Daniel Trilling

You know, they may well feel that the system isn't working for them or that the part of the country they live in has been abandoned by the political centre, by the centre of power in London and Westminster and so on.

But as well as that, they tend to have very hardline views on immigration and identity.

They may well tend towards more authoritarian views on certain social issues, crime and punishment and so on.

traditional gender roles, perhaps, and so on.

Things like support for bringing back the death penalty appeal to the pool of voters that Restore is hoping to pick up support from.

Put it more simply, there is a chunk of the British population that have got very right-wing authoritarian views.

Most of the time, or at least in most of our lifetimes...

mainstream parties have sufficiently appealed to them on other grounds that that hasn't made much of a difference politically because of the fragmentation of British politics now it's becoming possible for parties to scoop up those voters on that basis and

The other thing that I think is quite significant about Restore, obviously polling for a party at that scale and such a new party is always a bit of a stab in the dark.

But there does seem to be some evidence that Restore's support is coming from people who don't normally vote.

So there's a sign that they're going even beyond what reform were able to do along those lines and mobilise people who basically had rejected the political system until now.

Restore and Rupert Lowe have had the very enthusiastic backing of Elon Musk.

Elon Musk, obviously, is the proprietor of X, for a long time has used that platform to spread his own views on race, identity, quote-unquote, wokeness, and so on.

But since the beginning of 2025, has really latched onto Britain as a place where he wants to push his ideas to intervene in politics.

He's done at least half a dozen posts since Restore launched as a political party.

a few months ago, most of which have had over 10 million views each.

He'd already been quite a supporter of Nigel Farage and Reform UK before then.

But from 2025 onwards, he's taken this line that Farage is, as Musk put it, weak source, that Farage is too mainstream now, he's kind of sold out the cause, and that the real heroes are people like Rupert Lowe and Tommy Robinson.

And Elon Musk has been a big

rhetorical backer of both.