In the summer of 2025, near a coastal town called Great Yarmouth, a strange boat appeared. In normal circumstances, the boat would probably have gone unnoticed. However, Great Yarmouth’s member of parliament happens to be Rupert Lowe, a man who shares the country’s preoccupation with strange boats and the strangers that arrive in them.
Lowe wasted no time in raising the alarm. He posted a picture of the boat on social media, writing “Dinghies coming into Great Yarmouth, RIGHT NOW. Authorities alerted, and I am urgently chasing. If these are illegal migrants, I will be using every tool at my disposal to ensure these individuals are deported.” Despite the urgency of the situation, he also found time to demand mass deportations.
This reaction was triggered by the moral panic gripping the nation over ‘illegal’ immigration. Down in Kent, strangers have arrived in their thousands, assisted in their attempts to enter Britain by a network of people smugglers in France. But a swift glance at the map shows that Yarmouth is an improbable destination, unless they decided to make their way over from the Netherlands.
When the coastguard investigated, they found four rowers were on board. They were all Britons. One of them was actually a former Royal Marine. Their aim had been to raise money and awareness of motor neurone disease.
Lowe quickly followed up with a second post: “Good news. False alarm! The unknown vessel was charity rowers, thank goodness. As a well done to the crew, I’ll donate £1,000 to their charity.” He was unembarrassed by his mistake. “Keep going,” he added, “and watch out for any real illegal migrants! I make no apologies over being vigilant for my constituents. It is a national crisis. No mass deportations for the charity rowers, but we definitely need it for the illegal migrants!”
Lowe has come out in support of Tommy Robinson, a bruiser on the fringe of street protests whose brand Farage has been careful to keep at a safe distance.
Trivial in itself, the incident tells us a lot about the MP for Great Yarmouth, and not just that he lacks a firm grasp of geography. The issue of the 'small boats' has dominated the debate in Britain for years now, ever since they began to arrive following Brexit. For Lowe, the illegality of the crossings is more than matched by the undesirability of the people on board. He has developed a theory about it: these are Muslim men for the most part, coming from 'clannish' societies, with values and practices alien to Anglo-Saxon civilisation. They are intolerant towards women, and exploitative towards English girls whom they view as 'meat'. They even dislike dogs.
Rupert Lowe is a relatively latecomer to politics. He spent 20 years in finance. He was chairman of Southampton Football Club. He owns a farm. He was also briefly a member of the European parliament. He then joined Reform UK and was voted into the House of Commons. Yet he didn't become a household name (beyond Great Yarmouth) until more recently, after a massive falling out with Nigel Farage.
Reform UK's new MPs Richard Tice, Nigel Farage, Lee Anderson and Rupert Lowe pose during a presentation of their programme in London on 5 July 2024, a day after Britain held a general election
In March of 2025, he told the Daily Mail that Reform UK was 'a protest party led by the Messiah' and it was too early to tell whether Nigel would make a good prime minister. Lowe has called what followed a political assassination. In conversation with Joe Rogan, the hugely popular podcaster, he described how Reform "made false accusations about me threatening to hit […] Zia Yusuf in a meeting, and somebody was saying I went around parliament saying I was a very good shot and I was going to shoot Zia Yusuf. I mean, as if you believe that. I've got a completely clean record."
Reform's anxieties may have led to the confiscation of his firearms by police around that time. "Well, I have actually got some guns, Joe, because I have a farm. So when you come to the UK, I hope you'll come and shoot some pheasants with me."
Joe's lack of enthusiasm for this idea may have betrayed a love of animals. Or else an instinct for self-preservation.
Since the acrimonious break with Farage, Lowe has gone on to form his own party, Restore Britain. Though he is its only representative in parliament, it has already been able to poach some votes off the older party. In the Makerfield by-election, it beat the Conservatives and came third with 6.8%.
The obvious worry for Farage is the possibility that Restore might split the right-wing vote. Even when Lowe suggested a pact recently, and a patching up of their differences, he made the prospect unlikely by dictating terms. His demands included mass deportation of illegal migrants "including women and children"; tougher rules on legal migration; a ban on halal and kosher slaughter, the burqa, cousin marriage and sharia courts; a referendum on the death penalty and welfare cuts to fund "self-sufficiency."
He saved the most provocative condition till last: that former Tory ministers should be excluded from any future cabinet. This would almost certainly be a deportation too far for the leader of Reform. "Mass deportations must become a political inevitability," Lowe thundered. "They must all go." His ambition is to expel a million (or so) people from Britain's shores.
Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe (C) speaks to people as they campaign ahead of the Makerfield by-election on June 18, west of Manchester, north-west England, on 13 June 2026.
Lowe has come out in support of Tommy Robinson, a well-known bruiser on the fringe of street protests whose brand Farage has been careful to keep at a safe distance. Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, described Farage's more careful language on areas such as migration as "the difference between the dog-whistle and the fog horn—and it feels to me like Rupert Lowe has been tooting on the fog horn."
Perhaps this explains why a humble Norfolk MP has won the support of Elon Musk. As the world's richest man and the owner of X, Musk provides more than moral support. It is reported that, as a content provider, Lowe is set to receive more than his salary as MP. His pungent messages are boosted by X's algorithms.
Lately, he has described inclusivity policies as a 'wicked, malicious, viperous cancer', and illegal migrants as "unvetted foreign males" loitering "where your daughter walks home".
His digital earnings are duly declared, thus avoiding a run-in with parliament, such as led to Farage stepping down and being matched at the ballot box by 'a group of nobodies', among them a man dressed as a dustbin. Nonetheless, it is obvious that being paid by a billionaire with quasi-fascist views has done little to moderate Lowe's opinions.
The interview with Joe Rogan confirms this. At times rambling and often factually inaccurate, Lowe displays an undeniable gift for bloviating. He claims that Islam threatens what he calls 'high-trust' societies. He characterises the innocuous Fabian Society as a sinister organisation controlling the Labour Party. And Lebanon, apparently, was once: "a Christian country […] they had the best universities. They had a very open society […] Beirut in the '60s was meant to be the best place on earth to be. Great wine, freedom, very enlightened […] The minute that the Muslim population went over about 15%, you started to get a problem with a civil war."
This is hard to square with the census, which shows that Muslims already made up double that figure in 1922. But the detail is really not important here. Lebanon is useful to Lowe as a laboratory specimen of how a thriving Christian society can be brought down by the Great Replacement, that concept beloved of Douglas Murray.
A poster (R) for Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe is pictured on an electrical substation, ahead of the Makerfield by-election on 18 June, west of Manchester, north-west England, on 16 June 2026.
The implication is that 'rape gangs' could take Britain down the same path as Lebanon, yet Lowe's Rape Gang Inquiry Report has been criticised for being inaccurate and misleading. It drew on extant material, including from advocacy groups like Christian Concern. The Police Service of Northern Ireland went as far as to state that they could find no evidence to suggest any of its findings were true.
Yet Lowe freely admits the inquiry lacked factual evidence. His excuse is that the state has failed to pay attention to the issue, and that no one really knows the true figures involved. One thinks of Liz Truss denouncing the deep state.
As with Truss, there is something abstract about Lowe's foes. They multiply before his eyes till they overwhelm his entire parallel universe. The gentle interrogation of one of Elon's chums gave him full licence to explore the outer reaches of his own phobias.
Only in the real world does it turn out that small boats have rowers on board who are, if you bother to look, not disembarking anyway. In that same reality, your own son can fall in love with a Libyan woman, and you might find halal meat on offer at their wedding reception.
You may even have the misfortune to be interviewed by Nick Robinson of the 'cancerous' BBC, telling you that your definition of ethnic purity means that King Charles himself could be deported for not being a 'white Briton'. Why? Because his father was born in Greece.
