LONDON — Two of Britain’s leading right-wing politicians are stuck in a will-they-won’t-they tussle — and it could have big implications for the next general election.

Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe have spent the week flirting with, retreating from … and then once again talking up a rapprochement between their two parties, Farage’s Reform UK and Lowe’s Restore Britain.

It comes after months of bitter briefing against Farage by Lowe, whose hard-right party — while still polling in single digits — has eaten into support for Farage’s much larger right-wing force.

POLITICO recaps the saga — and tries to map out what it could mean for the wider British right.

Who are the key players?

Farage has been a dominant figure in British politics for many years. He was originally leader of the Euroskeptic UKIP, then the Brexit Party, and now Reform UK after a comeback at the 2024 general election. That election delivered five Reform MPs, including Farage … and Rupert Lowe himself.

Best known to some for a tumultuous stint as chair of Southampton Football Club, the multimillionaire Lowe briefly joined Farage in the European Parliament in 2019 as a Brexit Party MEP. He unsuccessfully stood for Reform in a 2024 by-election, but the pair were reunited after the general election when Lowe won the coastal seat of Great Yarmouth.

Why did they fall out?

It’s complicated. On the surface, it’s a policy split, but there’s plenty of personal bad blood too.

Farage has always taken a hardline approach to immigration — but some of Lowe’s stated positions went too far even for him. The Great Yarmouth MP publicly backed the deportation of families of people convicted of child grooming, a move the Reform UK leader rejected. Lowe said he had been “silenced” by the party.

Then Elon Musk weighed in. In January last year, the tech tycoon used his platform to lay into Farage, saying he was no longer the right person for the job — and giving his backing to Lowe. Lowe is a hit on the Musk-owned social platform X, where his lengthy posts have topped up his earnings.

After publicly criticizing Farage’s management of Reform, Lowe lost the Reform UK whip in March 2025. In a significant escalation, he was reported to the police over alleged threats of physical violence against Reform chairman Zia Yusuf — though no further action was taken by the authorities.

The pair’s mutual loathing only seemed to escalate.

Lowe sat as an independent MP in the House of Commons, before setting up Restore Britain as a cross-party group, publishing policy papers on mass deportations and holding its own inquiry into the emotive issue of grooming gangs.

It became a full-blown party this February, capitalizing on the Great Yarmouth MP’s growing X following.

What’s that meant for Farage?

The Reform UK leader, who has a well-established history of falling out with one-time allies, initially kept his distance from Lowe, claiming the hard-right party’s following is minimal.

However, Lowe’s movement has already proven effective at splitting the already fragmented right-wing vote. The Great Yarmouth First party, an affiliate of Restore, picked up nine seats at May’s local elections and denied Reform a majority on Norfolk County Council, although Reform still made huge gains nationally.

At the Makerfield by-election, which Labour’s Andy Burnham won shortly before becoming British prime minister, Restore Britain bagged 6.8 percent to Reform’s 34.5 percent. Even though their combined totals wouldn’t have beaten Burnham, Farage lambasted the result, asking Restore voters: “What do you want?”

A similar pattern emerged at last week’s Greater Manchester mayoral by-election to succeed Burnham, where Restore picked up 8.7 percent of first preference votes.

What’s the latest on a rapprochement?

After the Greater Manchester contest, Lowe shot a 12-minute X video calling for the two men to put “personal differences aside” to deliver credible change. Lowe’s monologue had five conditions. They included a referendum on the death penalty, banning halal and kosher meat, and preventing former ministers from the center-right Conservatives who’ve defected to Reform from having a role in a future Farage government.

The following day, Farage claimed he had reached out to Lowe but had received no reply. Lowe then denied this and accused Farage of “outright lying about our private conversations” — even publishing a purported WhatsApp message from the Reform UK boss.

Farage told Times Radio those claims were “extraordinary” and that Lowe is “not a very easy person to deal with.” But he insisted he has a willingness to “put past differences aside in the interest of getting some sort of unity” … which suggests the pair might come to the table.

What does this mean for the Tories?

There’s another layer of intrigue to this row, too.

The Conservatives — who were running Britain until a spectacular general election defeat in 2024 — have ruled out any arrangement with Farage’s Reform UK, decrying the party’s economic policies and questioning Farage’s financial affairs.

But they have sounded much more conciliatory towards Lowe.

The party gave him one of its seats on the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, which scrutinizes government spending. Party Leader Kemi Badenoch even praised Lowe as someone who “turns up to work. Nigel Farage doesn’t.”

Those answers suggest that placating Lowe — and his huge online following — is no longer seen as bad politics for Britain’s two big right-wing parties.

In something I never expected to have to clarify, this is a hot dog recipe but it is not a recipe for hot dogs. I know that I have a history of making foods from scratch that most sane people do not feel the need to — cream cheese, fig newtons, bagels, vanilla extract, and [coming soon] almond extract too — but I do still leave “grinding meat with spices, salt, and curing agents into a smooth, fine emulsion” before being “stuffed into casings and smoked” to the experts, usually at Hebrew National.

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Today's links

• Trump's fruitless search for a goreable ox: You can keep billionaires happy, or you can fight the cost of living crisis, but not both.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Typewriter bust; Phrack's new issue; Panama Papers whistleblower speaks; The PRO Act; Zuck's new mind-control ray.
• Upcoming appearances: Barcelona, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC, Edinburgh.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Trump's fruitless search for a goreable ox (permalink)

I've got good news and bad news for Trump. The good news: you can get elected by promising to do something about the cost of living crisis, and the president actually has a lot of ways to improve people's daily costs. The bad news: everything you could do to fix working people's cost of living will make an oligarch worse off.

This is the essential conundrum of Trumpismo: to keep his base happy, he needs to make their lives better; but to make their lives better, he'll have to make oligarchs angry. The oligarchs' wealth bonanza caused the cost of living crisis. Oligarchs' pleasure causes our suffering, so alleviating our suffering will reduce their pleasure.

This means that while Trump can promise help with prices, all he can deliver is union-busting, ICE lynchings, and pointless wars, none of which have any hope of materially improving the lives of working people. Indeed, all of this stuff makes working people materially worse off, as wages fall, crops rot in the fields, and gas prices shoot through the roof.

Trump would dearly love to find an ox he can safely gore, but all the good oxen are owned by his oligarch chums. Trump can't punish Ticketmaster, because the billions Ticketmaster steals from the WWE, F1 and football fans in his base all land in the pocket of oligarchs who own stock in Ticketmaster, and Trump can't afford to upset those oligarchs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/03/aoi-aoi-oh/#concentrated-gains-vast-diffused-losses

Indeed, I can't think of a single corrupt racket that Trump can afford to do something about. Not even the only cost of living metric that can approach gas prices in the hierarchy of American electoral salience: grocery prices.

Your grocery bill went up because oligarchs price-gouge you. Eggflation was caused by Cal-Maine, the monopolist that owns every brand of eggs in your grocer's fridge, who jacked up prices because they knew they could:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/10/demand-and-supply/#keep-cal-maine-and-carry-on

Pepsi and Walmart conspired to force every retailer to jack up the prices of all Pepsi products (including Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Aquafina, etc) at every retailer's store, so that Walmart could also jack up their prices and still undersell their competition (naturally, Trump let them get away with it):

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/secret-documents-show-pepsi-and-walmart

This stuff isn't exactly a secret. Grocery store owners hold earnings calls with their investors where they boast about the fact that they can raise their prices far in excess of their increased costs, and blame it on inflation:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

They boast about their "personalized pricing" swindles, whereby they use surveillance data to figure out how desperate you are and jack up the prices you see in their apps:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/11/nothing-personal/#instacartography

Trump has the power to put a stop to all of this, but still, he can't, because his oligarch pals would squeal, and when they squeal, Trump jumps. In theory, Trump has lots of power, but in practice, Trump can't do anything.

Which brings me to the cost of meat. Meat inflation has raced ahead of other forms of food inflation, even as the payments to ranchers and other producers fell sharply, leading to waves of bankruptcies:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/beef-is-expensive-so-why-are-cattle

Partly, that's because meat processing is controlled by cartels, with 85% of all the beef being processed by four packers, and nearly every chicken going through one of four poultry processors. These middlemen jack up prices to grocers while colluding to push down the payments to their suppliers.

How do they rig those prices? After all, it's very illegal for these four companies to get together around a table to rig prices. Instead, they use a "price consultancy" called Agri Stats that does the price-rigging for them. Every week, the packers send a detailed list of all their costs and prices into Agri Stats, and Agri Stats "advises" them all to raise all their prices at once, and anyone who doesn't play along is pushed out of the Agri Stats cartel. Everyone wins – except families paying for groceries:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

Agri Stats has been doing this since the Reagan years, but they grew steadily more brazen, until, back in 2023, Biden's DOJ brought history's most obvious, easily won antitrust case against them:

https://www.meatpoultry.com/articles/29124-doj-sues-agri-stats-for-complicity-in-meat-market-manipulation

And wouldn't you know it, Trump just settled that case, in a way that will make Agri Stats much, much richer and give them far more opportunities to rig prices:

https://prospect.org/2026/05/08/meat-industry-agri-stats-department-of-justice-price-fix-trump/

Under the terms of the settlement, Agri Stats must "allow" restaurants, farmers, and other parts of the supply chain to pay it for the data it consolidates. This will allow more parties to collude to rig prices, and provide more income to Agri Stats. As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, they've been "sentenced to make money."

Agri Stats isn't the only "price consultancy" that is used to launder a price-fixing cartel that's driving up the cost of living for all Americans, including Trump's base, in order to make oligarchs better off. Companies like Realpage do the same thing for residential rents:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/11/nimby-yimby-fimby/#home-team-advantage

Trump can't do anything about any of these scams, not without goring some oligarch's precious ox. But, as Dayen points out, there are dozens of Democratic state Attorneys General who can kill Trump's sweetheart deal for Agri Stats using the Tunney Act, which gives them standing to sue to force a federal judge to review the settlement and determine whether it is fair.

Whether any AG will seize the moment remains to be seen, of course, but it would be very good politics to do so – after all, the path to political power in America runs through credible promises to do something about the cost of living crisis.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• The simple statistical error Republican Supreme Court justices used to gut the VRA https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-05-08-simple-math-error-scotus-callais-vra

• Message to Congress on Curbing Monopolies. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/message-congress-curbing-monopolies

• The Scam Artistry of the Right’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels https://jacobin.com/2026/05/peterson-musk-tate-right-victimization

• Ploopy Bean Pointing Stick https://ploopy.co/shop/bean-pointing-stick/

'The Biggest Student Data Privacy Disaster in History': Canvas Hack Shows the Danger of Centralized EdTech https://www.404media.co/the-biggest-student-data-privacy-disaster-in-history-canvas-hack-shows-the-danger-of-centralized-edtech/

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Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago A dotcom founder's tale (funny) https://features.slashdot.org/story/01/05/04/1541239/the-worst-of-times

#20yrsago Shell UK abandons chip-and-pin after £1M fraud https://web.archive.org/web/20060508044110/https://www.snakeoillabs.com/2006/05/07/shell-stops-accepting-chip-and-pin-in-fraud-fiasco-bp-to-follow/

#15yrsago Typewriter bust: Grandfather https://web.archive.org/web/20110511033756/http://jemayer.tumblr.com/post/5260317696

#10yrsago Kobo “upgrade” deprives readers of hundreds of DRM-locked ebooks https://www.teleread.com/drm-nightmare-after-recent-upgrade-kobo-customers-report-losing-sony-books-from-their-libraries/

#10yrsago Venerable hacker zine Phrack publishes its first issue in four years https://phrack.org/issues/69/1

#10yrsago Panama Papers whistleblower issues statement, naming and shaming failed states and institutions https://web.archive.org/web/20160506180902/https://panamapapers.icij.org/20160506-john-doe-statement.html

#5yrsago The FTC's (kick-ass) Right to Repair report https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/07/pro-act-class-war/#we-fixit

#5yrsago The PRO Act and worker misclassification https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/07/pro-act-class-war/#sectoral-balances

#1yrago Mark Zuckerberg announces mind-control ray (again) https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
  https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/speakers/

• Virtual: How to Disenshittify the Internet with Wendy Liu (EFF), May 14
  https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-enshittification

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 18
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow-in-der-friesenstrasse-23-kreuzberg-praesentiert-von-otherland.html

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• The “Enshittification” of Everything (Bioneers)
  https://bioneers.org/cory-doctorow-enshittification-of-everything-zstf2605/

• Enshittification (99% Invisible)
  https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/666-enshittification/

• Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor

• When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8

• Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612

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Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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ISSN: 3066-764X

How do you cook when your kitchen isn’t available for kitchen-ing? On a Sunday last April, I awoke at the crack of dawn jet-lagged from an (excellent) trip to Amsterdam* to an email from my apartment building that ConEd had found a gas leak in the main line to the building and had shut down service for safety. With this, I was indoctrinated into a society of New Yorkers I previously hadn’t known existed, as NYC is apparently riddled with tales of people who lived without gas for (what seemed like the minimum of) 6 months and up to 18 months while their building trudged at a snail’s pace through rounds of repairs and inspections.

Read more »

Unless you’re living your life better than me (probably!), I bet it’s been way too long since you last had a baked potato for dinner — or, as they’re more charmingly called across the pond, “jacket potato.” And it’s a crime because they’re so cozy and uncomplicated to make, we could fix this right now.

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For the last several years, if we know each other offline and you ask me what brisket you should make for Passover or another Jewish holiday and you seem a little concerned over the work of it all — because something not discussed nearly often enough is that it’s never just about the brisket, right? It’s starters and sides and desserts, plus table-setting, water carafes (there are never enough), procuring wine and someone (hopefully not me) needs to make sure the place is passably spic-and-span for guests — I will send you an email with the recipe for what I call Stupid Easy Brisket. I’m overdue to stop holding out on the rest of us, too, albeit with a less insulting title.

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We jokingly call these meaty, greeny, cheesy, beany, spicy baked chickpeas because, well, internet recipe naming conventions make us laugh but I really think of them as Pizza Beans 2.0. I introduced Pizza Beans 1.0 in my second cookbook, Smitten Kitchen Every Day, where I dreamed of a mash-up of Greek gigante beans in tomato sauce and an American baked ziti, with beans instead of noodles. I called them “pizza” beans to try to convince my then-kindergartener to try them with clever marketing. We still adore the recipe and all of the truly unexpected places it’s landed.

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It’s humbling that way every September, without fail, knocks me on my rump. One week, you’re breezy and unscheduled, reading books on a beach and tearing lobster apart with your bare hands (indeed, we were in Maine) and the next you’re realizing a certain fetid backpack was never emptied on the last day of school in June, scrambling for after-school care, and despite the fact that I work every week of the year, somehow there’s a lot more to do. If dinner can’t be made in one pan in which everything cooks at once, I haven’t been making it. And yet I’ve made this chicken dish four times in the last month; it’s clearly time to shout about it across the internet.

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This has been my go-to summer steak for the last several years and I have some audacity to have gatekept it for so long. Mostly, we’ve been too busy eating it for me to grab the camera and shoot it and then sit down and write the recipe, which is hilarious as that’s, like, my whole job. But my brain softens in the summer, especially when my kids are away at sleepaway camp, as they are now, and we quickly lose whatever tethers we had to things like to-do lists, responsibilities, and adulting. And while I do not expect a skirt steak with a cherry tomato and sweet corn salad to shake the cooking internet off its axis, there are a bunch of tips tucked into this recipe that make it a reliable favorite, and I hope become part of your repertoire too.

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