For the next few weeks, this post will occupy the landing page of this website. The original landing page will be reinstated towards the end of June or early in July.
For transparency, I am a fully paid-up member of Restore Britain (the first ever UK political party whose policies have aligned so directly with my own particular views that I have felt compelled to subscribe as a member).
As a resident of Kingston-upon-Hull, like so many others across our nation, all my adult life I had to accept that the price of democracy in the UK was that my vote in both local and national elections was essentially of no consequence.
Thanks to Rupert Lowe, disenfranchised voters across the UK have been given the opportunity to change that.
One of the most attractive things about Restore Britain, in my view, is that they reject negative campaigning and encourage every individual to vote for whomever they feel will best represent their constituency.
I don’t underestimate the Herculean task the party faces in Makerfield and the undeniable national ramifications—whether Rebecca Shepherd secures a majority or not.
However, there is an obvious co-ordinated and focussed mainstream media attempt to besmirch and demean Restore Britain: the party, its members and supporters, and its candidate.
Some Right-leaning media commentators, from whom we might have expected better, have attempted to ridicule the party’s local candidate, apparently for her ordinariness and lack of ability to waffle in the accustomed manner of more accomplished political dissemblers.
The consequences of the nature, and even the basic premises of some of those attacks (‘splitting the vote’, etc.) seem to be that they are generating the opposite of their intended effect on Restore Britain’s popularity. We will know for sure when the results are announced.
(31 May 2026)
THE CALGIE DELUSION
(Any intervention by a political journalist, the effect of which is inversely proportional to that intended)
At 01:15 on Wednesday, 27 May 2026, the Daily Mail website published an article by its Senior Political Correspondent-at-Large, Christian Calgie: ‘Restore Britain faces ‘anti-Semitism’ outrage but rivals to Reform insist they won’t ‘police their membership’’.
This was the first of a series of pieces by Calgie concerning the Makerfield by-election, scheduled to take place within a month (18 June), in which Reform UK and Restore Britain will compete for the votes of the constituency’s Conservative-leaning voters, but also those of more than 47% of its electorate who feel disillusioned and unrepresented—and therefore disenfranchised.
In the article, Calgie referred to Restore Britain as ‘the hard-Right rivals to Reform UK’ and suggested that ‘the rise of the party [Restore Britain]…threatens to split the vote on the Right’, and would thereby help the Labour candidate Andy Burnham to win the Makerfield by-election.
Many Restore Britain supporters interpreted Calgie’s intervention as a ‘hit piece’ on Rupert Lowe and his burgeoning, recently established pro-Britain party.
It was almost as though Calgie had been asleep for the previous three months and had missed Lowe’s unequivocal dismissal (“I don’t care”) of claims that some people—commentators and voters—consider Restore Britain’s policies to be ‘racist’.
Lowe’s response to claims made in Calgie’s article can hardly have been a surprise to anyone paying attention: ‘We are not going to police our membership. The membership endorses our position, not the reverse, obviously.’
Despite the 1.8k comments posted on the article, if Calgie in his rousing had hoped to shame or dissuade potential Restore Britain voters, his mission was an abject failure. A simple, fleeting look at the comments section reveals that, reassuringly pipped only by a comment condemning anti-Semitism (1.9k), the second ‘Best Rated’ comment echoed my own thoughts on Calgie’s article: ‘Are we going to see daily hit pieces on Restore now, are we? Someone is getting very worried…’ (1.4k). The effect of Calgie’s article can only be seen as inversely proportional to that intended.
The next dozen or so Best Rated comments followed in a similar vein, for example: ‘This hit piece shows that Restore is doing something right’ (888), and ‘Hey media, this doesn’t work anymore’. (332) In other words, as Rupert Low has repeatedly insisted, ‘We don’t care’.
I can only assume that some form of algorithm identified the nature of the responses and comments Calgie’s article had drawn, as it wasn’t long before it disappeared completely from the scrollable list of articles on the website, at least on my smartphone’s browser.
However, the second salvo was already primed. At 00:50 on Thursday, 28 May, Calgie’s next ‘hit piece’ was published: ‘Restore Britain reinstated sacked member who posed during Nazi salute after furious backlash from hard-Right supporters’.
Calgie’s second article garnered over 2.1k comments. The Best Rated comment started by firing back at Calgie: ‘Anyone who thinks Restore is “hard right” is colouring their column with their own left wing agenda…’ (2.2k). The pattern continued much like the comments on Calgie’s article of the previous day, with the second Best Rated comment noting: ‘The hit pieces are coming thick and fast now……’ (976) Once again, the algorithm kicked in, and the article became increasingly less visible until it, too, was relegated in the running list of pushed articles.
On day three, at 23:10 on 28 May, Calgie regurgitated a Robert Peston (ITV) interview with Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, who Calgie tellingly referred to as: ‘one of the most prominent voices backing the Daily Mail’s ‘unite the right’ campaign’, but who is also a presenter on what many Restore Britain supporters would regard as the nation’s foremost ‘managed opposition’ Right-leaning media outlet, GB News.
Even in this somewhat tangential ‘hit piece’ (which generated fewer than 400 comments) the Best Rated comments sprung to Rupert Lowe’s defence: ‘Rupert Lowe is not extreme he is a highly intelligent man who has correctly identified our shortcomings and is prepared to take action to address issues’ (435) and, ‘Rupert speaks the truth and they hate him for it. He is our last chance, imo. Lowe for PM, then prosecute those in power who have committed treason.’ (348).
More broadly, almost all the pro-Restore Britain videos I could find on the topic were actively mocking of pro-Reform MSM attempts to shame Restore Britain supporters into not ‘splitting the vote’ on the Right, convincingly arguing that if the party’s support is insignificant, then why are journalists, commentators, and prominent Reform supporters even remotely concerned.
Meanwhile, in their distinctly positive campaign, as ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of Restore Britain members (having knocked on every door of the constituency in the first week) encourage the constituency’s voters simply to vote for whichever candidate they think will best represent them, reports of the grass-roots crusade of canvassers travelling—sometimes hundreds of miles—to Makerfield in support of Restore’s candidate, local business woman, Rebecca Shepherd, are legion.
One question remains: if Christian Calgie is not yet awake, will an earthquake bring him round?