was warning about: a predictable falling-out with potential to derail the party. I hate that my prediction is being proven true.
Read the rest of the essay on Courage Media, or on
:
It is also alleged that Rupert Lowe misquoted the KC that Reform UK had hired to investigate the bullying allegations in his offices. Lowe posted on X on the 7th of March, after Reform released their statement:
I have just spoken to the KC. She is dismayed that this statement has been made, and reiterated that no evidence against me has been sent to her. She stated that this has been issued before the investigation has even started.
She is shocked at the process, shocked at the communication from the party, and shocked that no credible evidence has been given, despite her repeated requests.
I was sent an initial letter late on Friday afternoon last week, again with no evidence provided, with no prior warning and no attempt to understand the full position.
Allegations of physical threats are outrageous and entirely untrue.
I have never made any derogatory comments about women, or those with disabilities. This is a lie. These allegations are not even referring to me. I will be seeking legal advice immediately.
There is no credible evidence against me, as the KC has stated on numerous occasions.
He also posted to X that same evening:
Important. The independent lawyer (KC), instructed by Reform, has advised me to say the following:
"The Party was precipitous to state that these allegations had been made without also saying that the Party has commissioned an independent investigation and the investigation has not yet got underway to look at all the evidence and evaluate its veracity."
That tells you everything that you need to know.
The BBC then ran an article on the 9th of March, quoting the KC, who said:
On Sunday, the lawyer, a KC who has not been named by the party but whose credentials have been verified by the BBC, said: "I have seen a number of statements made by Mr Lowe MP which are attributed to me and which describe my reactions to the process conducted by the party into the allegations made against both Mr Lowe MP and his constituency manager.
"I find myself in the unfortunate and regrettable position of having to make this statement to correct the record."
The lawyer added: "I have not expressed either 'dismay' or 'shock' at any time as to the process. Nor have I said 'there is zero credible evidence against [Mr Lowe]', let alone said this 'repeatedly'."
This has been cited to refute Rupert Lowe’s defences. But note that the KC only objected to Lowe’s characterisation of her as shocked and dismayed — and did not allege that Lowe had misquoted her in any of his posts. (Were anyone to misquote the KC, they could be held legally liable.)
Lowe has vowed legal action against Reform UK: claiming the investigation “is a vindictive witch hunt, all because I asked awkward questions of Nigel.” He also alleges that people within Reform have been briefing journalists that he has dementia — a claim which he vehemently denies. Having met Rupert on a number of occasions, I can attest to just how much more intelligent he is than the majority of MPs.
It should be noted that Lowe has never sought to usurp Nigel’s leadership. Nowhere in his Mail interview did he say Farage should abdicate. In fact, he has said many times, including in private, that “Nigel deserves to be Prime Minister” for his decades of campaigning for Brexit. Lowe, like many “critical friends” of Reform, has never been in doubt about wanting the party to win. He only questioned its strategy on how it wins, and what winning looks like after the election. Lowe reiterated the need for Reform to build a policy prospectus, appoint a shadow cabinet of spokespeople, and for Farage to better delegate to appoint his eventual successor — since neither he nor Lowe are spring chickens.
The ensuing leadership crisis — in which only 34 percent of Reform voters remain insistent that Farage be leader — was an avoidable but inevitable consequence of Reform’s own actions. It was unthinkable only a fortnight ago that 33 percent of Reform voters would want to replace Nigel Farage; and another 33 percent were indifferent as to who leads the party.
Farage’s favorability among Reform UK’s voters has fallen from 91 percent in February to 73 percent after the attempted reputation assassination of Rupert Lowe.
This rod for Reform’s back was fashioned by their abandonment of principles in pursuit of power. By calling the police on one of their own MPs, Reform’s leadership have demonstrated there are no tactics they will not deploy in order to occupy Downing Street come 2029.
Such stitch-ups aren’t beneath the creatures of SW1 — just ask Liz Truss. But regardless of cock-up or conspiracy: Reform’s modus operandi will be moot if they render permanent the demographic revolutions of Boris and Blair. Their path to victory will be a winding road of “Et tu?” betrayals if the party’s casus belli of political revolution and radical immigration reform is forgotten. For what profit Farage if he gains 10 Downing Street, but betrays his cause in the process?
Some within Reform still try to insist that this was one big unfortunate coincidence — telling Andrew Pierce at the Mail that:
The former candidate, a senior party member, told me: ‘It’s just terrible. Why go to the police the same day that Rupert Lowe’s criticisms appeared in public? The decision to call in the police was Zia Yusuf’s. Nigel had no knowledge. It looked inept and vindictive. Zia has no political experience, he’s a control freak.’
Asked if Farage was upset at the turn of events, the source said: ‘Nigel is shocked.’ Does he regret appointing Yusuf? ‘Oh, yes.’
A Reform spokesman insisted: ‘The timing of the statement being released, the day after the Mail article, is a coincidence. The decision to go to the police on March 6, the day the article was published, was a coincidence.’
This remains unconvincing to many of Reform’s core supporters — including me. I have voted for Reform twice — for Richard Tice in the Old Bexley and Sidcup 2021 by-election, and for the party at the 2024 general election. I spoke as a guest at their conference, and called for mass deportations, to the applause of their members.
Why I Called for Mass Deportations at the Reform UK Conference
Nigel Farage’s insurgent populist party, Reform UK, hosted their first annual conference at the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) in Birmingham on Friday the 20th & Saturday the 21st of September.
I support Rupert Lowe as a matter of principle: both because of his uncompromising position on ensuring the two-tier immigration system in Britain ends — by deporting all illegal immigrants currently in this country — and because I intensely dislike bogus cancellations of decent people.
And you know what? The majority of both Reform UK supporters and voters total feel the same.
Polling by JL Partners for GB News found that, in a nationally representative sample of 2,065 Brits, 86 percent could not identify a photo of Rupert Lowe. His 14 percent recognition was used for a week’s news cycle to say he has no right to question Nigel Farage’s ability to lead Reform UK, given his notoriety pales in comparison.
However, Lowe does have one advantage: that he is more in touch with the British public on the issues they care about.
It isn’t just that Rupert Lowe has a spotless reputation — making him the absolute worst person to choose as the target of a political hit. Low has been married for decades, has four children, and his life isn’t marred by drug abuse or extramarital affairs — which is more than can be said for some MPs…
I discussed how his credibility with the farmers — whose livelihoods are being ravaged by Starmer and Reeves’ Marxist grave-robbing family farm inheritance tax — and his favorability among the young men and “online right” whose content they consume, could elevate his nation profile in no time, on
last week:But it’s not just Lowe’s personal virtues which could make him a political powerhouse. On immigration, Lowe takes the positions that Reform UK codes to the general public as standing for, but which Nigel Farage has categorically ruled out.
Rupert Lowe alleged that, during his speech in Kemi Badenoch’s constituency of North West Essex, Nigel Farage forced him to censor the use of the term “mass deportations”.
There have been repeated attempts from within Reform, including senior leadership, to silence me on the Pakistani rape gangs. At a speech in Essex, I was instructed by Farage’s team, sanctioned by him, to remove a call to deport all complicit foreign national family members. I ignored them, as you can watch below.
My repeated pleadings for Reform to follow up on its promise to deliver a national inquiry into the rape gangs were ignored.
There was a belief from senior Reform figures that my language on the rape gangs was too strong, too robust, too tough.
In The Telegraph, anonymous sources from within Reform seemed to confirm this, by saying Lowe has been “captured by the online radical Right” by calling for “mass deportations and other preoccupations”. But it wasn’t until Farage himself confirmed this in The Telegraph that Reform’s voters realised just how out of touch their party was becoming.
Farage wrote:
“Furthermore, his speech in Essex that he talks about, what I stopped him from using was the word ‘repatriation’. I told him not to use the word ‘repatriation’ as well as ‘mass deportations’, because I thought it was a very grave, dark and dangerous use of language.
“This is all an attempt not just to damage Reform, but to get Elon Musk thinking that he’s the good guy.”
Nigel Farage has caused consternation in the base on a number of occasions, after he dismissed concerns about demographic change, repeatedly ruled out mass deportations for illegal immigrants, and said “if we politically alienate the whole of Islam, we will lose”. Farage suggested a change of heart in a recent video: “deporting those who come here illegally [has] just won an election for Trump in America. We may be a different country [but] the principles are exactly the same.” But these latest statements are unambiguous: supporters of deporting illegal immigrants are unwelcome in Refrom UK, for now.
Respected academic and Reform supporter
has defended Farage’s position — despite writing in The Sun yesterday that “There are now more illegal migrants in UK than soldiers in our army”.While the Army has 103,000 personnel, since 2018 more than 155,000 illegal migrants — most of them young men from Islamic nations including Afghanistan, Syria and Iran — have entered the country on 4,300 boats.
On Monday alone this week, five more boats arrived with 261 further migrants.
The British people, put simply, deserve better than this.
They deserve to live in a country where the borders are secure, where we know who is coming in, and where we are not subjecting our own people to a crisis that is costing them billions of pounds every year.
To do this, we need to leave the European Convention On Human Rights, reform Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act, which entrenched the ECHR into domestic law, and start replacing those incentives with active deterrents.
Only this cocktail of factors will give the British people what they both want and deserve — full control over their own borders, full control over their own laws and full control over their own country.
Nowhere in Goodwin’s column does the word “deport” or “deportations” feature. Only “deterrents” to stop more from coming.
We also learned today, thanks to
, that more than a million foreign nationals are claiming benefits from the British taxpayer — costing over £7.5 billion a year. Congolese, Iraqi and Afghan migrants are claiming benefits at four times the rate of British people.
Why are any of these unproductive, ungrateful people here? They were not invited by the British public, who have voted to reduce immigration in very election and referendum since 1974. 9 in 10 constituencies want immigration reduced — and that’s when they underestimate net migration by a factor of ten. (70,000, rather than +700,000.) I shouldn’t be subsidising their lifestyles with my tax money. I agree with Rupert Lowe: send them home.
After the row erupted on X about Farage censoring Lowe’s use of “mass deportations”, Matt suggested only the “Very Online Right” (a term used to disparage me before) want mass deportations — and conflated deportations with “remigration”, a completely different proposition.
Like Matt though I do: I believe his loyalty to his friend Nigel Farage, and his (merited) belief that Reform UK remains “the only game in town” as a political vehicle for radical and necessary change, is blinding him to the popularity of mass deportations for foreign criminals and illegal immigrants.
Not only did the same members who applauded Matt’s speech at Reform conference also applaud me when I called for mass deportations:
Mass deportations of illegal immigrants have majority public support in the US, which is why Donald Trump won the popular vote by promising them. Likewise, 58% of British voters support the same deportation policy for illegal migrants in the UK. Mass deportations are a vote winner, and where the public on both sides of the Atlantic already are.
But we need not extract from America data anymore.
Well, a new poll commissioned by Adam Wren (@G0ADM on X) found that 84 percent of all voters support the deportation of migrants who commit violent crimes; 85 percent support the deportation of migrants who commit sex crimes; and 67 percent support the deportation of migrants who entered the UK illegally.
When broken down by political party:
100 percent of Reform voters support deporting all illegal immigrants in Britain, and immigrants who commit violent crimes.
96 percent of Reform voters support deporting immigrants who commit sexual offences.
97 percent of Conservative voters support deporting immigrants who commit violent crimes and sexual offences.
79 percent of Labour voters support deporting immigrants who commit violent crimes, and 83 - 84 percent support deporting immigrants who commit sexual offences.
73 percent of Liberal Democrat voters support deporting immigrants who commit violent crimes, and 79 - 81 percent support deporting immigrants who commit sexual offences.
And even 53 percent of far-left Green voters support deporting immigrants who commit violent crimes, and 65 - 58 percent support deporting immigrants who commit sexual offences.
Mass deportations are the mainstream, settled, popular position with the general voting public, across all parties.
So no, mass deportations are not the domain of a radical fringe or “Very Online Right”. Then why is Nigel Farage, and therefore Reform UK, so opposed to it?
If the majority of the public agree with Rupert Lowe’s position, then, in lieu of Nigel Farage supporting the policy, Lowe’s popularity can rise.
And who else can challenge him? The Conservatives — barring Robert Jenrick, Neil O’Brien, Nick Timothy, and Chris Philp — do not support the policy. The Labour government are increasing the amount of money spent on illegal migrants — as I explained in a recent essay for Courage Media:
Over 150,000 illegal immigrants have also been recorded crossing the English Channel from France, to break into Britain, since 2018. A recent estimate by Oxford University puts 1 in every 100 people in the UK as an illegal immigrant (745,000) — the highest in Europe. A leaked Thameswater report found 1 in 12 people in London (585,533) is an illegal immigrant — 60% of the national total. However, this data was compiled in 2017, and so is likely undercounting by a factor of two. In 2017, Pew Research estimated that 1.2 million illegal immigrants had overstayed their visas and were still living in the UK. In 2019, the former Director General for Immigration Enforcement, David Wood, disclosed that private Home Office estimates for illegal immigration were 150,000 each year; and that half of those whose asylum claims are rejected remain in the UK. So, it is not hyperbole to suggest there are over 2 million illegal immigrants currently in Britain.
of these estimates were before the unprecedented “Boriswave” of over a million legal immigrants entered Britain every year, largely from outside Europe. Despite the record number of visas issued, there is no data on the number of people recorded as overstaying their visa in the UK since 2021. The Home Office just stopped collecting data.
£14.4 billion was spent on these illegal immigrants in 2023. £4.3 billion of that was on accommodation costs alone — 28% of Britain’s annual foreign aid budget. These hotels and private rental properties, leased on five-year contracts, are furnished with satellite televisions. Over £3.7 billion (£3,000 a day) has been spent on clothes for illegal immigrants since 2022. Data for 2024 has been difficult to procure. Shadow ministers and MPs have been refused answers. But the Labour government is projected to add an additional £17.8 billion to that annual bill, by allowing “Any asylum seekers who are granted asylum [to] have full access to…the welfare system.” These proposed amendments to the previous Conservative government’s Illegal Migration Act (2023) will repeal the ban on processing asylum claims for illegal migrants who cross the English Channel in small boats. It will euphemize illegal immigrants as “unauthorised” or “irregular”, in line with the liberal progressive platitude that “No human is illegal.” Any other view is deemed “right-wing extremism” by the Home Office.
Read the rest of the essay on Courage Media.
Rupert Lowe has a wide-open field to campaign on an issue that is not to Reform’s right, but rather where the majority of the voting public already are.
Where does Rupert go next?
Well, as we discussed on Weekly Wrap, he has a few options:
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