Perhaps the fortunes of Matt Goodwin, the Reform candidate who failed at his first by-election in February, are actually the fortunes of his party.

Goodwin emerged during the vestigial tail of Conservative Party decline. The Tories, with names like May, Johnson, Sunak, and Hunt, had ventured off-piste to the point of being irrelevant or offensive – its MPs suspended or charged for sending nude pictures of themselves to strangers or molesting young men – and a vacuum appeared for a centre-right, articulate dissident willing to address the forces responsible for the party’s humiliation.

Goodwin’s book, Values,Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics , was first published in 2021, then updated in 2023, propelling the former academic into the elite commentary league. Inevitably he caught the sight of Nigel Farage, whose Reform upstart rapidly positioned itself government in 2029 through the last year, exploiting both the failure of the Conservatives and the managerial, sometimes sinister ineptitude of Labour.

What Goodwin didn’t anticipate was just how rigorous the testing of his conservatism would be. He should have: in the background serious concerns about Farage’s judgement were being aired – starting with his willingness for Reform to accommodate former Tories complicit in 14 years’ worth of squander.

Recent events, including the use of ChatGPT (“MattGPT”) to help compose a book eerily similar to Douglas Murray’s 2017 The Strange Death of Europe have now all but proved that Goodwin isn’t the conservative he made himself out to be – just as Reform isn’t the answer it claimed it was.

Why Did This Happen?

Why this has happened can be found in the rise of one conservative man: Rupert Lowe, the Member of Parliament for Great Yarmouth, formerly of Reform, now Restore Britain – a party he founded in February.

Lowe is a City of London executive of an era past – Hermès silk ties and Hilditch & Key shirts. A successful career in finance, coupled with family money and other interests, has always afforded him roots and independence – the two most important munitions a Westminster outsider can possess. Having won his seat for Reform in 2024’s general election, he seized lightning-rod cultural issues, in particular the (predominantly Pakistani Muslim) grooming and rape gangs. Lowe’s solution, to his country’s greatest shame, was not only deportation of the perpetrators, but their family members too.

Nigel Farage couldn’t stomach it. Not one year into his term with Reform, Farage conspired with the party’s chair Muhammad Ziauddin Yusuf (Zia Yusuf) to concoct a series of spurious charges against Lowe. At it happened, Lowe didn’t need to be nudged much; despite having his shotgun rifles seized and being jeered by Reform MPs as senile, Lowe went independent with strong support of his Great Yarmouth constituents.

Not Acknowledged

Last month the American political theorist Curtis Yarvin visited the United Kingdom (UK) to participate in a few podcasts. In one of them, he raised a point about Lowe few have acknowledged.

Speaking to The Peter McCormack Show, Yarvin described Lowe’s strategy in basic but no less electrifying language. According to him, Lowe stands to benefit handsomely as “social media’s market for absolute sincerity surges”. The Westminster uniparty consensus, by contrast, is more extended transaction receipts between special interest groups, unions, and activist forces.

An acid test of this theory involves positioning Lowe against the forces that appear to have hobbled Farage. Like all Englishmen of his profile, nothing scares Farage more than being accused of an -ism or an -obia. He will traverse great lengths to announce his opposition to any perceived bigotry, following which he’ll meekly retreat and suspend press briefings for a week while the latest allegation, just as fatuous as the previous, withers.

Here Lowe sails through. He just doesn’t care. Call him a racist and he won’t bat an eyelid. Describe him as filled with anti-Islam hostility and he’ll shrug. There is no evidence to suggest that Lowe is a racist, or hates Muslims, but he’s gaming at the highest level – not dignifying smears with contrived denials.

For the UK, this is a remarkable position. Part of the construction of its media apparatus involved priming it to bully supposed bigots into grovelling apologies and resignations. “I don’t care” as a response was never considered in the construction and the expression spooks London’s neurotic political media axis.

But this forms only one of multiple challenges thrust before Lowe.

The uniparty establishment doesn’t like outsiders (unless, like Farage, they become insiders). Usurping Reform in Middle England will require epic horse trading: most of the party’s base are boomers who don’t observe social media and instead rely on titles such as the Daily Mail, whose owners are said to be coming around to Reform.

And this is before he gets to the greatest threat to his country: the new kind of UK socialism – the Greens – led by Zack Polanski, a man who has taken to lying on social media just as much enthusiasm as Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak did. Theoretically, only Lowe is equipped to meet the challenge of the razor-toothed, craven dissembler Polanski.

Will Haunt

There are other points about Lowe that have been ignored; they too will return to haunt Westminster’s flawed and scrambling hacks.

The first is that when Lowe transformed Restore Britain from a political values incubator into a registered political party, he was counselled by a group of young, white men, all of whom are under 30. Most of them have made names for themselves as commentators, some run their own YouTube channels. The briefest examinations will reveal what occupies their minds: revenge. Revenge for generational profligacy, race-based appointments, and the managed decline of their culture for the benefit of boomers or new arrivals who do not subscribe to their values. Collectively they boast a considerable following, and will invariably leverage Yarvin’s theory of sincerity to Lowe’s benefit within their critical constituency.

The second is another observation by Yarvin. Lowe may have never possessed a desire to lead, but is motivated by a sense of duty. This is salient. For all intents and purposes, Reform’s savage attack would have terminated the prospects of even the most experienced politician, but Lowe emerged stronger and more determined.

There was a time when the things that occupied Lowe’s mind during the worst of his character assassination, that tortured him into purpose and resolve and finally, duty, were the same things that made prime ministers. Many hope that time is set to return.

*On 15 March, Restore Britain claimed it had overtaken the Conservatives in membership numbers at 114 000. Reform, founded in 2021, recently crossed the 275 000 threshold.