Letters To The Editor: You're Wrong, And Here's Why

The first Restorationist domain was purchased on May 5 2025, almost a year ago. We've come through initial teething troubles, built a regular audience, and maintained a consistent publishing output which has landed in some strange and wonderful places. 250+ essays. Readership averages 10,000 unique visitors a week. Not bad for a small home which rejects the clickbait of social media and writes ~18,000 words Mon-Sat.

We're grateful for each one. We make a point out of contacting each subscriber and donor personally to thank them; and it's sincere.

There is talk of a Restorationist black tie annual dinner emerging. As well as moving into video. Not before we have our first anniversary on 4th July 2026, but we welcome all ideas. We won't be compromising the long-form format as we attempt to contribute to what is fast-becoming a post-conservative canonical doctrine.

It also gives us a wonderfully rich postbag to dive into, which is a delightful treat. It's difficult to reply to every person at length, but we read them all. And discuss them. We value any and all feedback from anyone who is kind enough to take the time to reach out and extend their thoughts. Many of them are pure Parliamentary tradition of the Loyal Opposition; you know the form: the English strongly-worded letter. The glorious Anglican sentiment of Dear Sir, I am appalled and will be cancelling my subscription if this rot continues.

Thank you to all of those who take out their English fountain pen to explain why we are... completely wrong. We value you; we're listening; and... keep admonishing us in the Britannic tradition.

Our Strategy Is To Hope The Americans Show Up

SIR – I am a serving officer (for now anyway) and so will be brief, though briefer than I would like.

Your author is correct on the arithmetic and, I think, wrong on the institutional pathology. We do not plan from affordability. We plan from a 1998 assumption, never written down and never formally revised that the Americans will arrive within seventy-two hours of the opening shot and will bring with them the logistics, air cover, and command structure we long ago stopped being able to provide. Every exercise I have attended since 2023 has included, somewhere in the scenario, a quiet stress-test of what happens when they don't. They are discussed in the mess and forgotten by Monday.

The 100-to-29 platform collapse your author describes is real and is also the optimistic reading. But it assumes the 29 are crewed, maintained, and reach the theatre. Two of those three assumptions are currently failing in peacetime. The third has not been tested since 1982 and the fleet which tested it then was four times the size of the one we have now.

I would ask your author, in any follow-up, to address the manning question directly. We cannot crew what we have. The warfighting state he proposes requires roughly 40,000 people who do not currently exist and whom the current recruitment pipeline is not designed to find. That is the harder problem and the one nobody wants to write about because the answer involves conscription or something adjacent to it, and no serving officer will say that word in print.

JR (Captain, retiring)

Keep Going

I read your site because it is the only one which writes as though the country can still be saved. I do not know whether this is true. I know that reading as though it were has done more for my mood than six years of the alternatives. Whatever you are doing, please continue. I shall not write again, as I have nothing to add, but I wanted to say it once.

AW

Don't Patronise Your Audience About Restore

SIR – Restore is not the BNP. So says chief narcissist and disloyal ex-Advance grifter Paul Thorpe (attached).

Reform initially did everything right; an organic grass roots movement. And then Nigel personally reacted to free minds of right sounding members and introduced weird governance on the fly. They humiliated then sacked hundreds of volunteers which in turn created a new grassroots hate Nigel movement. That's when I tuned out. Nigel then implemented his long-held centrist strategy and shot to 31%. He thought he'd found the silver bullet. He made huge blunders and largely got away with it. He welcomed all. But this included those that facilitated the decline of, well, everything. Reform now represents old politics, the past, the UniParty. It will be Reform's downfall. They have already lost 6 points. Reform will double down. They want some of the 41% of the 18-30 group the Greens own. Technically with that group they would win the majority. No coalition either. But these voters evidently don't want Reform. And Reform cannot change.

I’m stressed about Restore. I believe Rupert wants to do the right thing or is the best actor in the UK. Increasingly I feel Rupert has a weak team. Internally it’s a mess. Comms all confused or absent. Manuals and documents all partly written while vetting people and setting up branches with zero training or coaching. I can cope but it was literally here's your email login, badly written guide, access to a marketing database, good luck with your first meeting which can be handled any way you feel able. This feels like early Reform. I know Rupert said we are building a plane in the air, but he didn’t need to. There's no rush. And it'll crash if the pilots don't know how to fly or navigate. Appointing a 18yo with completely different political views who has little life experience and never voted, as a Branch Organiser (they all wrongly call themselves Chairs btw) is utterly insane. Lowe is obsessed with 18-30 voters like Farage. Even thinking they'll follow one of their own perhaps. Or perhaps he is only interested in the National messaging. That won't win. And some of us, me included, need to remind him that while Green voting youth are key targets, don’t ignore or alienate the core. But Rupert is surrounded by an impenetrable barrier. If Rupert doesn't pay attention to the mechanics, the message and who delivers it, Restore is toast too.

1. £700k could never fund an inquiry of any kind even with volunteers - it was always to force government to act so from that perspective initially had good intentions. I don't believe witnesses were under any illusion this was a solution and hope they were treated perfectly.
2. Pro-bono barristers have been helping behind the scenes drafting so I'm not surprised it's delayed
3. This started out of desperation at Farage lying about Reform's inquiry then backtracking (as he often does), and that Lowe was stonewalled by every official. Founded in the desperation of a lone MP and in haste is not a great starting point but originally for a good cause. In my view all he could ever achieve from an evidence gathering process was a political gun, and we've yet to see the bullets.
4. Without it, however crap it has been, whatever CIC category he used, Labour would never have agreed to start the national one without it (and are still desperately trying to water it down after 9 months of trying to sabotage it).

Knowingly patronising / alienating your readers with “Grandpa Rupe “ and making 20,000 funders feel stupid, is a strange business model. Like you, I want everyone accountable but even I can tear this one up:

1. The author didn’t put any of this to Restore - otherwise where is “Restore refused to say”.
2. The tone of broken promises might be fair if the author considered whether the survivors asked for changes? Maybe they refused to give evidence under those terms? We don’t know because no one asked. I would have refused.
3. £0.778m is a lot of money. Is it though? Post office is over £50m+ so far and zero convictions
4. A room with Steganography: Maybe recordings were made. As you know, transcripts outside of court or parliamentary protection could be defamatory. Did your author ask?
5. Moaning about a report that hasn’t been published when it’s in drafting and going through all the arguments of what legally can and cannot be said - did your author ask why the delay?
6. Operation Beaconport - started 6 months after Rupert announced the inquiry. Would it have happened if Lowe hadn’t started the inquiry? Let’s remind ourselves of the thousands of cases dropped by police/CPS - now miraculously revived.
7. National Inquiry - would this have happened without the political embarrassment of Rupert Lowe’s inquiry? I think absolutely not mainly because Labour have spend 9 months trying to sabotage their own inquiry and only yesterday put back race and ethnicity into the TORs. It will now report after 2029. Convenient. It will be a complete waste of money - a commission was the best available solution
8. Claims that 10,000 FOIs are doubtful, offers no proof as is speculative. The irony of that. Of all people, you know how easy it is to write a script to generate FOI requests. There are > 1,000 organisations (43-50 police, 300-350 NHS, 100s Councils including parish, 100s Charities, 50/100 regulators, 100s quangos). Sending 10x requests to each is firmly inside the realms of possibility.
9. The CIC isn’t great on the face of it but assume malice over sequencing without foundation is weak.
10. This inquiry could never fall under the Inquiry Act - even government commissioned rarely use it.
11. Twelve months of preparation and two weeks of hearings. That’s not unusual. That’s exactly how every trial I’ve ever known works. 

I could go on almost line by line. Your usual are slam-dunks.

1. Agree but they haven’t finished spending let alone auditing - so premature
2. Who says they were not? Barrister Daniel Sheinsmith and others provided advice, it was not a judicial process and was on a shoestring.
3. Mixes two issues: Inquiry v Political Party. You are likely to have egg on your face with FOIs, and I can see the data for the second.
4. Subjective. Other dates could be criticised too.
5. Sort of agree - but for what purpose? To feed journalists? I carried out many investigations in the past, and I only published data relevant to the report. And I only did that on the day the report was published.

I love a hit piece, and I’m very unsure of Restore Britain, there are a lot of questions, not least about transparency and using victims for potential party political gain unrelated to the plight of survivors. But let’s say the report is published and answers most of the questions and the one-sided arguments in the R. You then bring it down to the likes of the HNH website: full of rants, allegations, opinions, false comparisons, and refuted argument, not journalism.What I would have done is covered the same material, reframed it from a national standpoint, said it worked to pressure a national inquiry, a new police inquiry, but that’s all it could every do and crowdfunded pseudo-inquiries is not how Britain should be. I would have criticised the Lowe hype as damaging the credibility of Restore Britain and I would have suggested that bodes very badly for Restore Britain. BUT I would have waited for the Report, then I would have put the questions to Restore, and I would not have made the 20,000 people, probably some subscribers, that funded the inquiry, feel stupid.

GW

The Civil Service is Worse Than You Think

SIR – Your writers have the unfortunate habit of producing figures which check out when one looks them up. As a former civil servant in [redacted] this is not how the trade is meant to work. Kindly revert to the established practice of rounded estimates, optimistic baselines, and footnotes nobody reads. Otherwise readers will start expecting it elsewhere, which will be awkward for the rest of us.

I can assure you what you are documenting is the thin end of the wedge. The true situation inside the Blob is much, much worse than it appears on the pages of the Times.

Name supplied

Someone Told Their Story

SIR – As a parish priest I have sat with three women over the last decade who were among the girls brutalised by these animal gangs. None of them expect justice. What your piece gave them, which I showed to one of them on Thursday, is the dignity of being told plainly that the institutions failed them and that someone noticed. That is not nothing. It may be all they get. Thank you for noticing in print.

Revd. A. Blackwood

Grump Isn't Amused

SIR – The entire premise of your latest article is incorrect. You say The British right cannot win elections, so it writes manifestos. Only it does no such thing - and that is central to the entire problem. Not one of these parties has done a deep dive on what they would actually do with power, or investigated how they would do it - which is a big part of the reason they spout such utter bollocks.

Reform has not done any real policy work which is why it contradicts itself every other week. See its latest stance on the triple lock. To date, they've not released a single policy paper and if they did, Farage would regularly undermine it. As such, even the party's most ardent supporters will privately admit that Reform is not a serious prospect for government.

Advance UK, meanwhile, announced a major policy launch event - at which they did not release any policy at all. Two days later they uploaded a twelve page PowerPoint presentation with four disjointed bullet points per page.

Then we have Restore - which is regressing. It started off with a passable but derivative paper on mass deportations, only to follow up with a paper on legalising pepper spray, and a muddled essay on abolishing inheritance tax. It has since reverted to bullet point slop from Rupert Lowe's personal account.

Ukip did adopt the manifesto I tailored for them but mangled much of it, and ended up contradicting it on a regular basis because nobody in charge of messaging actually read it - rendering the whole exercise pointless.

Of all the players, only the SDP and Homeland have made any real effort to apply themselves to policy and use policy to inform messaging. While the SDP is a niche online enterprise it does have a reputation for seriousness where the Slop Right does not. Reputation building is part of the game. Meanwhile, Homeland's efforts aren't bad. Combined with their professional graphics template, they do a better job that most when it comes to communicating their ideas. They have at least made a worthwhile contribution to the debate.

While coherent policy is not enough to make a significant and sustained breakthrough, it is a prerequisite - if only to provide a consistent structure to your campaigning activities - and to stop your own spokesmen from freelancing. That all of these entities eventually disintegrate is largely down to their lack of an intellectual foundation and ideological scaffolding.

Meanwhile, you do a disservice to Donna Edmunds. Her work does a good job of identifying the shortcomings of the right, not least its propensity to shout loudly in its own echo chamber (while influencing nothing of importance). Meanwhile, my own critique is that these parties invest all their energies into building a social media sales platform without having a product to sell. Policy is an afterthought while they focus on generating social media noise. What all of the larger enterprises (Restore, Reform & Advance) have in common is that there is nothing there that can withstand the departure of their leaders.

It's interesting that you say "New Labour did not begin as an electoral project which later developed ideas. It began as an idea — modernisation, constitutional reform, a service-oriented state — and then built the electoral machine to deliver it. The ideas came first. But the machine was not optional". That's actually the point I've been hammering since 2023. Blair's first major battle was that of Clause 4, to impose his own ideology and intellectual architecture on the Labour party - as scaffolding for future policy development. The right doesn't even have this. It has a collection of ancient bullet point tropes inspired by Thatcherism, libertarianism, and nostalgia - none of which have been tested for relevance or coherence. This is why the policy process matters.

Blair, in conjunction with pressure groups like Charter 88, added substance to his reform agenda - which was the intellectual foundation of his constitutional revolution. The right has no equivalent. The populist right is a slop factory, cycling through the same handful of tedious talking points, not least the "bonfire of quangos" shtick, which is replicated in the pages of your own website. If this "manifesto industry" exists, then you are are part of it.

To my mind, Brexit is an example of what happens when you don't apply any serious policy thinking. The right burbled about sovereignty and democracy for the better part of twenty years and eventually leveraged a referendum. For sure, we won, but nobody had a defined idea of what we should do with that sovereignty. We could and should have ditched things like the Waste Framework Directive, the Habitats Directive, the Working Time Directive and the Renewables Directive. Instead, what we got was "Levelling up" and "green jobs". The policy cupboard was bare, and with no gun to its head, the Johnson administration was left to fend for itself - and it accomplished nothing.

That is the entire reason why the insurgent right is still on the march - but in the event of a Reform government, we will see the exact same implosion - precisely because the right has no idea what it would actually do with power.

As such, it might help if we did have a manifesto industry. It should not be left to nonentity bloggers like me.

Regards,

Pete North

Gas Is Even More Complicated

SIR – Writing from Houston, where I have worked in LNG logistics for fifteen years. Your piece is correct and understated. What your readers may not know is that the cargoes you assume will arrive are contracted to three other buyers first, and the spot market in a Hormuz-closure scenario does not behave the way the modelling suggests. Britain is not second in the queue. It is not in the queue.

David Fenwick

Actually, It's Even More Complicated

SIR – Twenty-two years in gas distribution, the last nine on the regulatory side, and your authors have produced the clearest public summary of the problem I have read. I write to sharpen one point and to correct another.

The sharpening: your authors treat the absence of storage as a technical and strategic failure. It is neither. It is a regulatory artefact. Ofgem's price cap methodology, as revised in 2017, does not recognise strategic storage as a cost which can be recovered through the consumer tariff. Storage therefore does not get built, because no private operator can earn a return on an asset which the regulator has defined as uneconomic by construction. The Rough closure in 2017 was not a commercial decision. It was the predictable output of a framework which had been told, repeatedly, from 2013 onwards, that it was producing this outcome, and which declined to revise itself because revision would have required admitting the framework was wrong.

The correction: your authors imply the silo problem is between gas and electricity. The deeper silo, and the one which must be broken first, is between the engineering profession and the economic regulators. The engineers have known since roughly 2011 what your authors now correctly describe. They have said so in evidence to select committees, in submissions to consultations, and in internal documents which occasionally leak. They have been ignored, not because they are wrong, but because the regulatory framework treats engineering judgment as a form of special pleading.

Build for excess, yes. But first, legislate that the regulator must listen to the people who know how the system actually works. Without that, the excess will be designed by the same people who designed the deficit.

G. Pritchard