What Rupert Lowe’s car-crash interview tells us about Restore – and Reform

Great car-crash political interviews come without warning and are, in the modern era of highly media-trained politicians, relatively rare. Rupert Lowe’s appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme was one such treat, and carries the delicious irony that a man dedicated to “responsibly” defunding the corporation showed precisely why unbiased public service journalism and scrutiny of half-baked ideas is so necessary in a healthy democracy.

An extra irony, for connoisseurs of such intrigues, is that the home of hard right propaganda, GB News, will hardly have Lowe on because of his continuing feud with bitter rival Nigel Farage, who is a GB News presenter. Anyway, the shouty skirmish with Nick Robinson did Rupert no favours…

He couldn’t answer a single question. Or even successfully evade one. Lowe was asked for evidence as to why Britain’s supposedly becoming an Islamic state (this was just before a Thought for the Day from an Anglican curate). This “minority in our own nation” stance is a routine claim of Lowe and friends, but all he could do in response was to cite his own report on grooming or rape gangs (which isn’t about demographics), and state “Sharia law”, which isn’t even an argument. More tricky – because more straightforward – he couldn’t say whether or not King Charles is a white Briton; this is because Lowe, like others on the hard right, often cite a random claim that “white British” will be a minority in the UK by 2063. The definition of “white British” used in that particular and tendentious extrapolation is that someone should have both parents born in Britain. Charles’ father, Prince Philip, was born in Greece. Lowe was smart enough to spot the obvious trap, but then made a terrific tit of himself, as we British say, in trying to deflect it.

“What do you bloody think?” might have been the response from the irascible late prince consort if anyone had dared pose such a damn fool question. He was certainly a member of the Greek royal family – and the Danish one – and an asylum seeker who was rescued as a baby in a boat (albeit a British warship) as the family fled a revolution. He became a naturalised British subject, gave up his Greek Orthodox religion, and renounced his Greek and Danish citizenships in 1946 soon before marrying Princess Elizabeth. The late Duke of Edinburgh was about as British as you can get, even though the late Queen Mother used to refer to him, behind his back, as “the Hun”, perhaps affectionately.

So would the king be deported to Athens, or Copenhagen, under a Restore Britain government? That would depend on whether the Greek or Danish governments would have him, plus Camilla presumably, as refugees. The Greek king and his family were granted asylum and royal assistance in London when they went into exile in 1967 after a military coup, so it would be a bit of a quid pro quo.

Not really. It proves the idiocy of an arbitrary nativist definition of citizenship and allegiance. Sadly there have been many examples of British “born and bred” traitors; and of heroic service to the nation by those born elsewhere or whose families came from elsewhere.

That its policies aren’t entirely thought through; Lowe’s recent beyond-radical plans for cutting income tax make Liz Truss look the very model of Gladstonian prudence.

Restore is also heavily, and dangerously, reliant on the political talents of its one national figure, a maverick. And he is only leading his breakaway party because, having been elected as a Reform UK MP in 2024, he had an argument with Zia Yusuf and subsequently fell out with Farage. Lowe then started his own party with the unspoken aim of annoying Farage by continually taking slightly more extreme positions than Reform.

No. In fact, because Reform UK has been running out of momentum and talent lately, Restore Britain is doing relatively well. The sobering fact is that Lowe’s candidate won 8.7 per cent of the vote in the by-election for a new mayor of Greater Manchester, beating the Tories. It didn’t make a difference to the eventual outcome – a decisive Labour win – but Farage himself admitted Restore could harm Reform’s prospects.

Lowe has proposed working with Farage, and the Reform leader is thinking about it; but there is only a slim chance of this cantankerous, opinionated, stubborn, domineering pair of outsized egos forming a dream ticket in time for the general election. One beneficiary of all that would be Kemi Badenoch, an unlikely “moderate”.