Inside the Reform civil war

Supporters of Britain’s biggest populist party have been forced to choose between Rupert Lowe and Nigel Farage.

IIt is an understatement to say that this has not been Reform’s week – and not just because the party can’t seem to decide on its position regarding Ukraine, Vladmir Putin, and Donald Trump.

To recap: last Wednesday (5 March) Rupert Lowe, one of the party’s five MPs, gave an interview to the Daily Mail in which he questioned “whether Nigel will deliver the goods” and said Reform needed to “change from being a protest party led by the Messiah”. This did not go down well. “We’ve got a lot of development to do, but we’re absolutely not a protest party,” was Nigel Farage’s response the following day.

But the real bombshell came on Friday afternoon, when Reform announced that Lowe was being investigated over complaints of bullying staff, and that it had referred to the police threats reportedly made by the Great Yarmouth MP against the party’s chair Zia Yusuf. The party later confirmed that Lowe had had the Reform whip suspended pending the investigation, leaving him to sit as an independent for the time being.

Needless to say, Lowe denies the allegations and has been using social media to share his side of the story and call the whole row “a vindictive witch hunt”. A ferocious air war has been underway over the past few days, with figures from both the pro-Lowe and pro-Farage factions of the Reform-y right going at each other, while the rest of Westminster orders popcorn and both Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch indulge in a brief spot of Schadenfreude. After all, it’s not every day that the insurgent party that poses an existential threat loses one fifth of its parliamentary cohort and disintegrates into infighting.

So what’s going on? There are real vibes of “you come at the king, you better not miss” to all this – it is very difficult to imagine the timing of Reform’s action against Lowe just days after he publicly criticised Farage can be entirely coincidental. But the tensions within Reform long predate Lowe’s pointed intervention in the Mail. They even predate Elon Musk’s suggestion in January that Lowe might make a better leader than Farage.

Reform is grappling over what it is – or rather, what it isn’t. What it isn’t is a political party in the usual sense. This was by design when Farage decided in 2018 to set up the Brexit Party (which changed its name to Reform in 2020).

As the political scientist Tim Bale put it in his review of The Art of the Impossible How to Start a Political Party (and Why You Probably Shouldn’t): “The Brexit Party – mainly in the hope that it could avoid the seemingly endless, time-consuming and energy-sapping infighting that had plagued Ukip – was set up as a (non-profit) company with registered supporters rather than members, thus ensuring Farage (who claimed to have been inspired by Geert Wilders in this regard) was ‘a boss unfettered by any possibility of internal competition’.”

There have been various attempts to tweak the party structure since then, most notably at Reform’s conference in Birmingham in September 2024, when members voted for a new constitution that (in theory) devolves some of the power. But Farage still overwhelmingly remains in charge. As the New Statesman’s own Nicholas Harris wrote in the wake of the conference: “Farage clearly hasn’t forgotten the early Ukip days, though. He has been careful not to give too much power away: any no-confidence motion to remove him would require the signatures of 50 per cent of the membership.”

Not everyone is happy about this. In November Ben Habib – who had been a Brexit Party MEP, the Reform candidate in Wellingborough and, up until the election, the party’s deputy leader – quit, saying he had “long held concerns about the control of the party and the decision-making processes”.

“Fundamentally, no party that wishes to go from an insurgent start-up to a global entity can do so under the control of one individual,” Habib told me when I spoke to him about the row over Lowe. “I was pushing for the democratisation of the Reform brand because I wanted it to succeed. Rupert [Lowe] has always felt the same.” He accused the party of being “the Nigel dog-and-pony show”, and said Farage’s fixation with retaining control was holding it back, because “you’ve got to be a Nigel Farage sycophant” to want to join.

Others I spoke to similarly accused Farage of being a “narcissist” or, as Lowe put it, “messianic” in his refusal to democratise Reform or acknowledge that anyone else could have a contribution to make.

I also spoke to Reform insiders with a different perspective. Farage is performing a tightrope act, I was told, positioning his party as radical enough to make attract those disillusioned with the mainstream parties but not so full of (to borrow David Cameron’s quip about Ukip) “fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists” that ordinary voters are disgusted and repelled. Farage is well aware of the “entryism” problem often faced by fringe parties on the right. There is a reason he has been so emphatic that the right-wing agitator Tommy Robinson is not welcome in Reform, for example (Reform voters are three times likelier to approve of Robinson than the average Brit).

This is why Farage was so angry at the vetting failures that led to more than a few embarrassments when the party revealed its general election candidates and announced he was suing the company hired to do background checks. It’s why the party has adopted a “hardcore” vetting procedure for the local elections that is rejecting around 50 per cent of hopefuls, according to one party insider. Farage knows how much damage could be done to Reform’s prospects if democratisation enabled the party to be influenced – or overrun – by the most extreme elements on the right. He must maintain an iron-like grip: there is no flexibility, no space for different perspectives or personalities. Any challenge to his authority must be immediately stamped out.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a narcissistic messiah complex issue at play too. And it doesn’t alleviate concerns than the “one-man-band” nature of Reform makes it near-impossible for the party to evolve and mature. But the recent infighting over Lowe is about more than the clash of two oversized egos. It’s about what Reform is and how it can – or cannot – develop from Farage’s personal fiefdom to a serious political force able to handle having more than four MPs.

[See also: The world according to Reform]