Nigel Farage has won the row with Rupert Lowe

The Reform schism, which the party’s many establishment detractors hoped would prevent it securing a breakthrough at the local elections, is nearly played out.

A leak to the BBC of private WhatsApp messages from Nigel Farage about Rupert Lowe, apparently designed to put Farage in a bad light, has in my view done just the opposite.

In the messages, which certainly increase suspicions that Lowe was suspended from Reform in part due to a newspaper interview in which he was critical of his party leader, Farage is nonetheless shown to have had one overriding factor in mind: giving his party’s candidates the best platform for winning council seats on 1 May.

In his exchanges with a sympathiser of Lowe, Farage declares: ‘He is damaging the party just before elections. Disgusting.’ A later, more detailed Farage message adds: ‘We are definitely damaged and within two weeks of nominations. Awful.’

That mention of the nominations window shows Farage focusing on the nitty gritty of getting hundreds of Reformers elected to councils. And that is exactly what any party’s activist base would wish to see from its leader.

Since the feud erupted, Lowe, by contrast, has shown himself prepared to say almost anything in public to damage the party’s collective leadership and Farage in particular. Just yesterday he told the BBC: ‘That interview is why they designed and launched their horrific smear campaign against my name. It is evil behaviour. Nigel Farage must never be prime minister.’

Those crucial local elections are even closer now and yet Lowe appears to many to be engaged in a one-man sabotage operation, his actions seemingly motivated by his sense of grievance about his own rough treatment, perhaps blinding him to any damage being done to the prospects of grassroots council candidates in knife-edge races.

To us old-timers it is all rather reminiscent of a row in the Labour party many moons ago. Back in June 2009, the Blairite cabinet minister Hazel Blears – who was known to be unhappy with Gordon Brown as leader – publicly announced she would be returning to the backbenches imminently. She made her statement while wearing a brooch carrying the slogan ‘rocking the boat’.

The trouble was that she did all this in the week of the European and local elections, in which Labour went on to do very badly. It would almost certainly have done very badly anyway but the party’s activist base was enraged by her display of self-indulgence. A short while later Blears admitted to her local newspaper that she should have handled the announcement better and subsequently she sank gently into obscurity.

Farage has electoral vindication now quite close at hand

We are in a different world now and Lowe has sufficient social media fame to sustain an active online following. But any claim he has to be the darling of the Reform grassroots is unlikely to survive for long.

It would be wrong to say the Lowe furore has done Reform no harm. While it has not shown up in lower poll ratings, perhaps it has stalled higher ones. And yet those poll ratings are already sufficiently strong and the membership drive and creation of local branches overseen by Farage and his lieutenants has been sufficiently dynamic to keep Reform on track for a big breakthrough on 1 May.

Actual, active Reform members will imminently be faced with a choice of getting their shoulders to the campaign wheel and then celebrating electoral success over the despised establishment parties, or sulking on the sidelines on account of Farage’s treatment of an MP who is coming across as increasingly self-orientated.

Farage has electoral vindication now quite close at hand. Lowe, by contrast, does not seem to have many places left to go.