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4 hours ago
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If you were to looking for answers as to why Rupert Lowe, a relatively little-known Reform UK MP, thinks he can lecture Nigel Farage about running a party and winning an election, there is one place you should probably start: X.
For all that in person Lowe can sometimes resemble a slightly embarrassing uncle at a wedding, on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, the Great Yarmouth MP is a big name – and by some metrics, a notably bigger one even than his party leader.
There is another difference immediately obvious from Lowe’s presence on the platform. He is also notably more hard right than Farage, with his feed heavily focused on pledges to mass-deport a million-plus illegal migrants, or complaints about criminals from “alien cultures”.
In the most recent register of MPs’ interests, Lowe set out that his income from posting on X, where some users are paid a share of advertising revenue based on how many people their content reaches, is currently more than £3,000 a fortnight, about four times as much as Farage makes.
In part this is about the much greater frequency with which Lowe posts. But unlikely online influencer as he might seem, he is very much an influencer, with his posts routinely “liked” tens of thousands of times. At the time of writing, the previous 24 hours of Lowe’s tweets had been viewed more than 2.5m times.
In part this reach is down to occasional amplification by Elon Musk, with the X owner and Donald Trump right-hand man endorsing Lowe’s robust views in January.
Do Lowe’s X statistics make a case for this? Experts argue probably not. As many other politicians have learned to their cost in recent years, social media is not real life, and endless adulation in a likely echo chamber does not always help at the ballot box.
Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, described Farage’s more careful language on areas such as migration as “the difference between the dog-whistle and the fog horn – and it feels to me like Rupert Lowe has been tooting on the fog horn”.
For all that Lowe’s method brings likes on X, a stream of comments about deportations, “wokery” and Islam has appeal to a niche electoral audience, Bale argued.
“There is an extent to which Lowe is addressing the extremely online part of Reform’s potential audience, whereas Farage is going way beyond that, talking to all sorts of people who wouldn’t dream of spending any time on Twitter,” he said.
“They might care about some of the issues that both of them talk about, but would probably find some of what Lowe and those who he retweets talk about as too extreme.”
Research by the advocacy group Hope Not Hate backs up this idea. It has found that the fastest-growing group of new Reform recruits are more positive about multiculturalism, with the Lowe-style “core anti-immigrant” vote likely to peak at about 15%.
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The X feed which has brought Lowe huge audiences and a healthy income is seemingly unlikely to appeal to such people, with its Musk-echoing talk of inclusivity policies as a “wicked, malicious, viperous cancer”, and descriptions of illegal migrants as “unvetted foreign males” loitering “where your daughter walks home”.
Ben Habib, who was ousted by Farage as Reform’s co-deputy leader last year and has since been a critic of him, argues there is a simpler explanation for Lowe’s online approach – this is just what he believes.
“The difference between Nigel and Rupert, and it is that Rupert is an ideologue,” Habib said. “He is in politics because he believes the country is facing very serious threats.
“Now, whether you agree with Rupert’s politics or not, that’s a separate debate, but the man is demonstrably in it for what he believed to be the good of the country. Nigel, on the other hand, is not an ideologue. A lot of people think Nigel is a rightwing firebrand, but he’s actually very pragmatic. He’ll go where it’s expedient to deliver himself into the public eye and into office.”
