Helen

And yes, so I agree with you.

It's good for them to have that argument.

A better time to have that argument would have been in, say, May 2024 before they had a crack at running the country.

No, I think he thinks about Gordon Brown a lot.

Yes.

Yeah, so Rupert Lowe's outfit, Restore, this is going to be a really interesting test.

So people who run focus groups say that Restore is being brought up in them.

It's, you know, always a challenge in the first part of the post is very difficult for new entrants, very hostile to new entrants.

So he's essentially got the backing, the very vocal backing of Elon Musk, who's about as popular as gonorrhea in this country, but has a lot of money.

And also, he has gone way beyond... Okay, so you've already got a situation in which reforms, Zaya Youssef is saying, we would deport foreign nationals who've got social housing.

We're already in getting close to the Trumpy mass deportation zone.

Rupert Lowe has bulldozed straight beyond that.

He said something about he wants to take all immigrants and put them on a midge-infested island and leave the midges to it.

We're now at fully far-right rhetoric.

So the interesting question is, for the other parties...

It's electorally useful to have Restore exist because it will drain some reform supporters away in the way that the BNP would have done, right, if you think about where that party is.

But in no way do you want to encourage the growth of a far-right party with that kind of rhetoric.

So there will be this awkward dance where people will be slightly keeping their gloves on about not wanting to quash this party for electoral reasons when they really should because letting it grow and fester will be horrible, you know, make this country horrible to live in.

But to go back to Sir Blessed Toblerone, there was another bit where he talked about the allure of people like Javier Malai in Argentina, you know, Mr. Chainsaw who communes with his dead dogs through seances, as do we all sometimes, and Giorgio Maloney of Italy and Trump, where he said the normal institutional politicians, they approach a wall in the road and they then have a kind of committee meeting to see how we could get around it.

And then these other, these populist right politicians just threaten to bulldoze through the wall.