Rupert Lowe is used to dividing opinion. During his years as chair of Southampton football club, such was the antipathy among some fans that many would engage in the abusive chant: “Swing Lowe, Swing Rupert Lowe.”
“Understandably, having thousands of people chanting such offensive language is not a pleasant position to be in, but we live in a country with free speech and we must respect that. It did put pressure on my health, I won’t deny it,” the new Reform UK MP said this week.
This month, he angered teachers’ unions even before he was sworn in after stating that he had a list of schools where he claimed teachers were allegedly “pushing” critical views about the populist rightwing party.
As one of five new Reform MPs, such interventions are in keeping with those of his colleagues Nigel Farage, Lee Anderson and Richard Tice. Leaving aside the unexpected “bonus” election of Reform’s fifth MP, James McMurdock, Lowe’s victory is potentially the more significant in the long-run.
Not only was his Great Yarmouth seat arguably a more challenging target than Clacton or Boston – it was Labour under Blair and Tory under Johnson – but in Lowe, the party also has an MP who comes to Westminster with decades of business experience.
Coincidentally, some of those business dealings have links to Rishi Sunak through the former PM’s wife, Akshata Murty. Eyebrows were raised last week when it was noted that she and Lowe were investors in a firm that went bust in 2022 after receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds in furlough money. Lowe said the firm was a casualty of the pandemic and lockdowns, adding that he was not liable for any debts and in fact “lost an awful lot of money”.
“If Britain is to flourish, risk-taking is something that needs to be fostered. With risk-taking, there is risk,” he added.
In another plus for Reform, Lowe is happy to plough along in the shadow of Farage and ready to go on the political offensive, even if he insists his style is a polite one. “I will always be jovial and pleasant to political opponents, giving the respect they deserve,” Lowe told the Guardian by email, after declining requests to be interviewed.
Like Farage and Tice, Oxford-born Lowe is a former public schoolboy intent on waging a libertarian revolt against Britain’s “establishment”. After university, he was a commodity broker in the City and went to Japan to work in securities. When British football clubs emerged as attractive financial assets in the 1990s, he became chair of Southampton after a reverse takeover.
“You tell me if there is anyone else in football by the name of Rupert,” the former Southampton manager Graeme Souness said of Lowe, echoing suspicions that he was not of the world of terraces and muddy nil-nil draws.
It was at the south coast club that he developed a reputation for ruthlessness. Lowe resigned in 2006 after a decade in charge – having been blamed by many fans for relegation in 2005 after 27 years in the top flight. He made a return but resigned again in 2009 as the club’s holding company went into administration.
Today, he looks back with pride and cites achievements such as delivering a new stadium and giving the club what he describes as an engine that enabled it to compete for many years in the Premier League. “People will always have different opinions, and that’s fine. Some at the club did not appreciate what we achieved,” he said.
What did mark him out as different from other club chairs was his political outlook. Interviewers recall Lowe pivoting from football talk to railing against the Maastricht treaty. By then, he had already cut his teeth in politics, having stood unsuccessfully in the Cotswolds in 1997 for the Referendum party.
After taking a prominent role in the vote leave campaign, he became a Brexit party MEP at the 2019 election. Political opponents in Brussels included his fellow West Midlands MEP, the Liberal Democrats’ Phil Bennion, who remembers Lowe not without fondness.
“He was a bit of a character and quite pally. He could be confrontational but it was always with smile and a wink,” he said.
But while another West Midlands MEP, Labour’s Neena Gill, says he never stood out during their time in Brussels, she tells of being barracked by Brexit party supporters who shouted at her to “go home” when she recalled fascist movements of the past in her election night speech. Lowe dismissed her comments, insisting people standing alongside him represented a broad cross-section of the population.
In parliament, he is expected to take a lead on issues including farming and fisheries. Comfortably in the camp of libertarian conservatives, he fervently believes Britain’s potential – especially after Brexit – has been held back by too much “state” and “woke”. But while seemingly a Tory at heart, his past pronouncements also indicate an even starker position on some of the betes noires of the right.
Lowe told a podcast in 2022 that he couldn’t wait to get rid of the national broadcaster, describing the BBC as a “cancer at the heart of Britain”. He also stands by his 2020 reference to “the cult of climate change”, adding that government policy has been based on “questionable evidence”.
Other past comments reflect a particular worldview. In a 2019 interview with The Athletic, Lowe waxed lyrical about England’s footballing “bloodstock” but veered into more contentious territory when talk turned to French talent, such as Paul Pogba, the Parisian-born star from the city’s multicultural suburbs.
“Pogba’s originally not from France, is he? He would be from Africa,” Lowe told the interviewer. He said this week: “Paul Pogba is clearly from France – I am not arguing, or did not argue, against that. I was referring to Mr Pogba’s lineage in a discussion about football youth academies. Mr Pogba is French.”
To his admirers – who include those applauding his decision to donate his net MP salary to charities and worthy causes every month – such comments are those of a man who simply speaks his mind.
June Mummery – the fisheries campaigner who encouraged Lowe to run in Great Yarmouth, said: “Clearly he’s a wealthy man, but he’s also humble … and a grafter. He genuinely cares about people.”
Others have been less than impressed. Amid a backlash over his comments about schools, the general secretary of the National Education Union, Daniel Kebede, suggested he was “cynically stoking up division”.
While the green benches of the House of Commons are a world away from Southampton’s terraces, it seems that Rupert Lowe is once more set to divide opinion.
