The unlikely influencer Will Rupert Lowe's 'foghorn' be heard beyond X?

If you were to look for answers as to why Rupert Lowe, a relatively little-known Reform MP, thinks he can lecture Nigel Farage about running a party and winning an election, there is one place you should probably start: X.

- Peter Walker

For all that in person Lowe can sometimes resemble a slightly embarrassing uncle at a wedding, on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, the MP for Great Yarmouth, in Norfolk, is a big name - and by some metrics, a notably bigger one even than his party's leader.

There is another factor immediately obvious from Lowe's presence on the site. He is notably more hard right than Farage, with the content on his feed heavily focused on pledges to mass-deport a million-plus migrants and asylum seekers, or complaints about criminals from "alien cultures".

In the most recent register of MPs' interests, Lowe set out that his income from posting on X, where some users are paid a share of advertising revenue based on how many people their content reaches, is more than £3,000 a fortnight, about four times as much as Farage makes on the platform.

In part this is about the much greater frequency with which Lowe posts. But unlikely online influencer though he might seem, he is very much an influencer, with his posts routinely "liked" tens of thousands of times. At the time of writing, the previous 24 hours of Lowe's tweets had been viewed more than 2.5m times.