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Infighting has erupted around Nigel Farage as his Reform UK party has suspended one of its five MPs from the party’s parliamentary group.
Rupert Lowe, MP for Great Yarmouth in the east of England, was suspended by Reform after allegations of “threats of physical violence,” which have now been reported to the police, and bullying in his offices.
These allegations came to light shortly after Lowe made a series of criticisms of Farage and other members of the party’s leadership. In an interview with the Daily Mail last week, Lowe said that the party under Farage remained a “protest party led by the messiah.”
Following the open criticism, Farage said that Lowe was “completely wrong” and that Reform UK was “absolutely not a protest party.”
Writing in the Telegraph on Sunday, Farage acknowledged that the row had “dented” the “sense of unity” within the party, but said it would have been “inconceivable” not to take action.
“If the last general election taught us anything, it is that the public does not like political parties that engage in constant infighting,” Farage wrote, adding that while Reform had built a united party, “thanks to one of our MPs, Rupert Lowe, unloading a barrage of criticisms against our operations and its main actors, that sense of unity has been dented.”
Reform, which is now polling ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives according to POLITICO’s aggregated Poll of Polls, denied that the announcement of the investigation was linked to the public spat between Lowe and Farage.
The party’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, also told the BBC on Sunday that there was “absolutely no truth” to claims of a link between Lowe’s comments on Thursday and the allegations against him that emerged a day later.
Farage also addressed the ongoing investigation, saying Lowe had fallen out with his parliamentary colleagues “in one way or another” since his election eight months ago. “We did our best to keep a lid on things but, in the end, containment strategies invariably fail,” Farage added.
Lowe called the investigation a “witch hunt,” in a separate piece in the Telegraph.
