Elon Musk has thrown his support behind Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party in the Makerfield by-election, in a move that risks splitting the right-wing vote and handing the seat to Labour’s Andy Burnham — just as the first poll of the campaign shows the contest on a knife edge.
The billionaire owner of X posted “Restore Britain” on Sunday morning while retweeting a message from Mr Lowe, the MP for Great Yarmouth who founded the party after being suspended from Reform UK last year. The intervention is likely to intensify the bitter personal rivalry between Mr Lowe and Nigel Farage, whose public falling-out has now spilled directly into one of the most closely watched by-elections in recent memory.
A poll of 504 adults by Survation showed Reform on 40 per cent, just three points behind Burnham on 43 per cent — a margin well within the margin of error. Restore Britain sits in third place on 7 per cent, a share that could prove decisive. If right-wing voters split between Reform and Restore Britain, the arithmetic points firmly in Burnham’s direction, potentially accelerating his path to a Labour leadership challenge against Sir Keir Starmer.
Farage moved quickly to contain the damage, framing the contest as a straight fight between his candidate and Labour. “Robert Kenyon is the only candidate who can stop Andy Burnham. This is a two-horse race — nobody else comes close,” he said. But Musk’s endorsement complicates that message significantly, given his enormous reach on X and his history of shaping British political discourse from afar.
Lowe welcomed the support enthusiastically. “Elon Musk backing Restore Britain sends a clear message that real change is possible and the establishment is losing control,” he said. “Makerfield will show Britain the way. We’re not here to patch up a broken system, we are here to restore our country.” The constituency’s Restore Britain candidate, businesswoman Rebecca Shepherd, added: “Elon Musk backing Restore Britain tells you something: the old assumptions about British politics are finished.”
In his own post, Lowe struck a combative tone, claiming Restore Britain was “under brutal assault” by an establishment that wanted it “gone.” He wrote: “Everything will be thrown at us — false allegations, dishonest polling, media hysteria, vile personal attacks. They’ve already tried to put me in prison. It will all keep coming and coming. The establishment is getting very nasty with us. Good. It shows we are making progress.” Restore Britain demonstrated its growing local presence earlier this month when its subsidiary party Great Yarmouth First won all nine seats it stood for on Norfolk county council.
Musk’s backing is not new. When Restore Britain launched last year, he wrote on X: “It will win. It must win. To Save Britain.” He has been a persistent and provocative voice in British politics since Labour’s general election victory in July 2024, describing the UK as a “tyrannical police state,” branding Sir Keir Starmer “two-tier Keir” over the policing of far-right protests, claiming “civil war is inevitable” in the weeks after the election and calling for the Prime Minister to be imprisoned over the state’s handling of child sexual exploitation. He also called former safeguarding minister Jess Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” and warned that inheritance tax changes for farmers meant the UK was going “full Stalin.”
His influence on X has not been without controversy. Musk was forced to act after his AI chatbot Grok was found to be generating and sharing degrading deepfake images of real people on the platform, prompting a significant backlash from the government. He subsequently blocked the chatbot’s ability to produce non-consensual sexualised imagery in countries where doing so was illegal.
