This is far from an outstretched hand of friendship

Rupert Lowe wants a smaller Reform. The country cannot afford one.

My friends, I stand with you resolutely in being utterly overwhelmed with horror at the transformational treadmill our country is on. I agree with many of you that the country we hand on to our children and grandchildren will be vastly different to the one we once knew. I’ve got a cold in August (how?!) yet I can still see that with the clarity of Jude Bellingham on the ball.

That’s why I’m unapologetic in pushing Reform in the pursuit of power. I also recognise this post will lose me subscribers. But I’ve been asked plainly for my view.

Purity feels great. It’s also free, because nobody who actually has to govern can afford it. Winning means building a coalition of voters, and a coalition contains people who aren’t you. That’s the whole point of one.

Rupert Lowe has published twelve minutes of video asking whether he can work with Reform again. I watched it this morning before reaching for paracetamol (not necessarily Lowe-induced), and by the end I knew exactly what I was looking at. An offer written from the first word to be refused.

Now, I’m no Shakespeare expert, but I do like a good film. Coriolanus is Rome’s finest soldier. Nobody disputes his courage. The city gets sick of his contempt for it and throws him out, and rather than take the verdict he turns on the crowd and tells them that actually it’s he who banishes them. Then he comes back to the walls with terms, and he offers those terms as mercy.

The terms were never meant to be accepted. They’re there to paint the men inside as people who were never worth talking to.

Take the deportations claim. Lowe says Farage called mass deportations a political impossibility. Farage stood in an aircraft hangar and announced the largest deportation programme any British party has ever put on paper, at what I’d call the landmark press conference in my party’s history. Rupert knows this. He’s betting nobody goes and checks.

Then look at the structure of the thing. Five conditions, and Lowe cheerfully admits in his own script that Farage has already rejected most of them. He’s drawn up a list he knows won’t be signed, invited the signature, and written the “he refused” statement in advance.

Point five gives the game away.

Four conditions about the country and one about staffing. Former Conservative ministers barred from any future cabinet. He doesn’t need to name Robert Jenrick or Suella Braverman because there’s nobody else he could possibly mean. Jenrick walked out of government because the Rwanda bill was too weak. Braverman was sacked for saying out loud what her own party wouldn’t. Whatever you think of either of them, they’re two of the very few who refused to go along with the betrayal of the 2019 mandate rather than two of the people who carried it out, and they’re the ones Rupert wants blacklisted.

So there’s the coalition-building on offer. A party polling in low single figures instructing the party that’s winning councils and by-elections to get smaller. We can’t afford that. The country can’t afford for us to.

And that’s Coriolanus exactly. The pride that made him formidable is the pride that makes him useless. He’d rather be right at the gates shaking his fist than governing inside them.

The anger he’s speaking to is real and it’s earned. People can’t get a house, can’t get a GP appointment, and feel utterly powerless watching hotels filled at their expense. Thirty years of voting and nothing changes. He’s right about all of it. I left telly to become a councillor because I am so sickened by all of this.

But the answer to powerlessness is power. In Durham we won, and then the fun stopped and the work started. Budgets. Planning. Fighting the HMO free-for-all Labour has no interest in fixing while decent streets get carved into rabbit hutches. Grinding, unglamorous, and the only thing that has ever changed anything.

And nationally, here’s what winning actually buys.

Operation Restoring Justice isn’t a mood retweeted by Elon Musk. It’s a five-year emergency programme to detain and deport every illegal migrant in the country, and somebody sat down and costed it.

A new UK Deportation Command, with data shared across the Home Office, HMRC, DVLA, the banks and the police, so a man with no right to be here can’t open an account or walk away from a routine traffic stop. Detention capacity for 24,000 built inside eighteen months. Detention on arrest, no bail.

Five deportation flights a day. There’s even an RAF Voyager held on six-hour standby so that a knackered charter doesn’t buy somebody another night on British soil. Read that back and think about how far it is from the last thirty years of hand-wringing.

Then a lifetime ban on re-entry, and return agreements pursued with aid as the carrot and visas and sanctions as the stick. Ten billion to run it. Over seven billion saved in the first term, forty-two billion over a decade, because the shambles we’ve got now already burns through more than seven billion a year.

That’s the document. It’s public. Anyone telling you Reform has gone soft on deportations either hasn’t read it or is hoping you haven’t.

And notice what isn’t in Rupert’s video. There’s no offer in it. Five demands, and not one word about what Reform gets in return. Does Restore stand its candidates down? Fold? Is this a pact, a merger, an arrangement in fifty seats? You can’t accept an offer nobody made.

Lowe says a divided right hands the country to the left. Right about that too. He says it in the same video where he sets terms he knows can’t be met and confirms he’ll stand candidates regardless.

Here’s the part of the play worth dwelling on, though.

Coriolanus doesn’t simply leave Rome. He goes over to Aufidius, the enemy commander, who welcomes him warmly as a famous defector. And the moment the usefulness runs out, Aufidius has him offed.

Rupert should look hard at who’s cheering him. A good number of his new following are ideological purists who visibly wince every time he goes off script in an interview and turns out to be nowhere near as hardline as they are. They’ll work that out eventually. They’re not a forgiving crowd.

Restore took under seven per cent at Makerfield. We’re running councils and now stand as one of the biggest parties in local government. Do the maths.

There’s still time for Rupert to come down off the wall, and nobody sensible wants him out there with Labour, the Greens, the Lib Dems and the faux Conservatives who thought enough of his anti-Reform schemes to hand over one of their three reserved seats on the Public Accounts Committee. But let’s not pretend a list of impossible demands is an outstretched hand.

This piece is my personal view and my view alone.