NADINE DORRIES: The sickening menace Rupert Lowe made to a fellow Reform member – and why I’m FINALLY telling the reality about Britain’s most far-Right MP

Parliament is no place for extremes or extremists, as Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn famously found to his cost.

And that’s a lesson now being learned by Rupert Lowe MP who, after a mere eight months since his election, has lost the Reform UK party whip.

I’ll say at the outset that I have no time for Lowe, who is perhaps the most far-Right MP in the whole of Westminster.

The member for Great Yarmouth believes that illegal immigrants should be sent to insect-ridden internment camps.

He thinks that entire non-indigenous communities in the UK should be deported – and that includes people who were born here.

We all want to end illegal immigration, but most of us would prefer a realistic, humane and civilised solution to the problem.

Lowe has praised the odious rabble-rouser and football hooligan Tommy Robinson.

There is not a great deal to recommend him. If you’d ever seen him perform in the House of Commons, he would certainly make an impression – but only because he’s so lamentably poor.

Unable to deliver even the shortest speeches without notes, Lowe’s interventions have been striking for all the wrong reasons. Even the Speaker was moved to describe one of his contributions as an ‘absolute shambles’. A natural high-flyer he ain’t.

Yet over the past few weeks Lowe has emerged from the shadows of obscurity, and has even achieved a small degree of fame, thanks, not least, to his Daily Mail interview with Andrew Pierce.

That was where he dismissed Reform as a ‘protest party’ and questioned whether ‘messianic’ Nigel Farage had the necessary skills to lead it.

I do, as it happens, know a little about the Great Yarmouth MP and what motivates him.

I was born with the ability to sniff out narcissism – a skill then sharpened by spending 25 years in the Palace of Westminster.

And while he likes to present himself as hail-fellow-well-met, a jolly huntin’, shootin’, fishin’, green-tweed-jacket-wearing kind of guy, I feel we need to hear about a very different Rupert Lowe.

During the time I was researching my books, The Plot and Downfall (which deal with the contrived removal of Boris Johnson as prime minister and the wilful destruction of the Conservative Party), Lowe’s name cropped up a surprising number of times.

Latterly, I’ve heard disturbing complaints about his behaviour. Words such as ‘bullying’, ‘litigious’ and ‘aggressive’ fell readily from the lips of the Westminster folk I know. It is a matter of fact that Scotland Yard has launched an investigation following claims that Lowe physically threatened Reform’s chairman, Zia Yusuf – something Lowe vigorously denies.

It is certainly fair to ask whether a 67-year-old Lowe would really issue such a threat against his much younger, 38-year-old chairman. Yet no fewer than three senior sources in Reform have told me that Lowe’s remarks were disturbing in their aggression and that, in the course of at least one party meeting, the agitated MP threatened to rip the ‘f***ing head off’ the seated figure of Mr Yusuf.

Lowe is understood to believe that such accounts are overblown and that what took place was no more than a ‘lively exchange of views between people in politics’.

Then come the allegations of bullying.

Complaints have been made to the House of Commons authorities following allegations relating to Lowe’s office by two members of staff – one in Westminster and one in his constituency office.

What makes the bullying controversy so particularly unusual is that Lowe chose to claim on social media that the independent King’s Counsel appointed by Reform to investigate the allegations had been ‘shocked’ at failures in the process. According to Lowe, she had personally told him that no evidence against him had been presented.

This high-powered KC – who has not been named – was then in the rare and embarrassing position of having to make a statement to the contrary.

Expressly denying his claims, she said: ‘I have not expressed either “dismay” or “shock” at the process. Nor have I said there was zero evidence against Mr Lowe.’

Her report into the allegations is due to be released any day soon.

There was a bizarre episode just before Christmas when, in the course of a debate, Lowe not only shouted at transport minister Mike Kane, but manhandled him.

‘It was almost like he had never even watched a debate before,’ I was told by one MP.

‘[Lowe] just marched across the floor of the chamber and began shouting at the minister. If it hadn’t been just before Christmas, I’m sure it would have been all over the news.’

Kane later told GB News that ‘the anger displayed towards me clearly showed a man not in charge of his faculties’.

There is also the curious case of the 2019 election campaign, when Lowe stood, temporarily, for the seat of Dudley North on behalf of the Brexit Party, as Reform was then called.

It was claimed a Conservative Party aide, unbeknown to Boris Johnson, had offered jobs to Brexit Party candidates if they withdrew from the election, so leaving the field clear for the Conservatives. That, in turn, could have meant elevating them to the House of Lords (as they would not have been elected MPs).

So, did Lowe – as some senior people in Reform believe – attempt to strike a secret, solo deal with the Conservatives in return for a peerage?

Lowe categorically denies it, despite claims swirling at the time. Indeed, a source tells me that Lowe sent a barrage of furious legal letters to Nigel Farage in an attempt to kill the rumours.

It is certainly true that, moments before the application deadline to stand in the election, Lowe dramatically withdrew his nomination paper, leaving no time for the furious party leader Farage to submit an alternative candidate for the constituency.

Why the change of heart? Lowe’s explanation was that, in those last few seconds, he had an attack of conscience and was concerned that, if he stood, he would split the Right-leaning vote and allow Labour to win.

As we know, neither Johnson or Farage would countenance any kind of deal, playing by the book. There is still some honour in politics.

The final case against Rupert Lowe is that he is a plain, old-fashioned windbag. Reform sources tell me that Farage has been forced to abandon his weekly Westminster meeting of Reform MPs because Lowe was dominating 90 per cent of the conversation.

‘He just hoovered up the time, never stopped talking and didn’t give other Reform MPs with equally important issues to raise a chance to speak,’ says one. ‘He clearly thought he was the most important person in the room.’

This doesn’t surprise me in the least. I’ve spent too many hours of my life locked in Westminster meetings with MPs who simply talk over everyone else.

Lowe, who has been seen dining with party donors, is certainly not without ambition.

Some fear that he wishes to replace Farage as party leader and shift Reform to a lonely – and I would say politically suicidal – position on the far-Right of British politics.

In the past few days, he has suggested that Farage meets him for dinner to sort things out between them, but I can’t see that happening any time soon.

Rather, this is the desperate hope of a man who is fighting for his political life.

Lowe is already claiming that he will start a new political party if he doesn’t get the Reform UK whip back.

Maybe he can join forces with misogynist Andrew Tate, Tommy Robinson and former political adviser Dominic Cummings, who have all threatened to form parties of their own.

But my guess is that, like all ‘independent’ MPs, Rupert Lowe will simply slip into oblivion – which is very much the best place for him.