Will Farage and Lowe team up or tear each other apart?

**Nigel Farage** (0:02)
This is a Global Production.

**Lewis Goodall** (0:05)
Restore have basically managed to either make the difference or affect a significant of support from reform. We saw that in the Manchester by-election, the mayoral by-election, just last week, where Restore got about 7-8% of the vote and even out-polled the Conservative Party. That is the context, basically, to this rapprochement or attempt of a rapprochement between the two men with lots of people online saying that the radical right vote can no longer be split. Cue Rupert Lowe's olive branch, which we saw at the weekend.

**Emily Maitlis** (0:36)
Did he just set a trap for Farage that he knows Farage will not accept? In other words, it makes Lowe look magnanimous, but Farage can never acquiesce to that.

**Nigel Farage** (0:47)
In broader terms, look, you know, you could see a situation where Restore, without the hope of winning anything outside Great Yarmouth, I mean, literally without a hope of winning a single seat in the country, could do us great harm.
And I think online you will see a lot of Restore potential voters now beginning to worry about the impact that might have. So, look, I finalise that by saying if it was the offer of a deal, it came in a very unusual way. I have responded to it potentially with an open mind, as I would, but I'm certainly not going to be ditching people that I view to be allies.

**Emily Maitlis** (1:32)
Restore's Rupert Lowe has set out five conditions for cooperation with Reform's Nigel Farage, including a referendum on the death penalty.
Could anything bring these two men back together again, or do they hate each other a little bit too much? Welcome to The News Agents.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:58)
The News Agents.

**Emily Maitlis** (1:59)
It's Maitlis.

**Lewis Goodall** (2:00)
And it's Lewis.
And it's sort of, I think we've just got to kind of take a little step back and remember how we got here in terms of this relationship between Lowe and Farage. Of course, Rupert Lowe was elected as a Reform MP at the 2024 general election as the MP for Great Yarmouth. That relationship quite quickly broke down. Basically, I think it's fair to say that the Reform town simply weren't big enough for the both of them.
At the start of 2025, Lowe was getting a bigger and bigger social media profile. You might imagine why that might have annoyed Farage. And the decisive rupture between the two men came in the March of that year. Lowe basically, cut a long story short, Lowe gave an interview to the Daily Mail questioning Farage's leadership, described Reform as a protest party led by the Messiah. Within days, Reform suspended Lowe, citing allegations that appeared of bullying and threats towards party officials, including the now shadow Home Secretary or Home Affairs Spokesperson, Zia Youssef. Basically, it descended extremely quickly into a bitter public feud, and eventually Lowe launches, in response to all of this, Restore UK, a breakaway splinter party on the even harder right from Reform, which eventually becomes backed by Elon Musk. Now initially, Reform at the time had no particular problem with this. They were glad to get rid of Lowe. Farage and Lowe did not get on. It was considered the two sort of men were just incompatible, personality-wise, but slowly over the course of the last year, partly because Restore have had this remarkable online presence boosted by, among others, Elon Musk. You've seen, quite remarkably really, for such a new party, them slowly gain traction in the polls to the point where, in by-election after by-election of late, Restore have basically managed to either make the difference or affect a significant amount of support from reform. We saw that in the Manchester by-election, the mayoral by-election, just last week, where Restore got about 7-8% of the vote and even out-polled the Conservative Party, something that they did in the Makerfield by-election. That is the context basically to this reprochement or attempt of a reprochement between the two men with lots of people online saying that the radical right vote can no longer be split. Cue Rupert Lowe's olive branch, which we saw at the weekend.

**Emily Maitlis** (4:28)
Yeah, if you want to look at that in terms of the numbers, what the Manchester vote tells you, and I think it speaks to the timing of why this has come now, is that probably in the Manchester mayoral, Labour was unbeatable. They got 47 percent share of the vote. But if you add together reform and restore, you are looking at something that looks like a 30 percent share of the vote. If you throw in the Conservatives, you're getting to a 38 percent share of the vote. Somewhere in those leaders' minds is a sense of the need for collaboration, I guess, if they want to beat the newly reinvigorated Labour Party under Andy Burnham. What happened over the weekend? Essentially, on Sunday morning, Rupert Lowe told Farage they needed to bring together a patriotic government at the next election. But here's where it gets sticky. Lowe then says he would only agree to a pact if Farage agrees to five policies, including mass deportations, a ban on the burka, and a referendum on the death penalty. From the sound of it so far, Farage doesn't actually have a problem with conceding ground on any of those policies at all. But where he's actually digging in is that Rupert Lowe's demand that he ditch former conservative ministers, many of whom, as we know, have now gone on to frontline positions in reform. People like Suella Bravaman, people like Robert Jenrick.