Rupert Lowe’s increasingly fractious Restore Britain has seen one of its most prominent figures step down from a leadership role, with Orla Minihane resigning as spokeswoman for the safety of women and girls after being viciously attacked by the party’s nazi faction.

Minihane announced her resignation today, thanking supporters and wishing Lowe and the rest of the party “the best of luck”. She indicated that her time will now be devoted to the ‘Pink ladies’, which she helped found, and claimed that she would now be “concentrating on holding ministers and MPs to account over women’s safety”.

Friendship with Lowe

There was no criticism of Lowe in her statement. Indeed, she went out of her way to thank him for his “ongoing friendship”.

But her resignation comes at an awkward moment for Restore.

Only days ago, we reported on the extraordinary open revolt by the party’s nazi faction against Minihane after she made a speech in Gateshead which proved too much for some of Lowe’s more extreme supporters.

Minihane committed the offence of pointing out that victims of sexual exploitation are not exclusively white.

“We’ve got to protect our girls,” she said, “but we have to remember that there are Indian, Asian girls, Pakistani girls, Bangladeshi girls, Somalian girls, who were born here, who are suffering this fate every day. And we have got to protect them also.”

For Sam Wilkes, the Holocaust denier who styles himself “Zoomer Historian”, and is one of the most prominent members of the nazi faction, this was “abysmal horror coal”.

“They’re not our girls. Who cares?” he posted.

Merciless pile-on

Other members of Restore’s increasingly vocal ethnonationalist faction piled on mercilessly, until Minihane, clearly taken aback by the onslaught, angrily hit back at the “abuse being dished out by faceless people who shout about patriotism whilst they hide behind keyboards bullying those who actually stand up publicly and face the consequences.

“How very brave of you!”

The episode was particularly revealing because Minihane was hardly an outsider. Lowe had appointed her to a senior party role and she had become one of the public faces of Restore’s campaign on women’s safety.

Ironically, her resignation follows that of Steve Laws, the former Homeland and Patriotic Alternative activist who had emerged as the unofficial leader of Restore’s nazi cheerleaders. Laws quit, in part at least, as a consequence of Minihane’s speech, accusing the party leadership of “terrible fucking leadership”.

He demanded the removal of Howard Cox, the former Reform and Advance UK figure now serving as Restore’s transport spokesman, who sprang to Minihane’s defence, calling her attackers “jealous scumbags, pathetic amoebas who get off behind their keyboards.”

Hardcore fascists

As Searchlight has repeatedly documented, Lowe’s problem is not simply that a handful of extremists have discovered his party and signed up. Restore has actively attracted a substantial section of the hardcore, ethnonationalist British fascist scene, and now depends on them for its online momentum.

Minihane herself has previously acknowledged that “wrong’uns” and “extremists” would inevitably infiltrate Restore. She has now discovered that they can also make life distinctly uncomfortable for the people supposedly running the party.

Laws, Wilkes and Callum Barker are among the most prominent of the nazi ‘wrong’uns’, but they are presently split three ways. Laws has quit, Wilkes is staying on, and Barker seems inclined to keep his membership going but concentrate on separate grassroots activity.

Barker is an interesting case: he worked closely with Minihane on the Epping Forest asylum hotel campaign and may not be altogether happy with the brutal online campaign against her waged by some of his ethnonationalist chums.

Messy public fight

Lowe is in a bind he appears reluctant to face up to: he wants Restore to be taken seriously as a political party while simultaneously benefiting from the energy of extremists he cannot control.

Minihane’s resignation shows the contradiction is becoming harder to sustain.