Political brands are not built overnight. They are forged in the crucible of public life, hammered into shape over decades of campaigns, controversies, media appearances, and electoral battles. They require a unique alchemy of personality, persistence, and timing. To imagine that a credible, national political force can be conjured from thin air by a disgruntled faction and a billionaire’s tweet is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of power in this country.
It is this delusion that has recently taken hold on the fringes of the new right, and it threatens to squander a once-in-a-century opportunity.
The emergence of splinter groups such as Ben Habib’s ‘Advance UK’ and Rupert Lowe’s ‘Restore Britain’ movement is a predictable, if regrettable, symptom of a successful insurgency. As Reform UK transitions from a party of protest to a government-in-waiting, those who prefer the purity of the pulpit to the messy process of power have peeled away. Appearing to give their endeavours a superficial gloss of credibility is tech billionaire Elon Musk, who, peering at Britain through the distorting prism of his X feed, has declared Nigel Farage “weak sauce” and anointed Habib’s fledgling outfit as the true vehicle for change.
This is a profound miscalculation, born of Silicon Valley naivety. Musk, a genius of engineering, fails to grasp the messy mechanics of politics. He sees a brand and assumes it can be replicated or replaced, like a new model of car. He is wrong. The Farage brand is not a startup; it is a political institution thirty years in the making. To back splinter groups now is not to accelerate change but to risk shattering the battering ram from the side, just as it is about to breach the gates of the establishment. Farage is the only man who has spent a lifetime building the war machine for the job.
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