3 hours ago
8
Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore Britain, is on course to earn as much from the social media platform X as he does from his salary as an MP, after surging income from posts that include demands for mass deportations.
Lowe has earned £932 an hour for his posts on X, formerly Twitter, since the start of the year, according to his own declarations in the register of MPs’ financial interests, which detail how many hours he has spent on X for each payment he received from the platform.
The figure is more than twice the £377 an hour on average he earned last year. His hourly rate rose steeply again this summer, reaching £1,476 since the start of June.
X critics claim it is further evidence that X is favouring and incentivising divisive political content, pulling the UK’s political discourse to the right. Elon Musk, the site’s owner, has repeatedly amplified Lowe’s posts.
Under X’s revenue-sharing scheme, premium subscribers such as Lowe are paid based on the performance of their posts. The scheme resulted in record payouts last year. The platform recently announced forthcoming changes, designed to reward original content and commentary.
Lowe’s total income from X since the 2024 general election has now surpassed £105,000. He earned more than half of that in the first eight months of 2026.
Should his average earnings for 2026 so far continue throughout the year, he would earn just over £93,000 – close to the current MPs’ £98,599 annual salary. He could easily exceed that figure should the higher rate of earnings of recent months persist.
Lowe has previously said he donates his net MP’s salary to charities and worthy causes in his constituency of Great Yarmouth.
The politician’s extraordinary success on X has led to concerns among some campaigners, who fear it is a sign that Musk’s site is effectively funding an MP that reflects the hard-right views of the billionaire.
“We tend to treat a politician’s online reach and their income as two separate stories, but for Rupert Lowe they’re part of the same mechanism,” said Ambrose Pym, a researcher covering the far right and technology who analysed Lowe’s rising X earnings. “The more his content is seen, the more X pays him for it.
“Scrutiny is rightly falling on other sources of foreign money in British politics. However, a US-based billionaire simultaneously paying and boosting an ideologically aligned British politician through his own platform is going strikingly under-reported. X’s financial and reach incentive structure rewards division and is shaping British politics with almost none of the scrutiny it deserves.”
Lowe, who founded Restore Britain after leaving Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, describes his party’s most significant achievement as “dragging mass deportations [of migrants] into mainstream politics”.
Asked about his accelerating X earnings, Lowe told the Guardian: “If I wanted to make money, I would not be in politics. I donate my entire net MP salary to local charities in my constituency – being a politician is the most expensive job I’ve ever had.”
His recent posts on X show the extraordinary amount of engagement the Restore leader secures on the platform. Over the weekend, one of his posts stated: “An illegal migrant could read ten thousand Home Office pamphlets in some woeful attempt to ‘integrate’, I’d still want him deported.
“They broke into our country – they are not welcome here, and they all need to be removed. This is not complicated.” It received 1.3m views, 25,000 likes and 3,000 reposts.
Last week, a post about how the UK should replicate Portugal’s ban on the burqa in many public spaces received almost a million views.
Lowe’s previous posts have included describing diversity policies as a “wicked, malicious, viperous cancer” and have criticised illegal migrants as “unvetted foreign males” loitering “where your daughter walks home”.
The Guardian has contacted X with a request for comment.
