I feel like I’ve had my eyes a bit off right-wing local politics for most of the year – partly because there has been just so much happening on the global stage with the Tangerine Tyrant doing his thing, and partly because I’m just tired to the back teeth of writing about people like Nigel F*cking Farage.
There have, however, been some very interesting things happening over the past week or so that has made me decide to lift this sordid rock and have a closer look at the cesspit again – and oh, good lord, what a rich ecosystem it remains.
Now, beyond the constant drip-feed of aggrieved ex-Tories making their way over to Reform UK, there are two things in particular in the past week that have made me raise my very furry eyebrows – the first of which being Farage’s hiring of James Orr.
The ideological shift
Orr, a Cambridge theologian, national conservative networker and a man with a hobbyist’s enthusiasm for dragging modernity straight back to the 1950s, is now a senior policy advisor and, in the absence of Zia Yusuf previously, now the de facto head of policy.
The second event that made me go “huh – that’s weird but not unexpected”, is the official formalisation of Restore Britain from a pressure group into a registered political party by Rupert Lowe, a figure whose politics is strongly fuelled by opposition to migration, nostalgia and grievance.
Individually, both of these make up small stories in the growing tapestry of the enshitification of right-wing politics in the UK – together though, they’re a brilliant case study in how the British right in particular cannot help setting fire to its own knickers the moment it starts seeing any sort of momentum.
Looking a bit more closely at the Orr entry into Reform, this is an exceptionally revealing move on behalf of Farage. I can’t imagine that Nige woke up one morning and thought to himself, “You know what’s really missing from Reform? A theologian.”
No – he has brought Orr in because Reform is very clearly attempting a political glow-up. It’s desperate to move away from looking like a pub rant with a log, and looking more like a governing project – even if it does mean bringing in the likes of Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick, Danny Kruger and Nadhim Zahawi1.
Constructing a governing project
What they’re building now is what looks a bit like policy infrastructure, and that means networks. They’re looking to move towards having intellectual gloss that’s been missing (an intellectual giant Lee Anderson is most certainly not).
Orr’s strand of national conservatism2 is often framed by critics as exactly that. Reform moves from creating a forum for people to shout at migrants3, to creating a whole narrative in which Great Britain is now a mortally wounded Christian nation that has been betrayed by liberal elites, and that the only salvation possible comes from a firm hand, a cultural purge and the rediscovery of a misty golden age in which everyone knew their place.
That message is a pretty seductive one if you’re already inclined to believe that the national decline we’ve seen over the past decade and a half has been caused by women, queer people, lefties and the existence of oat milk.
The thing that gets my back up about this is that in my view it represents a genuinely dangerous brand of politics from a worldview that is far from benign for anyone who is painted as the villain in the narrative, and it’s a political ideology that explicitly treats rights as conditional, pluralism as weakness and equality as indulgence.
Values politics emerges
Orr’s public record on abortion alone should be enough to make anyone with an even marginally functional moral compass recoil, and that’s not even going anywhere close to his views on the LGBT community or his documented associations with JD “Maybe it’s Maybelline” Vance, the Vice President of the United States, who is currently overseeing some of the biggest assaults on civil liberties in the US in decades.
The hiring of Orr as de facto head of policy is a seriously dangerous gambit for Reform – and even if Reform insists that its platform isn’t changing, that there is a firewall between them and Orr’s more questionable links to things like Resolute 1850/Centre for a Better Britain, the appointment sends a message. Critics interpret this as Farage having a comfort with politics that sees LGBT equality and reproductive autonomy not as settled questions, but as negotiable irritants and new platforms to stand on.
It carries serious electoral risk for Reform as well, because it’s at this point that I would gently remind you that the UK is not Alabama. It’s a country in which most voters are instinctively conservative about change but at the same time deeply uncomfortable with anything seen as overt moral policing. The second that Nigel Farage looks like he’s auditioning for America’s Next Top Christian Fundamentalist, the tactical voting reflex kicks in hard.
At which point Lowe’s little vanity project comes back into the picture and makes this all even more deliciously self-sabotaging – because while Farage is busy pressing his fanciest suits to professionalise and intellectualise, Restore Britain enters stage (far) right with one reason and one reason alone:
To say that Farage isn’t going nearly far enough and is just a reskin of the establishment we’ve all known and loved for decades4.
Lowe’s insurgent strategy
Rupert Lowe is in my mind the perfect embodiment of the British right’s nostalgia obsession/complex. He’s a wealthy former football chairman turned MP who talks about “restoration” as if the country was a stately home in desperate need of a bit of dusting. His whole policy platform looks like the comments section of The Daily Mail with fewer swear words.
Is there any credibility whatsoever to Lowe as a national leader? Not one bit.
Is he electorally useful in splitting the right-wing vote? 100%
Under first-past-the-post you don’t need to win anything to royally screw up someone else’s chances – you just need to shave off enough points, in enough of the right constituencies. Lowe has no need to be Prime Minister – he just needs to become irritatingly present and high-profile enough.
Which he is doing – and has been doing – for the past year and a bit since his departure from Reform, including in getting support from Elon Musk on Twitter kiboshing a massive part of Farage’s support base and ruling the roost for the most part on the same site when it comes to metrics5.
The vote-splitting dilemma
This all creates quite a bit of tension for Reform – because while Farage is focused on his professionalisation campaign, every time there is even a hint of him going for broader appeal (which he needs to do to win), Lowe can pick up his megaphone and shout “HE’S BETRAYING YOU!”, and if Farage responds by looking more extreme again, the suburban swing-voter who quite likes lower taxes but feels queasy at his migrant neighbour being a punching bag moves a bit further away.
The right of British politics is, in its current state, a ratchet, and only turns in one direction.
Ultimately Reform is going to find itself in a situation where the influence of Orr will drag it deeper into values politics while Lowe pulls the whole ecosystem even deeper into purity politics, and the combined effect is a right-wing landscape that keeps intensifying ideologically while becoming ever less strategically coherent.
Electorally, this completely screws the UK’s political right – because as a rule, intensity does not win seats under FPTP, consolidation does.
The right’s fundamental dilemma is a simple one – it can either be a broad populist coalition that hoovers up disillusioned Tories, soft Labour-leavers and apolitical grumblers, or it can be a constellation of micro-movements all competing to see who can be meanest at migrants and angriest about Pride flags.
It simply cannot be both.
At this point in time, it’s very obviously choosing the latter. We’re in a situation now in which Orr is handing Reform a shiny ideological sword to wave about wildly in the culture wars while at the same time Lowe gives the permanently aggrieved somewhere else to take their toys when Farage inevitably disappoints them.
One drags the party into a performative morality play about civilisational decline while the other stands outside the theatre shouting that the director of the play isn’t angry enough.
Intensity versus electability
The net result is a right-wing that feels louder, purer and more self-righteous by the hour, and at the same time less capable of actually winning the power it so desperately craves.
If you were looking for a strategy to keep the British right in a locked cycle of escalation, fragmentation and mutual sabotage like an Ouroboros birthed out of a Twitter sweep, you would struggle to do better than this – because while Orr hardens ideology and Lowe fractures the base, Farage is blithely strutting down the middle desperately pretending it’s all part of the plan.
It isn’t.
It’s a slow-motion demonstration that grievance politics won’t turn into governance in this country, that purity is in no way power and setting fire to your own knickers is not, in fact, a sustainable political strategy, no matter how loudly you insist to everyone that it’s restoration.
- Truly the best of the best, isn’t it. ↩︎
- Or Nat-C for short. ↩︎
- Something that will become increasingly hard to do considering that migration numbers are forecast to hit net-zero this year. ↩︎
- And, he is not wrong when you consider that most of the senior presence in the Reform Party come from the Tories. ↩︎
- And income, if his declarations are anything to go by. ↩︎
This article is republished with kind permission of The Bear. Read the original on his Substack here.
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