Populism's Monty Python problem

New European

19-03-2025

The mutual animosity of the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front in The Life of Brian satirised the liberation movements and left factionalism of the 1970s. A contemporary update would have as its target the endless splinters and splits that are now occurring across the populist right. Just as the Popular Front of Judea turns out to consist of a single elderly man, the whipless Rupert Lowe now forms a one-man band who is touted as leading a rival counter-insurgency party.
What is the Rupert Lowe versus Nigel Farage clash really about? Personalities, partly. Control, certainly. But this is also a clash over political strategy, especially how far populist disruption should go when it comes to the boundaries of democracy, decency and extremism.
The key moment in their relationship breakdown was a cocktail of these three elements, and it came about when Elon Musk called for Farage to be ditched as leader of Reform for his refusal to work alongside Tommy Robinson, the former leader of the extremist English Defence League. This was swiftly followed by Musk's praise for Rupert Lowe, who is now attacking Farage over immigration, mass deportations and grooming gangs.
'Nigel Farage should hope he is the only Reform MP elected. Because if there are two or more of them, the Reform parliamentary party will split at some point during the next parliament,' the Conservative peer Daniel Finkelstein predicted in the Times back in June. He was reflecting on the long history of Farage's previous clashes, including with Robert Kilroy-Silk, Douglas Carswell, former Ukip deputy Suzanne Evans and others.
Yet this is about much more than political egotism. This kind of internal conflict may well be inherent in the populist project itself. Populist parties pitch themselves as the political outsiders: prepared to say the things that need saying that the mainstream parties won't. But there are at least two different target audiences for that populist message, who hear two different versions of it.
For the authoritarian hardcore, the point is to reject and reverse the social changes of the last half century, particularly with regard to immigration, ethnic diversity and other social changes. But a reactionary project with serious ambitions cannot succeed merely by appealing to the hardcore – an overtly racist party like the British National Party would not secure 5% of the national vote.
But the idea that the political classes seem too comfortable with the status quo does have a broader resonance, and Reform's post-election rise in the polls demonstrates the breadth of public frustration about whether politics can deliver. This shows that populism can begin to take root across the mainstream right in Britain, where there is a broad socially conservative scepticism about the actual and perceived 'woke' excesses of identity politics on the left – but not if it seems in thrall to the extreme right. This is Farage's greatest challenge: the core online activist group wants Reform to say things about immigration and race that would repel their target voters.
Farage has dealt with this divide for his entire political career. He has always taken the view that explicit association with the far right would be toxic to a party with mainstream credentials. His departure from Ukip came about due to his successor's embrace of Tommy Robinson, a decision that Farage said would make Ukip 'the new BNP'. Today, the remnants of Ukip campaign for the release of those convicted over racist violence last summer, referring to them as political prisoners. The party also challenges Reform for not embracing Tommy Robinson.
There is an important difference between Farage's clash with Lowe and his clash with then Ukip MP Douglas Carswell, who challenged Farage for being too 'nativist' in his approach to immigration. The reason was that the winning post for the EU referendum was 50%.
At the time, the 'Farage paradox' was that Farage was good for Ukip getting 13% in a general election, but bad for Leave's chances of winning the referendum. Vote Leave therefore sought to exclude Farage, relying instead on the more moderate leadership voices of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Gisela Stuart, while cynically running its own messages about Turkish immigration online.
Despite its success in opinion polls, the public is divided on whether Reform should be regarded as mainstream. In research by Focaldata, carried out for British Future in the aftermath of the general election, just over four in 10 voters accepted that Reform was a mainstream party, while a similar proportion saw it as dangerous and divisive. Two-thirds of the public, including 60% of those who had voted Reform, thought the party needed tougher action to exclude extreme candidates.
The Reform leadership, after the election, accepted this criticism – yet it was more ambivalent during the campaign itself. Nigel Farage rejected pressure from conservative media outlets, including the Daily Mail , Times and GB News, to drop overtly racist candidates. Farage U-turned during his BBC Question Time special – removing three racist candidates live on air when read their indefensible quotes.
Reform is now placing much more emphasis on vetting candidates. Four out of 10 Reform members who have put themselves forward to become local election candidates have been blocked. It shows the scale of the challenge.
So in 2025, Farage is the 'moderate' in his clash with Rupert Lowe on immigration and race. Lowe has complained that the leader sought to control how he could talk about grooming gangs and immigration. Lowe wanted to go beyond the party's call for deporting dual nationals convicted of grooming and to extend that to deporting family members too.
The ostracised MP is talking about complicity, but he has something much more sweeping in mind when he declares that 'if whole communities need to be deported, so be it'. He also wants to adopt a Trump-like approach to mass deportations.
Lowe is openly flirting with the supporters of Tommy Robinson. He has said that he does not know why Robinson is in prison (he was jailed for contempt of court after making a film in which he repeated libellous claims). Lowe has written to the prison governor over Robinson's conditions. Despite Farage's rejection of Robinson, Reform voters are evenly split over his merits, with a third in favour, a third against and a third on the fence.
This is dangerous terrain. There is an ethno-nationalist core on the hard right that is not so much worried by the rate of net migration but by the fact of ethnic diversity, and that wants to legitimise the language of remigration and mass deportations. That would cover not only asylum seekers and those without legal status, but legal migrants and British-born minorities too.
These views are only held by 3% of voters, but have more visibility than ever before, particularly due to Elon Musk's ownership of Twitter. Steve Bannon's argument that populists should not accept mainstream anti-racism norms but wear the charge of racism as a badge of pride now dominates the US MAGA right, putting Farage's position under more pressure.
Farage's former Ukip allies and supporters can already be found spread across half a dozen parties: from Reform, to Laurence Fox's Reclaim, the remnants of continuity Ukip, the Heritage Party and even the ethno-nationalist Homeland Party that split away from Patriotic Alternative.
There may be more of these new hard right factions to come. The former Reform deputy Ben Habib suggests he might team up with Lowe and seek Elon Musk's money. Academic-turned-Substacker Matthew Goodwin was exploring a new party, though may well throw his lot in with Reform. Dominic Cummings often blogs about how a new start-up party could sweep all before it without ever quite managing to start it up.
The political appeal of populism is supposed to be that it is obvious what the people want that the elites refuse to deliver. Yet the point of democratic politics is that we do not all agree on what we want. Perhaps the 'splitters' problem of populism has a wider significance after all – it is a lesson on what democratic politics is really about.
Sunder Katwala is a writer, director of thinktank British Future and former general secretary of the Fabian Society