It’s been a while since Barking & Dagenham received a media mention as a Reform UK target for 7 May. But the party is surely hoping to make an impact there, even if it can’t knock down Labour’s big red wall. One of its top targets is Eastbrook & Rush Green ward in the east of the borough, which bumps up against its border with Havering. Nigel Farage’s vehicle might, though, find itself in a race for votes there it hadn’t bargained for.
Until a week or so ago, a man called Lewis Holmes was Reform’s local guiding light, busy on X/Twitter and Instagram accusing the council of all of sorts of wickedness. Last summer, he was Reform’s candidate for a by-election in Thames View ward. He finished third behind Labour, which held the contested seat, and, perhaps surprisingly, the Greens. He did, though, beat the experienced and well-known local Conservative Andrew Boff of the London Assembly.
However, Holmes has now left Reform in a blaze of bad blood and announced his intention to run in Eastbrook & Rush Green as an Independent. He has pledged on a banner to put “Barking & Dagenham Residents First”. He even has a running mate for the two-seat ward, whose name is Ashlea Wane.
What happened? Perhaps Holmes’s fracture with Reform began shortly before that Thames View by-election, when HOPE Not Hate dug up his sharing of X/Twitter posts by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, and other very far-Right nationalists. Holmes had also, in June 2025, replied to ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe’s assertion that “we need a credible alternative to the utter shambles that is Reform UK” with the word “Amen”. Lowe has since set up a party called Restore Britain, which is even further to the Right than Reform.
The exposure of Holmes’s very public display of disloyalty to Reform did not deter Reform London Assembly member Alex Wilson praising his Thames View candidacy a few days later. A week before that, the X/Twitter handle Reform Party UK Exposed highlighted a tweet by Holmes in which he described Barking as “a nasty, disgusting place surrounded by Pakistani rape gangs”.
Holmes’s X/Twitter account abruptly disappeared, but the recording of some of its output for posterity has provided a weapon for opponents. He used to describe himself as the chairman of Barking & Dagenham Reform. But these days that role belongs to Ben Suter, a former Conservative who was the party’s by-election candidate for Barking & Dagenham’s Village ward as recently as November 2024.
Suter is now down to be one of Reform’s challengers for Eastbrook & Rush Green with Holmes set to be among the competition. The other is Ron Emin, who finished fifth there as an Independent four years ago and describes himself as “the voice of the public and the champion for the community in Rush Green”. There will also be a brace of candidates representing Kemi Badenoch’s stubbornly Right-populist Tories in the field. All this suggests some potential for the ward’s right-wing vote to split three different ways, which wouldn’t hurt Labour’s survival hopes.
As for Holmes, he has been hailed by a Facebook page entitled Restore UK – Romford as the “chairman of Restore in Barking & Dagenham”. There’s a photo of him standing next to a street poster of Lowe. On Wednesday, Lowe said Restore won’t be standing local election candidates anywhere except in Great Yarmouth. But after that, he revealed, the plan is to “take it national”. For Lewis Holmes, it appears, when one far-Right door closes, another opens.
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Splitters!