Revolution on the right eats its own
A split among populist insurgents threatens to parachute a carpetbagger into Downing Street
This is an expanded version of my column in today’s Times (£).
The all-important Makerfield by-election in Britain has turned even more unpredictable. The assumption that the battle for the seat is between Reform and Labour is out of date.
Restore, the party created by former Reform MP Rupert Lowe after his volcanic falling out with Nigel Farage, threatens to snatch votes from Reform and hand victory to Labour’s Andy Burnham.
That would put Burnham, who has become the least unacceptable candidate for party leader among warring Labour MPs but who, as mayor of Manchester, doesn’t currently have a parliamentary seat, into pole position to lever the terminally unpopular Keir Starmer out of office. So the stakes in this by-election — engineered by Burnham specifically to vault into Downing Street — are extraordinarily high.
Polling suggests that Restore is currently on 7 per cent support. In a tight race, with Reform at present three points behind Labour, this can make a critical difference to the result.
An alarmed Farage has warned that the tech mogul Elon Musk, who has backed Restore, is playing into Labour’s hands by splitting the right.
The irony! Farage himself split the right at the last general election by sending in his troops to fight the Tories, helping ensure Starmer’s stonking parliamentary majority. The Reform leader declared at the time that he wanted to see the Tories destroyed.
Now the biter is being bitten. The insurrectionist is facing an uprising against himself.
Support for Restore in Makerfield seems to be growing, with anecdotal evidence that Lowe is being seen as the real deal while Farage is not.
This is ironic. The axiom that the revolution eats its own, first coined when the 18th century French revolutionaries started guillotining each other, is generally associated with the left. Now it’s arrived on the right.
