Restore leader Rupert Lowe is the latest wealthy right-wing politician to play a familiar card. Not the race one, the benefits one or the patriotic one – although he’s a card shark at all three – but the martyr one. As in, I only chose to become a political messiah who leads his followers out of the broken-bordered wilderness, for love not for money.
“If I wanted to make money I would not be in politics,” he harrumphed after a newspaper revealed he was on course to earn as much from posting anti-immigration rants on his political soulmate Elon Musk ’s X as he does as an MP. Since January, the former banker has trousered, on average, £932-an-hour by “monetising” his posts on X, thanks mainly to the notoriety he has garnered from, as he proudly puts it “dragging mass deportations into mainstream politics”.
We’ve heard the same moan from Nigel Farage. In 2017 he claimed politics had left him “skint” when at the time he belonged to an exclusive bank where you had to “maintain at least £1million in investments or £3million in savings” had two EU pensions, a five-figure radio presenter’s salary and a £4million house in Chelsea. Oh, to be that skint. Maybe his friends drop him £5million gifts so he can put some coins in his gas meter.
