Rupert Lowe reckons he's got 80,000 members now.

The bloke who walked out of Reform to start Restore Britain is either building a serious political movement or the most expensive vanity project since the Millennium Dome. Depends who you ask.

Inside Reform HQ, the official line is that Lowe's outfit is irrelevant. A JL Partners poll has him on 8% name recognition. Hardly terrifying.

But privately? People are twitchy. One Reform insider admits Lowe is "extremely well connected" and has proper donor money behind him. Low single digits in the polls is realistic. And in a country where elections get decided on margins of a few thousand votes, that's not nothing.

Then there's the Musk problem. The world's richest man has endorsed Restore Britain several times in the past few days. Musk's X algorithm reaches more eyeballs than every British newspaper combined. When he decides to boost something, it gets boosted.

Farage took a swipe yesterday, warning that immigration failures are fuelling "extreme right ethno-nationalism." He didn't name Lowe directly. He didn't need to. It's the kind of language Farage uses when he wants to be seen as the sensible populist rather than the angry one. He's done it before. It means he's worried enough to draw a line.

Some people on both sides have started muttering about a pact. Farage hasn't ruled it out. Lowe hasn't either. Whether their egos could survive sharing a platform is another matter entirely.

The real joke is that the Conservative Party, the actual official opposition in theory, doesn't feature in any of this. The fight for the British right is happening exclusively between parties that didn't exist five years ago. Kemi Badenoch might as well be shouting into a pillow.

Whether Restore Britain amounts to anything or fizzles out by Christmas, one thing's clear: the right is fragmenting at exactly the moment it should be uniting. And the only people enjoying that are Starmer's lot, who can't believe their luck.