Richard Tice, the chairman of the Brexit Party, is understood to have advised Rupert Lowe to wait until the last minute to pull his election candidacy for Dudley North, Express.co.uk can reveal. At 8am on Thursday morning, Mr Lowe, who is already a sitting Brexit Party MEP, said he called Mr Tice to inform him of the decision to stand down. The Brexit Party chairman then asked him to wait until later on Thursday evening to make the announcement, to avoid other Brexit Party candidates from pulling their nomination.
Mr Lowe said: “I spoke to Richard Tice at 8am and he asked me not to do anything until later this evening.
“It would have been more damaging if I had stood down in the morning which would have given a lot of people the chance in pulling their nomination, which I didn’t want toa do.
“Both Richard and I feared that could happen.”
As a result, Mr Lowe pulled out of the general election just minutes before the deadline for nominations passed, at 4pm on Thursday.
He was the only Brexit Party candidate to withdraw his candidacy.
Explaining his decision to stand down, Mr Lowe said: “I saw no logic in me standing and splitting the Leave vote and letting somebody who is so politically different to me get into Westminster.”
He said he did not want to play a part in allowing the Labour Party, either alone or as part of a pact with the Lib Dems and SNP, to get into No10 as they “will destroy the country”.
He said: “I would be distraught if I saw a couple of ageing Marxists backed up by Momentum being given an opportunity to kill off this country for probably the next 50 years.”
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Mr Lowe said: “Nigel rang me, he is very angry with me and hopefully he will over time appreciate the reasons I made the decision that I made.”
Mr Farage insisted earlier this week that no more of his candidates would be standing down after he announced the withdrawal of 317 Brexit Party hopefuls from Tory seats.
The Brexit Party MEP insisted he had not been offered a job by the Tories, or a peerage, for standing down from the election.
It comes after Mr Farage claimed that Mr Johnson’s aide Sir Edward Lister had offered Brexit Party candidates jobs if they withdrew from the election.
Mr Farage wrote on Twitter: “Even Boris Johnson’s Chief Strategic Adviser Sir Edward Lister is calling our candidates and offering them jobs if they withdraw. The system is corrupt and broken.”
But Mr Lowe said he had not been offered such a role and did not resign for that reason.
He also said he had not been offered a peerage.
