On Friday morning, I was on the ground in Makerfield, conducting a post-mortem of Andy Burnham’s victory in a by-election that could dramatically alter the course of British politics. If Burnham now challenges Keir Starmer and becomes Prime Minister, then calls a snap election off the back of the inevitable popularity-bounce, Britain could have five more years of radical left-wing government instead of three. What a disaster that would be.
As I walked the streets of this average Northern town, people stood stupefied, gazing up at the sky in disbelief. I visited the local Games Workshop store where young men in pungent t-shirts were unable to paint their Primaris Space Marines, so violent were their fits and tremblings. Blue paint everywhere, including on the parts that should be skin-colored. The atmosphere at the gaming tables was funereal: heads bowed, silence, dice at a standstill.
All said the same thing: How could this be happening? We were told Restore would win…
Gradually, as these dumbstruck boys and girls began to recover from their collective stupor, I was able to extract from them a more coherent picture of just what went wrong for Restore.
Here’s what I discovered:
- The absence of Zoomer Historian was one of the key reasons many Restore voters either chose not to vote or voted for Reform instead. Late in the campaign, a rumor spread that Zoomer would enter Makerfield from the east at the coming of light on the fifth day. When he didn’t arrive at the head of a Wehrmacht armored division with 1,000 Latvian autists in full SS cosplay, many voters felt short-changed.
- Aaron Bushnell, the candidate, didn’t speak too little: he spoke too much. Voters found his garrulousness offputting and would have preferred a full mime routine, with costume and face paint.
- Messaging didn’t focus enough on issues that really matter to the constituents of Makerfield, such as the legacy of Nazi war criminal Oskar Dirlewanger. Zoomer Historian’s presence in the constituency could have allayed fears that a Restore government would not challenge long-held myths about Dirlewanger’s brutality on the Eastern Front.
- Young Bob’s talents were mysteriously underused. Voters were disappointed he wasn’t beaten to a pulp in the center of town, as usually happens. More than one voter told me they needed comprehensive proof that the left are violent and don’t want to engage in reasonable, good-faith debate—and only a 17-year-old boy with a folding table and Asperger’s could provide that.
- Too few podcasts were made about the election: self-explanatory. Many also said the volume of Tweets about the election was underwhelming. The word “patriot” was not spammed enough in replies by Restore staff and supporters.
- Predictions were not optimistic enough either. Many voters felt deflated when they were told a political “earthquake” was about to be unleashed. They were expecting a rarer, more spectacular geological event: something on the order of a global pole shift, when the earth’s magnetic poles flip and entire continents are submerged under 300-foot tsunami waves.
If what I’ve just written is incomprehensible to you, like the ravings of some drug-addled madman, you’re half-right. I made the whole thing up; although I’m not under the influence of anything stronger than some rye-bread kvass I brewed in my boiler cupboard. Delicious stuff. You should try it.
Ravings—maybe, but no less unhinged than the bizarre conclusions currently being drawn from the failure of Restore Britain to win its first parliamentary election since the creation of the party five months ago. Idiots with internet names like Zoomer Historian are still convinced their dreams of a based Fourth Reich can be achieved with the help of a man whose views are those of a typical small-government Thatcherite with a fat yellow dog and a slightly battered MG sportscar he drives at the weekend.
For just over a month we were told a Restore victory in Makerfield was “inevitable,” “inexorable”—unavoidable, etc. Canvassing returns said 10% of the vote, 20% of the vote, 200% OF THE VOTE would go to the insurgent, anti-Establishment underdogs and their motley crew of podcasters, minor Substack writers and castoffs from other failed nationalist parties.
Nigel Farage was going to rue the day he expelled Restore leader Rupert Lowe from his own party, Reform. All those decades of careful political campaigning, all that gentle pushing of the Overton Window away from the center and back towards the right—blam, gone, for nothing! Haha!
Rupert Lowe would be toasting Nige’s demise with a pink gin and some pork scratchings from the terrace of his villa in Marbella.
Bottoms up!
In the end, Restore got a mere 7.8% of the vote, less than the British National Party decades ago, when the general perception was that being a member of the BNP was more shameful than catching monkeypox direct from the source or keeping your tomatoes in the fridge. Restore fielded a candidate with the personality of a sausage roll and the figure to match. They might as well have stood an actual sausage roll, ideally from Greggs. Thousands of activists flooded the constituency, but at least one senior member of the party suggested there were more activists than Restore voters in the end. I don’t think such a dismal feat has ever been achieved in the history of British elections; although I may be wrong.
Restore also did nothing to dispel the persistent claim that the party exists merely to shit on Nigel Farage from a great height. Virtually all the party’s attacks were directed against him and not the favourite to win, Andy Burnham. This was made all the more inexplicable by the release, two days before the vote, of Rupert Lowe’s long-awaited 220-page report into Britain’s grooming gangs, which directly implicated Burnham in the cover-up during his tenure as Manchester mayor. Today, on Twitter, Rupert Lowe—or whoever runs his Twitter account—congratulated Burnham for his “overwhelming victory” and “impressive campaign.” Wasn’t Rupert Lowe—or whoever runs his Twitter account—saying the grooming gangs were an atrocity on the scale of the Holocaust? Impressive campaign, Mr Eichmann! Fair enough.
There are a lot of lessons for Restore to learn here if they want to be a serious party that makes a meaningful contribution to British politics. And that’s something I’d genuinely like to see happen. Look beyond the cruel mockery and you’ll see my position on the party hasn’t changed since day one. Yes, I want the morons, mouthbreathers and model-painters to feel ashamed, but the party still has a clear role to play in averting political and demographic catastrophe.
Restore is best placed to act as a strategic pressure group on the right, ensuring Nigel Farage—the only man on the right who can become Prime Minister—doesn’t compromise on the policies that really matter for the future of the country.
Pressure here, pressure there—presto!
Just look at the salutary effect Restore had on Reform within days of the party’s creation. Reform were hesitating to endorse a policy of mass deportations and then suddenly Nigel was saying lots and lots of people would have to pack their bags. It’s that simple.
For decades, one of the main problems with the Conservatives was precisely the lack of a strong right-wing competitor to keep them on the straight and narrow. UKIP, led by Nigel Farage, did that to some extent, but clearly not enough. The Conservative under Boris Johnson became the party of turbo mass immigration, letting in more than a million people a year (the so-called “Boriswave”).
For me, the real takeaway from Makerfield is that the right—Reform and Restore—still have a long way to go. The Labour Party still commands generational loyalty, left-wing voters are still prepared to vote tactically to keep the right out, and it’s still not clear whether right-wingers can put aside their differences to work effectively for the national interest.
A long way to go—and time is running out. Fast.
