Independent Member of Parliament Rupert Lowe formally established a new national political party on Friday evening, converting his Restore Britain pressure group into a fully operational electoral vehicle and pledging to field hundreds of candidates across Britain at the next general election.
Lowe’s launch announcement, posted on X at 2:36 p.m. on Friday, read in its entirety: “I am today launching Restore Britain as a national political party. Join us.” The post drew significant immediate attention online. Within hours it had accumulated 2.4 million views, an indication of the profile Lowe has built during nearly a year as an independent MP following his acrimonious departure from Reform UK.
In a seven-minute launch video, Lowe set out an ambitious organizational model and an explicitly combative political posture. He pledged that the party would field “hundreds of qualified candidates from outside the existing political establishment” at the next general election. “They will not be failed ministers. They will not be politicians. They will be men and women who have succeeded in their own fields, and want to deliver a better Britain,” he said.
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The party is structured as a national umbrella organization that will work alongside locally based political groups rather than replacing them, a model Lowe described as “an entirely different way of doing politics.” He said Restore Britain would “work with local parties to deliver local priorities for local people,” and that figures from Reform UK, the Conservatives, Advance, the Social Democratic Party and others were welcome to join, with invitations already having been issued.
Lowe himself is expected to contest his Great Yarmouth constituency at the next election under the banner of Great Yarmouth First, the local party he established in December 2025, which will operate as a Restore Britain partner in Norfolk.
The launch video included a direct attack on Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, with Lowe pledging that Restore Britain would not include “failed ministers” or those “tainted by failures of the past,” a line understood as aimed at the wave of Conservative defectors Reform recruited ahead of and after the 2024 general election.
The party’s stated policy platform centers on hardline immigration control, including proposals to detain and deport illegal migrants and suspend all asylum claims. Other positions include banning quantitative easing, reducing energy bills, cutting business taxes and regulations, reforming the welfare system, and upholding what the party describes as “Christian constitutional values.” Lowe also said nothing had shaped his political thinking more than Restore Britain’s independent inquiry into historical child sexual exploitation by organized rape gangs, which he said had been established only “because the political system itself would not act.”
Lowe’s path to founding a new party began with a bitter public split from Reform UK in March 2025, when the party suspended his whip following allegations made by then-party chairman Zia Yusuf that Lowe had made verbal threats against him. Reform UK subsequently appointed a King’s Counsel to investigate separate bullying complaints made by two women who had worked in Lowe’s parliamentary office. Lowe denied all allegations, describing them as vexatious, and the Crown Prosecution Service later concluded there was insufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction.
Lowe, born on October 31, 1957, won the Great Yarmouth seat in the July 2024 general election with 35.3 percent of the vote. Before entering elected politics he had a lengthy career in business and served as chairman of Southampton Football Club from 1996 to 2006 and briefly again in 2008, before the club entered administration in 2009.
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The transition from movement to party has cost Restore Britain two prominent advisory board members. Senior Conservative figures Sir Gavin Williamson and Susan Hall, the Conservative leader in the London Assembly, had both been involved with the organization during its earlier phase. Williamson indicated he would end his involvement following the formal establishment of a political party, and Hall is understood to have made the same decision. Neither issued a formal public statement by Friday evening.
The BBC’s East of England political editor, Andrew Sinclair, described Lowe as having a reputation as a maverick MP who was “not very collegiate,” and suggested that private polling commissioned by multiple parties indicated he would perform strongly if an election were held in Great Yarmouth today. Lowe had originally hoped that Great Yarmouth First would make its mark in this year’s local elections, but those polls have been cancelled by the government.
Restore Britain enters a crowded field on Britain’s political right, where Reform UK under Farage holds a commanding share of right-of-centre protest votes, and where the Conservatives are still rebuilding following their historic 2024 general election defeat. Whether Lowe’s umbrella model can aggregate enough local political energy to translate into seats at Westminster remains to be tested.
