Rupert Lowe’s far-right breakaway party had its first big internal row last weekend. It was won by the party’s openly racist faction headed by increasingly influential fascist social media king Steve Laws and his Holocaust-denying ally Sam Wilkes (aka Zoomer Historian).

This dispute was triggered on Saturday when Saskia Teague, one of the few women in Restore’s racist faction, was suddenly disinvited from the launch of Rupert Lowe’s youth wing.

She was about to catch the train to York as an invited speaker at this launch, but was told that she was no longer welcome.

Ms Teague says that her only sin was to have tweeted a photo of the newly elected Restore councillors in Great Yarmouth, with the slogan: “Exactly what British politics should look like. White. British. Proud.”

She added that Restore’s leadership also instructed speakers not to use the word “Remigration” at the youth launch.

Fascist influence

What seems to have happened is that some of Rupert Lowe’s advisers started to panic about the influence of fascists including Steve Laws and other refugees from Patriotic Alternative and the Homeland Party.

Laws is especially influential among young Restore supporters on X, whose owner Elon Musk is a Restore sympathiser.

Laws and the rest of Restore’s pro-Saskia faction are opposed by a fogey faction whose inspiration comes more from Margaret Thatcher and Friedrich Hayek than from Oswald Mosley and Adolf Hitler.

At first most blame for banning Saskia fell on Harrison Pitt, who styles himself as a “philosopher and intellectual historian” and as a “senior policy fellow” at Restore Britain (which makes us wonder about the calibre of its junior fellows).

Orban-style politics

Pitt is a frequent spokesman for Orbán-style politics at the magazine and online video emporium “European Conservative”. He would like Restore to be the new UKIP, not the new BNP.

But within 48 hours Pitt’s fascist rivals started to pin the blame for Saskiagate on an older fogey, who is arguably leader of the Tory-lite faction in Restore.

This is Alistair Harrison, who works for Rupert Lowe and is a self-parody of the reactionary Thatcherites who dominate one wing of the party.

For the past thirty years Harrison has run “Park Lane Champagne”, a firm that specialises in relabelling imported champagne to supply personalised bottles for corporate events.

In the shadows

There’s no doubt Lowe is more comfortable with people like Harrison than with nazi apologists and racist conspiracy theorists, but his problem is that Harrison has only 591 X followers (on his own account, though he also allegedly ghostwrites most of Lowe’s tweets). Steve Laws has more than 140,000 followers.

Harrison stays in the shadows and issues his orders to silence or cancel the party’s extremists via more junior staff.

He isn’t helped by his allies in the reactionary and libertarian factions, including Montgomery Toms who came into politics as an anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination crank.

Toms goes out of his way to pick fights with Wilkes, Laws, and others in Reform’s racist and fascist faction.

Thanks to those extremists’ social media outreach, quickly mobilised in support of Saskia Teague, another of Restore’s Tory-lite advisers Connor Tomlinson was brought in to try to mediate. He failed.

Tomlinson’s intervention was a red rag to the racist bulls, especially when he dared to imply that British people aren’t necessarily white.

Increasingly vocal critics

With Restore’s critics – ranging from Alek Yerbury to David Clews of UNN, as well as the nazi “intellectuals” of Heritage and Destiny magazine who had earlier stayed neutral – becoming increasingly vocal, a third prominent Lowe backroom boy was wheeled out.

This time Charlie Downes (a self-styled political strategist who once applied for a job with Robert Jenrick during his Tory days) issued a grovelling apology to Saskia Teague.

Downes explained that far from being banned, remigration was something Restore are committed to.

In admitting that Restore made a mistake in blocking Ms Teague from speaking, Downes was showing where power lies in the party.

However great the war chest Harrison and his friends can raise from their fellow ex-Tories and champagne quaffers, they will need strong support online to recruit an activist army if they are to take on Farage in a battle for control of the British right.

As has been shown many times in history, when reactionaries invite fascist cuckoos into their nest it doesn’t end well.