Newsletter #24: Farage-Lowe feud escalates

PLUS: Mike Tapp — Labour’s anti-Reform attack dog?

Good morning.

No respite for Kemi Badenoch this week, I’m afraid, as she somehow managed to beat her abysmal PMQs performance last week. Meanwhile, Labour seem to have started worrying about Reform; Thames Water is almost bankrupt; and the Farage-Lowe feud, bubbling under the surface for some time now, seems to have escalated.

This newsletter’s agenda: Mike Tapp — Labour’s anti-Reform attack dog? (free); Farage-Lowe feud escalates? (paid); Cabinet reshuffle rumours (paid); Yet another atrocious Kemi Badenoch PMQs performance (paid); Thames Water now only has enough cash to survive for five more weeks (paid)

Mike Tapp — Labour’s anti-Reform attack dog?

The Labour Party has responded to Reform’s rise in the polls by forming an informal ‘anti-Reform’ caucus, as reported by The Independent. This group broadly consists of MPs in seats where Reform finished second in July’s general election, with one such constituency being Dover and Deal, won by Mike Tapp from the Conservatives in 2024. Newsletter #19 drew attention to Tapp for his willingness to keep up Starmer’s ‘patriotic’ General Election branding and to make a big show of Labour’s crackdowns on illegal immigration. Since then, his prominence has only increased.

Tapp’s Union Jack-adorned profile may have appeared on your feed recently due to his incendiary posts against Reform and his spat with Rupert Lowe. As per The Independent, this definitely seems like a coordinated push. In the entirety of 2024, Tapp only made two tweets containing the word ‘Reform’, yet within a month-and-half of 2025, Reform have been mentioned in at least ten of his tweets, with the pace really picking up in February after the reported formation of the ‘anti-Reform’ group. It seems that Labour, who at first were quite happy for Reform to do well (assuming that this was mostly at the expense of the Tories), are now getting worried.

Tapp’s tactics lean heavily on ‘British Values’ boosterism with a peppering of Louise Mensch-tier conspiracies about Reform’s supposed links to Russia. See, for instance, this post from Saturday:

What links do the Reform Party have to the Russian Government? Has Farage or Tice met Putin? Do they talk? Is there a Handler? Funding? Where does the anti British, pro Putin rhetoric come from? #nationalsecurity #subversion #infiltration #westminster #Russia #ukraine

This was followed up with a post against online anonymity using a video clip (Tapp’s team have added a ‘grindset’ music track for some reason) from a recent interview. ‘If you wouldn’t say it in the street, then why would you say it online?’, says Tapp, which sounds more like a deputy of the Supreme Soviet asking why samizdat authors don’t air their views on the metro than a down-to-earth politician telling it ‘as it is’.

Tapp’s background is pretty opaque. Tapp has no visible online presence other than his politics, with the oldest tweets from his account on X going back to October 2021. Perhaps favoured Starmerite candidates were encouraged, or even required, to wipe all social media? (Reform UK should take notes.) On Wikipedia, we are informed that he was ‘born 1984 or 1985’ and is ‘age 39-40’. There is no indication of where he was born or grew up other than his southern accent, and the only information provided about his parents is that his father was a policeman ‘who’d done a bit of intelligence work in the past’. After finishing school, Tapp also decided to do ‘a bit of intelligence work’, joining the Intelligence Corps and serving in Iraq and Afghanistan before leaving the Army to work at the National Crime Agency (NCA) for two years. He then had a five-year spell in counter-terrorism at the Ministry of Defence, coinciding with Britain and Europe’s peak of Islamic terror attacks in 2016-18. It was only in 2020 that he quit to pursue a career in politics.

The first mention of Tapp in the news is a KentOnline article covering his e-petition to force Kent County Council to preemptively give a £15 supermarket voucher to the parents of children who receive free school meals, rather than only giving it to those who get in contact. Around a year later, he is featured again due to his criticism of the government’s handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal. Tapp was merely a Labour Party member at the time of the first article, and a failed council candidate at the time of the second. Is it normal for local newspapers to provide this level of coverage to someone who was essentially a nobody?

The first major event in Tapp’s political career was the contest for the Tunbridge Wells North seat in the local elections of May 2021. In line with the national trend, he did not win. Next up was being accepted onto the Labour Party’s ‘future candidates programme’ in October 2021, which itself was a factionalist exercise carried out by Morgan McSweeney for the Starmerites. The goal was for Starmer and his allies to gain more control over the future composition of the Parliamentary Labour Party, with no candidates from the Labour Left receiving a place on the programme. This was followed by Tapp securing employment in the office of John (now Lord) Spellar, who was probably as close as a Labour MP could get to being a ‘neocon’ in foreign policy terms.

Tapp is married to an Estonian woman and is the chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Estonia (another Intelligence Corps alumni, Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, is a vice-chair), which may go some way in explaining his preoccupation with conspiracies about Russia. Tapp’s rapid rise through the British political system will also undoubtedly raise questions about the ‘spook-to-politics’ pipeline (with Sue Gray being the most well-known example). He is not even the only ex-Intelligence Corps MP in Labour’s 2024 intake: there is also North East Derbyshire’s Louise Jones, whose Wikipedia page (like Tapp’s) also tells us almost nothing about when or where she was born.

Will Labour’s attempt to stop Reform work? I think this is very unlikely. This sort of Labour initiative operates under the assumption that people have vague ‘concerns’ about being ‘left behind’ that come about because of the pernicious influence of the right-wing media. But in reality, Reform voters are pretty clear about what they want: massively reduced immigration; a tougher criminal justice system; lower levels of tax and regulation; and less Woke. They are not going to switch their vote to the party of Dawn Butler and Bell Ribeiro-Addy, even if they don’t find Tapp particularly objectionable on a personal level.

And what about Tapp himself? On the face of it, Tapp should be a serious candidate for a senior position, if not the leadership, in the post-Starmer Labour Party: fairly young, photogenic, able to string a coherent sentence together, willing to fight for Labour in the most hostile of environments, and with a ‘Forces’ background to boot. The problem is that structural factors in Britain’s demographics don’t favour his chances under first-past-the-post. Starmer has been unable to stop the splintering of the left-wing coalition along religious lines, and Tapp’s record of working with the occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with being part of Labour Friends of Israel, will not improve this situation.

— Apple Tokamak Contributor, Pimlico Journal