Will Farage and Lowe team up or tear each other apart?

0:02This is a global production.

0:05Lewis Goodall:Restore have basically managed to either make the difference or affect a significance of support from reform. We saw that in the Manchester by-election and mayoral by-election just last week where Restore got about 7-8 % of the vote and even out-polled the Conservative Party. And that is the context, basically, to this rapprochement or attempt of a rapprochement between the two men, with lots of people online saying that the radical right vote can no longer be split. Cue Rupert Lowe's olive branch, which we saw at the weekend. Did he just set a trap for Farage that he knows Farage will not accept?

0:40In other words, it makes Lowe look magnanimous, but Farage can never acquiesce to that. In broader terms, look, you know, you could see a situation where Restore, without the hope of winning anything outside Great Yarmouth, I mean, literally without a hope of winning a single seat in the country, could do us great harm. And I think online you will see a lot of Restore potential voters now beginning to worry about the impact that might have. So, look, I finalise that by saying if it was the offer of a deal, it came in a very unusual way. I have responded to it potentially with an open mind, as I would, but I'm certainly not going to be ditching people that I view to be allies.

1:33Restore's Rupert Lowe has set out five conditions for cooperation with Reform's Nigel Farage, including a referendum on the death penalty. Could anything bring these two men back together again? Or do they hate each other a little bit too much? Welcome to The News Agents.

1:57The News Agents. It's Maitlis. And it's Lewis. And it's sort of, I think we've just got to kind of take a little step back and remember how we got here in terms of this relationship between Lowe and Farage. Of course, Rupert Lowe was elected as a Reform MP at the 2024 general election as the MP for Great Yarmouth. That relationship quite quickly broke down. Basically, I think it's fair to say that the Reform town simply weren't big enough for the both of them. At the start of 2025, Lowe was getting a bigger and bigger social media profile. You can imagine why that might have annoyed Farage. And the decisive rupture between the two men came in the March of that year.

2:41Lowe basically, cut a long story short, Lowe gave an interview to the Daily Mail questioning Farage's leadership, described reform as a protest party led by the Messiah. Within days, reform suspended Lowe citing allegations that appeared of bullying and threats towards party officials, including the now shadow Home Secretary or Home Affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf. Basically, it descended extremely quickly into a bitter public feud. and eventually Lowe launches in response to all of this Restore UK, a breakaway splinter party on the even harder right from Reform, which eventually becomes backed by Elon Musk.

3:21Now, initially, Reform at the time had no particular problem with this. They were glad to get rid of Lowe. Farage and Lowe did not get on.

3:28Lewis Goodall:It was considered the two sort of men were just incompatible kind of personality-wise. But slowly over the course of the last year, partly because Restore have had this remarkable online presence boosted by, among others, Elon Musk. You've seen quite remarkably, really, for such a new party, them slowly gain traction in the polls to the point where, in by-election after by-election of late, Restore have basically managed to either make the difference or affect a significant, significant, or take a significant amount of support from reform. We saw that in the Manchester by-election and mayoral by-election just last week, where Restore got about 7-8 % of the vote and even out-polled the Conservative Party, something that they did in the Maker Fiat by-election.

4:13That is the context, basically, to this rapprochement or attempt of a rapprochement between the two men, with lots of people online saying that the radical right vote can no longer be split. Cue Rupert Lowe's olive branch, which we saw at the weekend. Yeah, if you want to look at that in terms of the numbers, what the Manchester vote tells you, and I think it speaks to the timing of why this has come now, is that probably in the Manchester mayoral Labour was unbeatable. They got, you know, 47 percent share of the vote. But if you add together reform and restore, you are looking at something that looks like a 30 percent share of the vote.

4:55If you throw in the Conservatives, you're getting to a 38 % share of the vote. So somewhere in those leaders' minds is a sense of the need for collaboration, I guess, if they want to beat the newly reinvigorated Labour Party under Andy Burnham. So what happened over the weekend? Essentially, on Sunday morning, Rupert Lowe told Farage they needed to bring together a patriotic government at the next election. But here's where it gets sticky. Lowe then says he would only agree to a pact if Farage agrees to five policies, including mass deportations, a ban on the burqa, and a referendum on the death penalty.

5:42From the sound of it so far, Farage doesn't actually have a problem with conceding ground on any of those policies at all. But where he's actually digging in is that Rupert Lowe's demand that he ditch former conservative ministers, many of whom, as we know, have now gone on to frontline positions in reform. People like Suella Braverman, people like Robert Jenrick. Lowe is saying they would have to be excluded from any future reform restore cabinet. So I guess two things going on here. One is that Restore and Rupert Lowe genuinely feels that kind of harking back after old Tories are sort of killing the Lowe brand, which is about, you know, moving forward, modernising, not being a party of the traditional Tory right.

6:34But I guess the other part is, did he just set a trap for Farage that he knows Farage will not accept? In other words, it makes Lo look magnanimous, but Farage can never acquiesce to that. And this was Farage's response when he was asked about it in today's press conference, which we should say was all about the small boat operation, about essentially returning migrants after a biscuit and a drink of water back to exactly where they'd come. He was asked about any kind of future restore pact. And this is what he said. On the Rupert Lowe stuff, well, my understanding is that he had a bit of a fallout last week with the Conservatives.

7:16You know, he had been working quite closely with for some time. You know, he said that he had a deal with the Conservatives and Kemmy Baden-Ock said they had an arrangement. I don't know what that was. My understanding is there was a bit of a fallout. Now, look, I mean, if you want to do a political deal with somebody, you know, you would contact them privately and not do a 12-minute video. That said, I did actually reach out back yesterday to him. I did say, look, should we have a call? I haven't heard back yet. So I don't know what the sincerity of this is.

7:55But it seemed to me that he was sort of, more than anything, perhaps putting out this gesture, saying, look, I'm the good guy, Nigel's the bad guy. Well, that's not the case. If you look at my history, you know, in politics over the last few years, I am prepared to do things and make sacrifices if I believe it's of a national interest. I certainly did that in 2019. I would do whatever I could for us to have a sane centre-right alliance that beat Labour at the next general election. So essentially, Farage has said he's open to something, but he doesn't like Rupert Lowe going public without contacting him.

8:34And Rupert Lowe has come back on Twitter and said, I don't want to make private conversations public, but Farage has just done so at a national press conference. He just stated, he said to me yesterday, shall we have a call? Sadly, that is just a lie. But then he goes on to explain what happened, which is that at 10.30, Nigel Farage did in fact message Rupert Lowe and he puts the words, we'll call later. But there is no call forthcoming. Now, I mean, it seems to me a fairly trivial question, this, as to whether Farage said he'd call but then didn't hear back from Rupert Lowe or didn't get a sort of thumbs up emoji so didn't call or wanted to call but didn't manage to.

9:17But you have to stand back and say, I'm not sure how well these two guys will run a party together if they can't actually organise a phone call. And so you have this sense of, what do they call that? The rutting stags, you know. they're sort of they're trying to come together but the antlers are just getting in the way already they haven't even got to stage one and already they've locked horns yeah look i i mean this is sort of um the latest episode in the long uh storied history of nigel farage's career of him not being able to get on with anybody for for very long and um one of the most damaging things about the low split in the first place was it reinforced the idea that basically was a reform is a one-man band and is only held together and is only a vehicle for Farage's own career, which has obviously become a problem for reform over the past few weeks, as Farage himself has become so diminished by the allegations that have been coming forward about his personal finances.

10:18There are no other strings to the reform bow, really, on which to play.

10:23Lewis Goodall:But I think that if we take a step back, why does any of this matter? I think it matters is because it tells us a lot about the state of our contemporary politics, particularly on the right. This is a moment which is revealing of and adverting to Nigel Farage's profound political weakness right now. Make no mistake, Farage would not be doing this if he did not feel that he had to, if he was not feeling politically feeble, if he was not backed into a corner. He loathes Lo, and he loathes the people around Lowe as much as anything else. Yes, there's politics involved here. I think there's no doubt, you know, Rupert Lowe is definitely on the harder right.

11:03He says things and talks about politics in a way, in such a hard edged way that even Farage would not dare. You know, Farage, as we've talked about before, very good at knowing where the line is, getting to it and just staying just on it rather than going over it. You know, Lowe goes way over, both rhetorically in terms of the policy. You know, he's talked about sending migrants to,

11:21Lewis Goodall:Scottish islands and letting the midges consume them, stuff like that, right? But he would not be doing this. This is as much as anything, though. It's not just political. It's a personal thing. So many of the people around Lowe are people who used to work for reform and for one reason or another have come to loathe Farage and the people around him. So this is a deeply personal, bitter feud between groups of men, and it nearly is all exclusively men, And Farage would not be overcoming that animus and making this offer if he did not feel that his political position right now was so parlous that he had to do so.

12:00Lewis Goodall:And that is coming both as a result of the financial stories, as I say, but also it adverts to the fact that the right more generally right now have been concerned for some time that the right wing vote, the radical right vote, is deeply split. that cost them in Gorton and Denton. It cost them in Makerfield. It cost them in the Manchester by-election. It cost them in Caefilly. What we've seen in by-election after by-election and in election after election is that the left-wing vote, the progressive vote, generally is coalescing very successfully behind an anti-reform candidate or position in a way that the right-wing vote is not doing.

12:41Lewis Goodall:So you're getting all this pressure online in the Tory papers and elsewhere to come to some sort of accommodation. But the fact is, is that Farage would not have been doing this three months ago, six months ago, nine months ago, because he felt politically strong. He's doing it now because he feels politically weak, partly as a result of all the things I've said, and partly because, of course, we see in Andy Burnham and Labour a governing party which has got its act together. It's very interesting that we used to talk about Keir Starmer trying to work out his positioning vis-a-vis reform. You know, was he trying to appeal to reform with those kind of crazy lines like the island of strangers?

13:21Or should he have been playing to the people on his left, the people who are leaving to go to Zach Polanski's Greens or to the Lib Dems? And curiously, you now have this sort of mirror image of where Farage finds himself, because today's announcement is about pledging to send the Royal Navy into the Channel to intercept all migrant boats. And migrants under this plan would be detained, given food and water and then returned under escort on naval vessels to France or to Belgium, facing presumably huge legal hurdles and also incurring the wrath of many of our European partners. And I think Farage has sort of managed to find, as you said, that sort of line which didn't sound completely off the charts until this point.

14:12He would sort of try and find the right words on the economy because the Conservatives were weak on the economy. He'd try and find the right words on immigration because Labour were weak on immigration. And now what is essentially happening is that the Conservatives are concentrating much more on the economic message and Labour, partly through what they've already done on immigration, partly through presumably this sort of reinvigorated leadership from Burnham, have just found their feet and they found their skin, really. They've worked out how to feel good in their skin. And so it's Farage now who's trying to shapeshift and follow.

14:51I mean, the fact that we've had sort of no comment really on a referendum on the death penalty from Farage, I think is quite indicative. When we were growing up, we used to kind of laugh about the idea that that if, you know, the reason you don't have referendums is because, frankly, the British public would just say bring back the death penalty. That was always given as a reason to not kind of go to the country with your latest crazy idea. You know, we only just ended the death penalty in the 50s. And here we are sort of, you know, whatever, 70 years later with somebody who wants to be part of a major coalition saying, shall we bring back the death penalty?

15:30Farage isn't even responding to that at the moment because he's still trying to, I think, feel where the political waters are. And I think you're right. I mean, all politics is personal. All politics is deeply personal. But what is happening to Farage now is for the first time possibly in his entire life, he's coming under relentless scrutiny and reinvigorated scrutiny from parts of the press that he's never had it from before. and just over the weekend, a new report in the Times suggested that he'd struck a secret deal to return as leader of a former UK months before the general election of 2024.

16:12In other words, why is it important? Because we were made to feel, all of us were made to feel like he suddenly said, oh, fuck it, I'm going to go for it. I'm going to try and win Clacton. And if I do, then, you know, I will become party leader and this will be a sort of breakthrough. But if, in fact, there was a deal already in place with Tice many months ahead of this, then that£5 million donation looks even shadier and invites even more questions. So it is that pincer movement, really. He can't move at the moment for somebody revealing something new about his finances or about his decision making process or about deals that were struck and never declared.

16:58And he's trying to work out how far to the right Rupert Lowe is making him shift now to find his own ground. Yeah, I mean, this is something that Farage has never had to do with. You're right, Emily, that the level of scrutiny to which he's now been subject has been at a level that he's never really had.

17:20Lewis Goodall:And it's had an effect. I mean, he now is, by some margin, having been briefly the most popular politician in the country. He's now the least popular politician in the country by quite some margin. And that has really happened over the course of the last few months. And that's not just, of course, the scrutiny. It's the way that he's responded to the scrutiny, not least with this deeply eccentric move to have a by-election where, you know, he's going to win, but he's going to lose 30 % of the vote to a bin. Just at the moment where Nandi Burnham has been coming in, he's basically absented himself from the political fight because he's been fighting a contest in his own seat.

17:56You know, very eccentric, very odd. The public, I think, deeply confused by it, as is quite a reasonable proportion of his own party.

18:03Lewis Goodall:But he's also had to deal with something new as well, which is doing what he has done for the best part of 20 years, 25 years to the Conservative Party, which is to have an affliction from his right, to have a political problem from his right. And it is very telling, I think. I mean, I think this is another reason why today is a moment. Over the past 18 months or so, since the general election and since the rise of reform, which obviously hit its peak probably about this time a year ago in 2025. All of the talk in the Conservative papers and the right-wing press and so on was, would there be an accommodation between the Conservative Party and Farage?

18:44Lewis Goodall:And would there be a coalescence of the right in that direction? Which, you know, I think was always not particularly likely to happen, but it would have been potent. And it certainly tells you something about the way in which Farage was looking. You know, this time last year, when reform were at their maximal kind of strength, you know, if you spit both to them privately, they were talking about hoovering up what was left of the Conservative Party vote, of becoming the centre-right, right party of British politics. Now that is not the direction they're looking in. Today is not about an alliance or a deal or an accommodation with the Conservative Party, which has its own problems, by the way.

19:20Lewis Goodall:It's about a deal with a radical, hard right, in many cases, let's be honest, far right party. And the signal that that sends to the electorate is a party which is looking to consolidate part of its politics and part of its coalition. And a year ago, it would have assumed it would have sewn up. And I think why today is important is that, you know, I don't think reform are going anywhere. I don't think Farage is going anywhere for the time being, at least, although I've still got a big question mark about whether he makes it to the general election. But I think what the story in a way of the last 12 months and today is a kind of full stop on that for me.

19:57Lewis Goodall:I think the story of the last 36 or 12 months is reform having to battle and basically stay in its comfort zone rather than doing the thing that people inside internally and others hoped it would be able to do, which has become a big, bigger tent version of itself that would be a potent, more potent force, not in the centre of British politics, but certainly on the mainstream of British politics. The last 12 months has been a retreat, I think, for reform to its eccentricities. Yeah, and I think there's another awkwardness, which, again, Lowe has managed to kind of tease out of Farage, and it's this, that the people who are now bulking up reform in terms of the sort of serious politicians, the serious players, are all these ex-Tories, many of whom were in charge of the immigration policies that went so badly wrong.

20:48And if you cast your mind back to the day that Jenrick, he didn't defect to reform. He was booted out by Badenock because she discovered that he was sort of having thoughts about it. She kicked him out the party. And so he had to announce that he was joining reform slightly too early. And the welcome that Farage gave him was not the warmest, actually. Farage sort of seemed to be saying, oh, well, come on then, you know, in you come. I wasn't really expecting this, but let's see. And he's had now four or five very senior kind of old school conservatives, which I think have taken him off track of being this insurgent, you know, kind of new nimble party.

21:33And the fact that Lowe has said, get rid of those guys, they're not going to be part of any cabinet for me, has made Farage have to go out and defend them. And while it's very admirable that he's remaining loyal to these new colleagues, there is something quite awkward now about Farage having to defend the very people that in a sort of previous incarnation, he was slagging off for having sort of failed the country so badly. I just want to play you that clip where he could not sound warmer. I don't ditch my friends. I don't ditch my allies. whether that's Suella Braverman or posh George, you know, I do not ditch people because somebody else wants me to.

22:13And there's an irony in this, which is that two years ago, Rupert Lowe said, what a fantastic job Jenrick, Braverman and Kruger were doing inside the Conservative Party. And, you know, unlike Chris Philp, who failed completely, but now wants to sort of forget it, in the case of Braverman, And Jenrick, they resigned from their positions in their frustration that the government wouldn't get a grip. So that would not be a part of a negotiation. So, I mean, he makes a point, which is that Lowe is probably just as hypocritical as Farage has been, and they're both guilty of the same sort of thing. But they've now got this sort of slightly embarrassing baggage of the Tory part of reform, and they don't really know whether to embrace that even more while still harping on about returning migrants or to kind of say, well, maybe they are worth, you know, maybe they can be the sacrificial lamb if there's something to be done with Restore more broadly.

23:20Lewis Goodall:Well, I mean, and the fact that it's, you know, it's received wisdom now, or many people would say that Farage made a mistake by accepting too many kind of, you know, Tory dispossessed and never possessed all the, you know, ne 'er-do-wells and so on. But I think the fact that he did, again, sort of points back to what I was saying before, which is that, you know, at that time, Farage, what was Farage trying to do in accepting these people? He was trying to send a signal that the Conservative Party was dead and that Conservative voters, even if maybe, you know, Farage, well, doesn't necessarily have their cup of tea, maybe they found him a bit harder-edged or they had sort of worries about his past or whatever, he was trying to send a signal to say this is a moribund party, the Conservative Party.

23:59Lewis Goodall:It's dead. It's buried. we are the only game in town. Of course, the cost of that has been that it has allowed someone like Lowe to try and pay Farage and reform as just, you know, Tory light or new Tory or Tory in a different guise and grabbed all of the kind of insurgent energy, particularly from the online space. It's worth saying, though, I mean, I have to say is that, you know, we're talking about Farage and Lowe's problems or Farage's problems in particular. You know, what about Kemi Badenock and the Conservative Party. You know, Kemi Badenock gets a really great press and she's got a lot of friends in the Conservative press.

24:32Lewis Goodall:Don't get me wrong, I find her impressive in quite a few ways and I think she's growing into the job. She's good at PMQs and so on. But we keep getting told, I mean, this is a sort of reminder of the extent to which the Conservative Party, yeah, they're just about hanging in there, but they're showing no sign, really, of resurgence or vivification, right? I mean, look, they've now been out-polled in two massive elections that we've had in this country. in the Manchester, in the Makerfield by-election, and in the Manchester mayoralty, right, which we saw last Thursday, they've not just been out-polled substantially by the Reform Party, they were out-polled by Restore.