Paddington Bear wrote: Mon Mar 10, 2025 11:00 am
Of course it’s a battle for control of the party - in one corner is Lowe who has seen the polling and the state of the two main parties and decided that there’s a chance to 1) win an election then 2) shape the country in a right wing direction that he feels would be more successful.
In the other is Farage for whom this is all just a game, power would actually be a disaster, and the aim is to hold the balance of power propping up a Tory PM, meaning that he gets invited to all the parties, is on tv the whole time and winds up with a peerage. That peerage not coincidentally is also his pension.
Farage’s issue is that Lowe is the first person in any of his parties who is 1) independently wealthy and 2) not interested in the social side of Westminster, which is why he’s been unable to dispose of him as he has just about every other figure with even a crumb of substance to them
That's true, but you're missing that Frog Face and his team are quite good at this. What Frog Face understands and Lowe does not, is that if a party lets in Tommy Ten Names and other loonies, then goes into the great replacement stuff, it becomes a dustbin for the far right and nothing else. It would become irrelevant, another NF or BNP.
The skill of Frog Face is putting a human face onto something that's ugly and using that to gain support and prominence (as you say). His actual stated positions down the years don't indicate he cares much about even Brexit or immigration, he has supported every possible Brexit outcome including (very briefly) another referendum when he thought he had lost, he's also supported more Indian immigration over European immigration on the basis Indians are more culturally similar to English people than any Europeans (no, I'm not making this up).
It's possible in about a decade the buffoons on the right will be replaced by actual competent fascist authoritarians, not convinced Lowe is that guy, but maybe he is or there'll be someone else. It's more likely they've blown their chance, had nearly a decade long runway from 2016, achieved a widely disliked Brexit and nothing else. The UK's demographics in the 2030s are going to be quite a bit different to the 2010s, the Jenrick/Lowe approach just means no version of the right ever comes back.
Frog Face is probably as far to the right as anyone can go and still be viable, which is why he's dangerous. If Frog Face ever became PM he would be a combination of Big Dog and Truss. An incompetent disaster trying to implement turbo Thatcherism and making everything worse.
