Daniel Trilling

He's also actually paid some of Tommy Robbins' legal fees in the past, so there's actually been some financial backing there.

In the environment on X where safeguards against hate speech and abusive content and so on have been removed, and Musk is pushing these far-right ideas, it's created a very fertile ground for Rupert Lowe and

and Restore to build up a profile that is massively outsized in comparison to their actual support on the ground in the UK.

In the immediate term, they're a very pressing threat because the big political challenge at the moment is

for reform is to win the maker field by election, both because that might well block potential future Labour leader who would be quite effective at taking them on, but also because they've really got to show that they have momentum.

Losing to Andy Burnham would both be a logistical, tactical defeat, but also a very symbolic one.

And although Restore, I think, were polling around 2% to 3% nationally...

The more detailed polling and reporting that's been done on Makerfield shows that there's potentially a bigger pool of support for Restore there than, you know, the national average.

It's likely, I think, to come down to how many voters there are very online.

Going by the latest polls on Makerfield, there is only about two to three percent between Burnham and reforms candidate.

it could potentially really mess things up for them.

The local elections in May this year weren't as rosy for reformers, certainly as they portrayed it, but I think quite a lot of media commentary portrayed it as well.

On the one hand, it's significant that they made these big advances electorally in England, Scotland and Wales.

But on the other hand, they weren't quite as big as they were hyped up to be.

They really need a win in Makerfield to show that there's still a going concern.

Restore have already pulled Reform further to the right on certain issues.

So when Lowe had his big falling out with Farage and Reform's leadership and left, it was partly down to a disagreement over how hardline their policy on deportations should be.

So Lowe was saying already that Reform's policy should be to deport hundreds of thousands of unauthorised migrants per year.

That wasn't Reform's policy at that point.

And reform over the past year have got even more kind of hardline and threatening in their rhetoric around that.