This week, Nigel Farage would like us to focus on the launch of his “shadow cabinet”. Unfortunately, the media keeps asking him about the threat posed by Restore Britain, a new populist party led by the ex-Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe.

Farage’s exasperated response is to dismiss Restore Britain as just one of 11 rival outfits, all of which are too tiny to trouble Reform UK. But what if Lowe’s startup has the potential to grow beyond micro-party status? The latest poll from YouGov provides some cause for concern on Farage’s part. It shows Reform on just 24%, three points down on last week. Over the same period, support for the “others” has gone up from 2 to 4%. And that just happens to follow the launch of Restore Britain as a fully-fledged party.

Of course, before getting ahead of ourselves, we need to see other pollsters picking up similar or bigger shifts in opinion. But it’s worth noting that Britain wouldn’t be the first country where the main populist party has acquired a significant rival.

In the run-up to the French presidential election in 2022, Marine Le Pen faced an unexpected challenge from Éric Zemmour, who positioned himself to her Right on issues such as immigration while taking a Thatcherite line on economic policy. Ultimately, she regained the initiative — beating him in the first round with 23% of the vote to his 7%. Nevertheless, that was enough to establish Zemmour and his party, Reconquête, as a minor but stubbornly persistent feature of the French political landscape.

It could be argued that Zemmour’s presence is a net positive for Le Pen and her colleagues in the Rassemblement National (RN). For instance, it makes it easier to convince mainstream voters that the RN has moved away from the fringes. She can present Zemmour as one extreme and the pro-immigration establishment as the other, with her party as the voice of common sense. The RN also benefits from France’s two-round electoral system, because radicalized voters who opt for Reconquête candidates in the first round can switch to RN candidates in the second.

However, if Rupert Lowe becomes established as the British Zemmour, Reform UK is in a much weaker position to benefit. It’s harder for Farage to present Lowe as an extremist, given that he was originally elected as a Reform MP in 2024. Then there’s the image problem. The equally tweedy Lowe and Farage are two peas in a pod — unlike Zemmour and the youthful Jordan Bardella, who is likely to run in Le Pen’s place in the next presidential election. As for the electoral system, there’s no two-round voting in the UK, so every vote for Restore Britain is one less vote for Reform.

If the new party wins a vote share of just a few percent, that could be enough to deprive Reform of a decisive victory at the next election. If you plug the latest YouGov poll ratings into an electoral model such as Nowcast, Reform UK falls far short of a Commons majority. The party would still come first, but would need a coalition partner to govern — most likely the Tories. Ironically, by setting up a party to the Right of Reform, Lowe may force Farage to do a deal with the party to its Left.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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