Britain’s Christian Political Arms Race
8th March 2026
Rupert Lowe is fond of reminding everyone that his favourite historical figure is Oliver Cromwell. One can see the resemblance: a farmer, faithfully married for four decades, who sets down his plough to reluctantly take up an office of state in the years preceding imminent civil unrest. Lowe collects commemorative coins and books about Cromwell. A portrait of the Lord Protector hangs in his office. He named his faithful farm dog after him. While I’m more a Guy Fawkes man myself, it is obvious that Lowe is the Old Noll that Britain needs.
Fortunately, Lowe’s new political party, Restore Britain, isn’t planning on bringing back blasphemy laws or banning music, maypole dancing, and Christmas. (Though Britain’s growing number of Muslim candidates might.) After he announced his plan to stand candidates at the next election on Friday the 13th, Rupert’s former home turned rivals, Reform UK, simultaneously said he would split the vote and that nobody has heard of him. But even John Cleese can see this isn’t a squabble between Judean People’s Fronts. Restore Britain is not a heretical sect, formed from splitting hair-shirts over apostolic succession. As Nigel Farage revealed during his shadow cabinet announcement, Lowe was expelled from Reform because he called for deportations of Pakistani Muslim rape gang collaborators. The “bullying” investigation, police raid of his farmhouse, and confiscation of Lowe’s shotguns were all, in Farage’s eyes, a “brutal” but necessary way of “getting rid of him.”
If such tactics are permissible to prevent people who conspired to cover up the gang rape of children being banished back to Pakistan, then we shouldn’t be shocked that Reform’s surrogates spent the week following Lowe’s announcement comparing Restore supporters to the Nazis. What prompted such insults? Restore’s campaigns director, Charlie Downes’ definition of Britishness, being based on “ancestry” and Christian faith. Downes was guilty of stating what was obvious to everybody until the Cool Britannia messianism of Tony Blair reduced our history and heritage to a liberal pluralist Scout’s pledge of “British Values”.