In the mid-to-late 2000s, Southampton F.C. supporters sang a refrain at St. Mary’s Stadium about then club chairman (and current Reform UK MP for Great Yarmouth) Rupert Lowe:

Swing low

Swing Rupert Lowe

Swing him from the Itchen Bridge

Lowe seems to create conflict everywhere he goes. Having originally seemed willing to fall in line behind Nigel Farage’s leadership of Reform, Lowe told the BBC in May that the party had become ‘the cult of Nigel’. He also claimed that Farage and recently-departed Reform chairman, Zia Yusuf, were trying to put him in prison (resulting in police confiscating ‘a wheelbarrow full of guns’ from his country estate). Seldom out of the news cycle, Lowe is now apparently flirting with joining the Conservative Party.

Who is this deeply polarising figure? Hailing from what has become a standard politician’s background, Lowe attended the private Radley College and then became a commodity broker in the City, before attaining notoriety after becoming chair of Southampton F.C. via a somewhat peculiar reverse takeover in 1996.

Upon assuming his new position at the club, Lowe set about alienating almost everyone he came across. ‘He was a hothead’, Perry McMillan, a former Southampton councillor and Militant Tendency member, tells me. ‘Everything we’re seeing now, none of it surprises me at all’, he continues. ‘Getting involved with Farage and then falling out with him … that was always the path he was going to take. From day one, we knew this guy had got political ambition. And [the] Tories will now do a deal with Lowe, because they will see him as a good spearhead for the future.’

Alan Whitehead, the MP for Southampton Test until retirement last year, had numerous encounters with Lowe over the years — and he sensed his political aspirations early on. ‘He always was a businessman who was very interested in politics, in a way that a lot of businessmen won’t say they are’, Whitehead told me. ‘It was always very clear that Rupert was very interested in politics as a whole.’ While the specifics of Lowe’s political beliefs were unclear to Whitehead at this point, he says his perception was of ‘a dyed-in-the-wool far-right individual’.

In a more recent metamorphosis, Lowe’s online reach has been massively expanded by the patronage of Elon Musk, who earlier this year appeared to tweet that Lowe should become British Prime Minister. On the kinship between Lowe and Musk, Whitehead told me that on top of political convergences, these two individuals have something else in common: ‘Neither has any shame.’

Whitehead recalls a particular incident in which he — having heard that Lowe would be attending what could well have been Southampton’s final match before going into liquidation, ‘thanks to Rupert’s financial messing about’, as Whitehead puts it — told the local paper that he felt that it was inappropriate for ‘the architect of the club’s downfall’ to be present at what might have been its last ever game. According to Whitehead, Lowe went ballistic, and wrote him a long, angry letter.

After getting to know Lowe and sensing his political inclinations, Whitehead rapidly came to the conclusion that he was aiming for some form of political office. Shortly after being appointed chair of Southampton, Lowe stood for James Goldsmith’s fiercely Eurosceptic — and very right-wing — Referendum Party at the 1997 General Election. Lowe enjoyed having access to politicians and would often try to go through back channels. ‘I think he rather revelled in perceiving himself as having access to a politician [like me]’, Whitehead told me. ‘He thought I was rather more influential than I actually was, that it might be worth continuing to cultivate me, and that it would help with his own parliamentary ambitions.’

Many miles further to the left of Lowe (and indeed Whitehead), McMillan was, in the late 1990s, the chair of Southampton Independent Supporters Association, a supporters’ club whose founders did nothing to conceal their socialist politics. SISA was involved at this point in negotiations surrounding the building of a new stadium, eventually opened in 2001. 

Having failed to understand that it wasn’t feasible for it to be built at the intersection of three different councils controlled by different parties, Lowe then caused mayhem among residents in St. Mary’s, where the club had originated. The area was by then home to many people from South Asian backgrounds, and McMillan suggests that Lowe was not welcome at meetings involving local Sikhs, because of his well-documented abusive comments aimed at the Sikh community. It is certainly true that under Lowe’s stewardship, Southampton were the last club in the Premier League to sign up to the Kick Racism Out of Football campaign.

McMillan describes Lowe as ‘a big flag-waving nationalist, and genuinely patriotic’. Evidence of his peculiar brand of reaction and extreme nationalism arrives in the form of his objection to the flying of a Pride flag by a local council, his recent call for the Scottish Parliament to be abolished, his penchant for making antisemitic remarks and invoking the threat of criminals from ‘alien cultures’, and his demand that Britain withhold aid to Pakistan over ‘Pakistani rape gangs’.

Driving this behaviour is a worldview that seems to depend on ideas of racial purity recalling those of the historic British and European far-right. McMillan told me that Lowe identifies as ‘fiercely Anglo-Saxon. He used that language with us. He’s a sincerely religious man, he is sincere about the Anglo-Saxon heritage of this country’.

Having made Boris Johnson a star and mainstreamed UKIP and Reform, Britain’s media — including the BBC — is now treating Lowe as a curiosity and a legitimate outrider, and one with the potential to outflank Farage from the right. A man who spouts ‘England for the English’ rhetoric is now routinely appearing on the evening news, during a political moment in which advocates for Palestinian rights, for example, are invariably excluded from debates.

The Spectator’s ‘Steerpike’ gossip column has linked the Tories’ apparent courtship of Lowe to manoeuvres against the already deeply unpopular Kemi Badenoch. Meanwhile, Lowe has bragged about the possibility of setting up his own party. Whatever his political ambitions might be, his increasing fame demonstrates the ruinous effects of the British media’s curation of political discourse. It also underlines the willingness of those who decide who is platformed — and who isn’t — to continue to allow wealthy reactionaries to drag the discourse inexorably further to the right.