Thread by @politicworm

We laugh at Lozza ‘Loser’ Fox but we’ll have to take this seriously, I’m afraid.

Not him. Those behind him.

He’s just a figurehead.

They have the cash - £5 million up front - and a plan.

The expertise, experience & contacts too.

But who are they?

Read on & pls RT

[thread]

This is Culture War Commander Fox’s temporary and modestly named website for the new party - as he waits for the Electoral Commission to agree to the party name ‘Reclaim’

laurencefoxparty.nationbuilder.com

The contact address is the PR company looking after this operation, Reputation Management.

“Providing senior, trusted and effective crisis communications and public relations”

reputationcommunications.com

(Given Looza’s reputation in the acting world, the ‘crisis’ part may come in handy...)

I think we can guess who advised him to delete all previous his tweets, which he did 31 August

Too many hostages to fortune right there.

(The oldest does hit the mark - he can take it, eh?)

So who is in the team?

Managing Director -
Patrick Barrow

Former Question Time press officer, Head of Corporate affairs for the Telegraph, advisor to the UAE, and life-long rugger-bugger.

We’ll come back to him.

Director -
Lucy Goodwin

PR whizz who has worked with The Telegraph (where she worked with Boris), ITN & Tory HQ - she was on the election press team for Michael Howard & Cameron

Nick Chaloner -
Director

He’s got an interesting background. Aside from a long career in financial services, he’s worked across the Arabian Gulf and ‘managed an extensive PR network spanning the Balkans and former Soviet Republics’.

He helped launch Pizza Hut in Moscow!

And..

... he doesn’t mention it on his RepComms profile, but as well as a few years working in Riyadh, Cyprus, & the UAE, he’s a former British Army intelligence officer with long experience in Northern Ireland.

Don’t be shy, Captain Nick!

prweek.com/article/96274/…

Then there’s:

Vicky Beaney-
Director

Another very experienced PR, who has also worked with The Telegraph group, and has recently been advising the Gibraltar Government on handling tensions with Spain and the Brazilian Government on attracting investment from Europe.

Lastly:
Robin Britten -
Associate Partner

An editor with BBC News for 13 years, founding editor of Radio 5 Liv, and deputy editor of World at One for Radio 4.

‘He recognises the crucial role of non-journalistic work in the creation of news agendas’

Now, none of this means they are bad people, even if some have no qualms about working with foreign dictatorships with appalling human rights records.

They’re probably fun & fascinating people to have a drink with, and patriots all, no doubt.

The point is...

... they REALLY know what they’re doing.

Between them, they have serious contacts within right-wing politics & across the media.

With these guys, backed by oodles of cash, Looza is going to be unavoidable.

So...

... let’s go back to the boss, Patrick Barrow.

He’s not just a gun for hire, this is very much a project close to his heart.

Here he is ‘rocking the fringe’ with Boris at the Tory party conference last October:

reputationcommunications.com/latest-industr…

As Barrow put it later:

“The Daily Telegraph was, quite literally, running the country”

But the ‘harmony’ didn’t last.

By June this year, he was recanting his ‘sordid tryst’

thecritic.co.uk/my-sordid-trys…

The cause of the split?

A hatred of the #BLM movement and that new bogeyman ‘cultural Marxism’

“The cultural colonization of British life by the Left was to be halted. Quangos, regulators, the Civil Service and the BBC were to be reformed and...

... with a belting and unarguable majority behind him, the country was at last supposed to settle down into the good-humoured, optimistic and largely liberal independent trading nation that most of us – it is most of us – quite fancied. A sort of national Boris.”

Sound familiar?

June saw Barrow spilling his angst into print a lot.

About policing, about rugby - why can’t we sing ‘Swing Low’ anymore? - and, here, about #BLM again, where the nostalgia for being able to be proud of the Empire shines through:

reaction.life/why-does-it-al…

For Barrow, this seems the core of it all.

The golden days of Empire when the map was full of pink, where we were better than the Belgians, not as nasty as the Nazis, where the police didn’t ask for your papers when driving all the time, like French cops...

... a world of cocktails on the verandah, and we were proud of it all.

Accepting the violence, cruelty, oppression - and, yes, racism - that underpinned it is just too painful, too shameful, an insult to our forbears’ good names.

The complexity is just too hard to face...

... which brings us back to the Looza party.

Fox’s website’s statement could have been written by Barrow himself.

I’ll bet you 50p it was...

Given all the close links the guys at Reputation Management have with The Telegraph, it’s no surprise who gets the scoop.

The ambition is frighteningly clear.

And if you think Looza managed to write this all by his little self, I’ve got another 50p to bet you.

This isn’t the Looza party.

It’s the new Barrow Telegraph party.

Another battalion on the field of the ‘culture wars’

Pretending to run separate campaigns that are secretly in sync is how Brexit - & the last election - was won.

No surprise then that @leaveeu are one of the first to tweet support.

KulturKreigKommander Fox is promising to run candidates in future elections, but winning isn’t the point.

Like the Brexit Party Ltd, it’s a useful way to threaten sitting Tory MPs to toe the new party line.

And as a party, there are lots of other goodies on offer. Funding, airtime, mailshots, party political broadcasts.

But the point isn’t to win. It’s to put more pressure on the current political system and ratchet it ever rightwards.

Looza’s an amateur, but he’s being trained up by real professionals

& the pitch - for all the bogus talk of love, reason & respect - is an old one:

a mythic lost past, stoking nationalist fears to grab ever more power for those who already have it, & silencing those who dissent

And here are two more threads looking at those who might be involved to go with this first.

A second, more comic thread, on Looza’s loyal lieutenant, Darren Selkus:

https://twitter.com/politicworm/status/1311671633464229894

... and the 3rd (and last) thread looking at the political players who may be involved:

https://twitter.com/politicworm/status/1312828606339592192