Reform UK’s Andrea Jenkyns says Nigel Farage’s row with Rupert Lowe was ‘clearly a big falling out’ – but insists it will ‘blow over’

Published

8 months ago

March 15, 2025

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Reform UK’s most senior woman has told Sky News the Rupert Lowe row “doesn’t look great” and she doesn’t “want to see it in the news any more days”.

Dame Andrea Jenkyns, who defected to Reform last year, accepted it was “clearly a big falling out” but suggested these spats do not always cut through to the public.

She insisted she was concentrating on winning as she looks to become the party’s first ever mayor in May.

In an interview with Sky News, Dame Andrea also spoke for the first time about her experience of domestic abuse, denying Reform has a “woman problem” but accepted “we need to start talking more about issues, what women are interested in”.

Having lost her seat as a Conservative in the 2024 election, Dame Andrea briefly quit politics only to return earlier this year as Reform’s newest recruit.

She is now standing as the party’s candidate to become the first Greater Lincolnshire mayor, in a race that psephologists think could be Reform’s best hope of turning itself from a party of protest into one that is governing.

That’s because Reform is on the march in Lincolnshire, which is a key battleground between the Conservatives and Reform in the local and mayoral elections in May.

Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, took the Conservative seat of Boston and Skegness in the last election as Reform came second in a further two of the county’s eight constituencies.

This farming country has long been part of the patchwork of Conservative England and it is in these heartlands that Reform hopes it can land a significant blow to its political rivals in the coming weeks.

“It’s a worry,” admits one Labour insider who doesn’t much relish the prospect of having to deal with a newly minted Reform party mayor should Dame Andrea win in May against Labour candidate Jason Stockwood, the Conservative Rob Waltham and independent Marianne Overton.

There is also the Lincolnshire council race, which Reform is targeting. All 70 seats are up for grabs and the Conservatives, which have a 38-seat majority, are defending 53 seats. The only way is up for Reform here, while the Conservatives, who have held this council for 10 of the past 13 elections, are bracing for a drubbing.

Tories say Jenkyns is from Yorkshire

The Conservatives make the point that they have a “strong local candidate who is born and bred in Lincolnshire, whereas Dame Andrea is from Yorkshire” when I ask them about the race.

“We are fighting hard, we have a proven track record of delivery in charge of local services whereas Reform aren’t tried and tested,” the Conservatives said.

“And if they’re anything like Reform nationally, who don’t turn up on important votes, then they won’t show up for people locally.”

Dame Andrea is still based in Yorkshire where she used to be an MP, as this is where her son attends school. But she rents a place in Lincolnshire and has vowed to move to the county should she win the mayoralty.

She also points out that she grew up in Lincolnshire and was a local councillor before moving to Yorkshire after her shock victory over Ed Balls in the 2015 general election.

‘Fed up’ farmers eyeing Reform

When we meet her on the road in Lincolnshire, she takes us to meet some farmers whose livelihoods are under intense pressure – be it over local flooding and flood defences or changes to inheritance tax and farming subsidies that are affecting their farms.

There is little love for Labour in the gathering of farmers, who in the main seem to be lapsed Conservative voters that are now eyeing Reform, as a number of them tell me how they are fed up with how the Environment Agency and local politicians are running their area.

“We’re fed up with all of them,” said one farmer.

“We just want some action. As farmers we know drainage is so important, we just want to get it sorted.”

They are also alarmed and anxious about the inheritance tax changes introduced by Labour and are pressing for carve-outs for small farms handed down from generation to generation amid fears they will have to sell up to pay the inheritance tax bills.

But the troubles at the top of Reform hadn’t gone unnoticed by this group. Unprompted, one of the farmers raised the row between the suspended Reform MP Rupert Lowe and the party leadership, telling Dame Andrea that while he “really likes Reform” he doesn’t much like what he’s seeing at the moment.

‘Spat looks worse because Reform is small’

The farmer said: “I don’t follow politics avidly. But I just look and say [Rupert Lowe] is full of common sense and I really like him and I don’t know what’s happened, but it looks from outside [he has been] chucked under the bus.

“And I’m like, am I getting second thoughts about Reform? I don’t know what’s gone on, but it concerns me about what’s going on with Reform.”

Dame Andrea tries to downplay it and says the “spat” looks worse because it’s a smaller party.

“To me it’s about the movement, the right policies, to carry on. What is the alternative? This will blow over and Reform will keep getting strong,” she said.

Can Jenkyns and Farage co-exist?

Dame Andrea would clearly like the infighting to stop, but it raises questions for me about how she will fit into this very male-dominated party, in which all four MPs are male, with Dame Andrea the only senior woman beyond the former Conservative minister Ann Widdicombe.

She is, like Nigel Farage, a disrupter – Dame Andrea was one of the first Tories to call for Theresa May and Rishi Sunak to stand down, and a conviction politician who fervently backed Boris Johnson and Brexit.

If she does win this mayoral race she will be a big personality in Reform alongside Farage, which leaves me wondering if they can co-exist in a party already at war.

Jenkyns was in an abusive relationship

Reform does struggle with female voters, with fewer women voting for the party against all age cohorts, young to old. Dame Andrea tells me she doesn’t think the party has a “woman problem”, but she does think it needs to talk about more issues that she thinks women are interested in, citing education, special educational needs and mental health.

When I raise the matter of violence against women and how the party has handled revelations that one of its own MPs was jailed in a youth detention centre as a teenager for assaulting his girlfriend, Dame Andrea reveals to me she has been in an abusive relationship.

“I know how it can break you. I know how you sort of start losing your identity. So I’ve been on that side,” she said.

“And I’ve also helped constituents to fight against this, so it matters, we need to do more in society because whether it’s men or women, one is too much in my view.”

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Out on the campaign trail, even in the Labour territory of Lincoln where Hamish Falconer is the local MP, Dame Andrea gets a warm welcome. She tells me she thinks she can win it: “I might be living in blind hope here. But I’ve got that feeling.”

This corner of England has become a test bed for Reform to see if it can turn from a party of protest into one that has a shot at governing in the form of a regional mayor.

If Reform can succeed in that – what might come next? It would be a remarkable comeback for Dame Andrea and a remarkable victory for Reform too.

Politics

Regulators must catch up to the new privacy paradigm

Published

4 hours ago

November 9, 2025

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Regulators must catch up to the new privacy paradigm

Opinion by: Agata Ferreira, assistant professor at the Warsaw University of Technology

A new consensus is forming across the Web3 world. For years, privacy was treated as a compliance problem, liability for developers and at best, a niche concern. Now it is becoming clear that privacy is actually what digital freedom is built on.

The Ethereum Foundation’s announcement of the Privacy Cluster — a cross-team effort focused on private reads and writes, confidential identities and zero-knowledge proofs — is a sign of a philosophical redefinition of what trust, consensus and truth mean in the digital age and a more profound realization that privacy must be built into infrastructure.

Regulators should pay attention. Privacy-preserving designs are no longer just experimental; they are now a standard approach. They are becoming the way forward for decentralized systems. The question is whether law and regulation will adopt this shift or remain stuck in an outdated logic that equates visibility with safety.

From shared observation to shared verification

For a long time, digital governance has been built on a logic of visibility. Systems were trustworthy because they could be observed by regulators, auditors or the public. This “shared observation” model is behind everything from financial reporting to blockchain explorers. Transparency was the means of ensuring integrity.

In cryptographic systems, however, a more powerful paradigm is emerging: shared verification. Instead of every actor seeing everything, zero-knowledge proofs and privacy-preserving designs enable verifying that a rule was followed without revealing the underlying data. Truth becomes something you can prove, not something you must expose.

This shift might seem technical, but it has profound consequences. It means we no longer need to pick between privacy and accountability. Both can coexist, embedded directly into the systems we rely on. Regulators, too, must adapt to this logic rather than battle against it.

Privacy as infrastructure

The industry is realizing the same thing: Privacy is not a niche. It’s infrastructure. Without it, the Web3 openness becomes its weakness, and transparency collapses into surveillance.

Emerging architectures across ecosystems demonstrate that privacy and modularity are finally converging. Ethereum’s Privacy Cluster focuses on confidential computation and selective disclosure at the smart-contract level.

Others are going deeper, integrating privacy into the network consensus itself: sender-unlinkable messaging, validator anonymity, private proof-of-stake and self-healing data persistence. These designs are rebuilding the digital stack from the ground up, aligning privacy, verifiability and decentralization as mutually reinforcing properties.

This is not an incremental improvement. It is a new way of thinking about freedom in the digital network age.

Policy is lagging behind the technology

Current regulatory approaches still reflect the logic of shared observation. Privacy-preserving technologies are scrutinized or restricted, while visibility is mistaken for safety and compliance. Developers of privacy protocols face regulatory pressure, and policymakers continue to think that encryption is an obstacle to observability.

This perspective is outdated and dangerous. In a world where everyone is being watched, and where data is harvested on an unprecedented scale, bought, sold, leaked and exploited, the absence of privacy is the actual systemic risk. It undermines trust, puts people at risk and makes democracies weaker. By contrast, privacy-preserving designs make integrity provable and enable accountability without exposure.

Lawmakers must begin to view privacy as an ally, not an adversary — a tool for enforcing fundamental rights and restoring confidence in digital environments.

Stewardship, not just scrutiny

The next phase of digital regulation must move from scrutiny to support. Legal and policy frameworks should protect privacy-preserving open source systems as critical public goods. Stewardship stance is a duty, not a policy choice.

It means providing legal clarity for developers and distinguishing between acts and architecture. Laws should punish misconduct, not the existence of technologies that enable privacy. The right to maintain private digital communication, association and economic exchange must be treated as a fundamental right, enforced by both law and infrastructure.

Such an approach would demonstrate regulatory maturity, recognizing that resilient democracies and legitimate governance rely on privacy-preserving infrastructure.

The architecture of freedom

The Ethereum Foundation’s privacy initiative and other new privacy-first network designs share the idea that freedom in the digital age is an architectural principle. It cannot depend solely on promises of good governance or oversight; it must be built into protocols that shape our lives.

These new systems, private rollups, state-separated architectures and sovereign zones represent the practical synthesis of privacy and modularity. They enable communities to build independently while remaining verifiably connected, thereby combining autonomy with accountability.

Policymakers should view this as an opportunity to support the direct embedding of fundamental rights into the technical foundation of the internet. Privacy-by-design should be embraced as legality-by-design, a way to enforce fundamental rights through code, not just through constitutions, charters and conventions.

The blockchain industry is redefining what “consensus” and “truth” mean, replacing shared observation with shared verification, visibility with verifiability, and surveillance with sovereignty. As this new dawn for privacy takes shape, regulators face a choice: Limit it under the old frameworks of control, or support it as the foundation of digital freedom and a more resilient digital order.

The tech is getting ready. The laws need to catch up.

Opinion by: Agata Ferreira, assistant professor at the Warsaw University of Technology.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.