Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe could rake in more from his prodigious tweeting habit this year than he does from working as an MP, earnings figures show.
So far this year, the Great Yarmouth MP has made just under £56,000 from an estimated 60 hours’ work posting on Elon Musk’s platform X.
The total was displayed in his entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, which lists gifts and outside earnings for MPs.
It revealed that Lowe received a single pay packet of £10,265.50 earlier this month for five hours spent tweeting – working out to more than £2,000 an hour.
According to analysis by the Guardian, his X earnings will easily surpass the current MPs’ annual salary of £98,599 if those recent payout trends are kept up.
Lowe has previously said he donates his monthly net MP salary to local charities and other good causes.
That amount, following tax and National Insurance, is estimated to be around £5,645 – considerably less than the amount he has earned on X in recent months.
X’s monetisation system pays out to subscription-paying users based on the number of impressions their posts get.
Lowe is enormously popular on X, boasting around 150,000 more followers than Prime Minister Andy Burnham.
He has the fifth-highest follower account among British MPs on the platform, after only Keir Starmer, Jeremy Corbyn, Rishi Sunak and Nigel Farage.
That popularity has largely been driven by the explicit and passionate support provided to him by the site’s owner – and world’s richest person – Elon Musk.
The MP’s brand of hard-right politics, which rails against immigration and calls for the deportation of millions from the UK, fits in well with Musk’s apocalyptic visions of a Western civilisation on the brink of collapse.
Lowe’s posts regularly get tens of thousands of likes, while one recent example calling for the UK to follow Portugal’s lead in introducing a burqa ban was viewed more than a million times.
The scale of engagement is unprecedented for a man who entered the national spotlight just last year following his ejection from Reform, and whose party has only one MP – himself – and 35 councillors nationwide.
However, his online popularity appears to have had some electoral impact. Restore Britain finished above the Conservatives and Lib Dems in both the Makerfield and Greater Manchester mayoral by-elections.
Writing on X yesterday evening, Lowe said: ‘Trust me, if I wanted to make money, I would NOT be in politics. I donate my entire net MP salary to charity.
‘This is the most expensive job I’ve ever had, comfortably!’
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