Rupert Lowe’s “no Tories” promise didn’t last long. And one ex-Conservative he has hired – now running Restore’s Makerfield by-election campaign – also comes with a set of Hebrew tattoos that has enraged the fascist faction inside the party.

The man Restore has employed is Scott Benton, the former Conservative MP for Blackpool South, who was caught in a newspaper sting corruptly offering to lobby ministers on behalf of gambling industry investors, resigned his seat in disgrace and was subsequently turned down by Reform UK.

Party ructions

He is currently based in Makerfield, running Restore’s local by-election campaign, and has been given full access to the party’s membership database. And it is causing ructions internally, bringing to the surface the visceral antisemitism of some of the party’s hard-line fascist faction.

Benton’s backstory is worth recapping. In April 2023, The Times published footage of him apparently offering to table parliamentary questions, leak a confidential government policy paper on gambling reforms, and provide access to ministers, all in return for payment from what he believed to be gambling industry investors but were in fact undercover journalists.

The Commons Standards Committee concluded that he had given the message he was “corrupt and ‘for sale’.” He was suspended from the Commons for 35 days, the suspension triggering a recall petition.

At home in Restore

Before the petition could run its course, he resigned. When he subsequently tried to find a political home, Reform UK said no.

Restore Britain, on the other hand, not only welcomed him but handed him an administrative role.

To understand why the Benton appointment has detonated internally, it is necessary to understand the factional war that Searchlight has been tracking since early May.

The first major battle, as we reported, was won decisively by the party’s hardline fascist wing, spearheaded by Steve Laws and Sam Wikes (or ‘Zoomer Historian’) both unapologetic fascists and antisemites.

They were welcomed, or at least tolerated, in the new party because Lowe needed activist energy and online reach that his inner-circle of Tory-lite advisers could not provide.

‘Hebraic tattoo’

But the complaint circulating among Restore’s neo-Nazi faction is not primarily about Benton’s lobbying scandal, his Tory background, or even the “no Tories” pledge that his employment so conspicuously violates.

No, the grievance that has been most energetically amplified is a photograph of Benton that shows him with “Hebraic tattoos”, which is being circulated, helpfully notated with translations, along with pictures of him apparently in a gay venue with an exotically-dressed companion.

This has seriously upset the faction that celebrated the all-white composition of Restore’s Great Yarmouth councillors; the faction some of whose busiest activists deny the Holocaust.

The issue has already led to the very public resignation of the secretary of one of the party’s Yorkshire branches who wrote “Scott Benson’s Conservative past was known to me, and to all other Branch Organisers…His Hebraic tattoos and dedication to Israel were not.”

Canvassing strategy

Meanwhile, for anyone watching from outside, the canvassing strategy Benton has been implementing in Makerfield tells its own story about what Restore is actually up to.

At pre-canvassing briefings, he has reportedly told volunteers that the party’s explicit goal is to take votes from Reform, and that canvassers who encounter residents planning to vote Labour should simply move on.

This is not a party trying to win power or even a by-election.

This campaign is a spoiler operation being run by a man who was rejected by the party he is trying to spoil, on behalf of a leader whose primary motivation appears to be personal animus toward Nigel Farage.

For the moment, Rupert Lowe needs the fascist faction’s online reach, activist energy and ideological enthusiasm.

But he cannot afford to be openly identified with Holocaust denial and explicit calls for ethnic cleansing.

The ‘moderates’ around him understand this and have been trying to manage the tension.

But they are losing.