Rupert Lowe faces life in the political wilderness

Rupert Lowe must currently be the most frustrated man in British politics. The MP has been exonerated of accusations brought against him by Reform, yet his political career appears to be over.

The police have said that there is insufficient evidence to justify proceeding with charges after leaders of his old Reform party accused the Great Yarmouth MP of bullying his office staff and threatening party chairman Zia Yusuf.

Lowe, who has been expelled from Reform and now sits in parliament as an independent MP, responded to the news of him being cleared with an angry tweet accusing party founder and leader Nigel Farage of being a ‘viper’ and added that he must never become prime minister.

Now Lowe must decide whether to join Ben Habib, another Reform renegade, in his new party Integrity, to soldier on as an independent, or seek admission to the Tories. If he joins Integrity he will be accused of splitting the right-wing anti-Labour vote. The Tories are unlikely to welcome a man who holds what they would think of as extreme views on immigration and Islam. That leaves just one option open for Lowe: he must stay on as a lone MP at Westminster in a party of one.

Lowe’s accusation that Farage is an egotistical snake won’t come as a surprise for anyone who knows the former Ukip and Brexit party leader well. Farage does seem to have a long history of falling out with and cutting off colleagues who get in the way of the light that shines on him. Just look at his run-ins with Douglas Carswell and Suzanne Evans. The trouble, however, for Lowe is that none of this cuts through with the average Briton. Voters this month gave Reform a whopping 30 per cent of the vote in the local elections, enabling them to seize control of ten councils – and oust Labour in the parliamentary by-election in Runcorn.

Lowe does retain considerable popularity with grassroots Reform members who feel that he has been badly treated by the leadership simply for speaking his mind, but on the other hand, his critics point to the crass political error he made which triggered the whole row in the first place. (He gave an interview to the Daily Mail in which he attacked Farage just before the local elections and called Reform merely ‘a protest party’.)

As Lowe contemplates what looks like the ruins of his political career, he may well reflect that he has brought this disaster upon himself.