Leave Zia At Home

Sean O’Grady writes:

I’m no psephologist, but I cannot help feeling that every time Zia Yusuf appears in the media he shaves another slice off Reform UK’s increasingly fragile poll ratings.

Rarely, even in these polarised times, even on the hard right, has a personality emerged onto the political stage who is quite so unlikeable, quite so rebarbative, and just so sneery as Reform UK’s self-styled “shadow home secretary” (not yet even an MP). He rarely smiles. He cannot bring himself to be graceful to his opponents. He doesn’t listen. He talks over everybody when he’s on panel shows such as Question Time (where they seem to have given him a season ticket).

Like Nigel Farage, who had appeared to have sort of adopted Yusuf as some sort of heir apparent, he appears to hate being interviewed by the mainstream media, though he’s not as specifically rattled by the sight of a female interlocutor as Farage seems to be.

Perhaps he’s been actually been trained to go on the attack and belittle and impugn the motives of journalists as a way of avoiding the more awkward questions and getting the nasty messages across. Or perhaps he’s just permanently angry. Perhaps even when he’s brushing his teeth or watering his potted plants he’s seething with resentment about the Boriswave or Keir Starmer’s phytosanitary Brexit reset. I imagine must be difficult company in the green room: “Going away this summer, Zia?” “No Yvette, not until the evil people who’ve destroyed this great nation have been made to pay for their crimes.” “Oh, Ed and I were thinking about Tuscany”.

Farage, obviously, chooses his moments to lob inflammatory grenades of “pure cold rage” into a combustible situation. Robert Jenrick, too, though he’s quietly nudging Reform’s economic policies in a distinctly Tory-ish direction to realise his (hopeless) dream of uniting the right under his leadership. And as for Suella Braverman, prone to such crippling vaulting ambition, surely she must sometimes wonder whether she really believes in the stuff she comes out with.

Whatever, as Yusuf would say. But I do take particular exception to him insulting Ben Wallace, former Tory defence secretary, for being a “moron” and a “traitor”. This, it must be added, after someone has been charged with the murder of a former MP, Ann Widdecombe, and after Yusuf himself called for the abusive political rhetoric to be cooled down. Wallace was a captain in the Scots Guards, did tours in Northern Ireland and elsewhere, and was mentioned in dispatches for his distinguished service.

The explosive row within Reform UK has burst into the open after the party’s leader Nigel Farage publicly slapped down one of his key allies for calling a former Tory defence secretary a “traitor”.

Farage himself said his home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf had gone “over the top” in the attack on Ben Wallace, a former soldier who served in Northern Ireland.

What, Zia should ask himself, is the usual punishment for someone who is a traitor? What does Yusuf think should be done with Wallace just because this well-experienced politician thinks Reform UK’s policy of sending foreign prisoners “home” or to El Salvador is utterly bananas?

Being a part of the mainstream media, I like to be fair. I’ve no doubt that, in their own ways, the Reform lot are patriots, even if they are misguided. I’m sure they think that only Reform can fix Britain because scores of people in their other parties are too gutless or too stupid, or both, to implement the oh-so obvious policies that Reform think are such easy, simple remedies. The party is as entitled as anyone to present their bonkers manifesto to the British people, and for it to be covered properly – with due scrutiny. I concede Reform remains popular, at least still in second place in the polls, though their support is broad rather than deep and seems to have recently bounced off quite a low ceiling.

Sadly, Reform also seem to think figures such as Andy Burnham, Keir Starmer, Ed Davey, Zack Polanski and Kemi Badenoch don’t love their country too – which is offensive and a mistake. The good news, for us centrists, is that Reform and its politicians are so toxic that while they have been successful in cultivating a cult, they have also terrified other people so much that they can’t win elections.

From Caerphilly to Manchester, it is now routine to see an anti-Reform coalition of tactical voters uniting behind whatever other party has the best chance of stopping them – Plaid Cymru, the Greens and Labour have been the beneficiaries in recent months, and the unlikely figure of Count Binface is doing so in Clacton right now.

So I wonder what would happen, when the second Clacton by-election comes around, after the standards commissioner finishes his enquiries into the famous £5m gift. What if in that campaign it suddenly becomes quite clear that the best way to kick Farage out of Parliament would be for everyone – Labour, Green, Lib Dem – to vote for the Conservative candidate.

People such as Yusuf scare the hell out of me. Nigel should probably leave Zia at home when he embarks on his next, and quite possibly final, campaign to hang on to his seat and his career.

And Fraser Nelson writes:

Throughout his career as a political entrepreneur, Nigel Farage has tended to steer clear of the type of politics that Reform UK has now ended up with. I can see why he decided to experiment during the great vibe-shift after Trump’s re-election. If old taboos have gone, if social media has replaced the press as a mediator of political conversation, then how far is too far? This used to be Farage’s speciality: recognising and policing the boundary that separated his outfits from the unelectable hard right. But his parties, then, were a one-man band. Reform UK is a far greater operation with more people. And he finds himself tugged towards the extremes by two centrifugal forces: social media and Zia Yusuf.

His policy chief is, in so many ways, a man of huge talent. A man of undoubted achievement and eloquence, a strong broadcast performer in spite of having no previous experience in front of microphones. I disagree with most of his views but I’ll say of him what he’d never say of his opponents: he’s intelligent, accomplished and energetic. The question is whether he is now putting those talents in the service of a destructive agenda which in my view is now starting to toxify Reform UK - crossing the line from muscular to rabid.

A few examples:

‘Traitors’. He presents Reform UK as the only legitimate voice of ‘the people’ and its opponents as enemies of the people, even traitors. A classic authoritarian position. He has made no secret of his dismay over the arrival of former Tories (which, oddly, he was until 2024).

Mass deportation. He has overcome Farage’s objections to mass deportation and committed Reform UK to tracking down and deporting every single undocumented migrant. Two million, he says, if need be. “You’d better believe it.”

“Trump mark two”. Such deportation would need a massive police squad and a British version of ICE - which he actively welcomes. “It’ll be much more like Trump mark two than Trump mark one,” he told The Times.

Domestic enemies. He proposes to build detention camps for migrants in the constituencies of people who did not vote for Reform UK, especially Green seats. This sets up a notion of internal conflict. Until now, politicians of all parties have said they will serve supporters and foes alike. Yusuf sees his deeply-unpopular immigrant detention centres as a kind of punishment to be meted out to Brits who disagree with his politics. He seems to regard a lot of his countrymen as his enemy.

Personal hostility as a signature style. He sees political civility as a deplorable cosiness, boasting that he never spends time in TV green rooms talking to opponents before debating them. The usual dynamic of democratic civility - disagreeing with opponents but respecting their motives - is one he actively and regularly rejects.

Islam. Oddly for a practising Muslim, he can talk about Islam as if it’s a threat to Britishness and proposes to ban disused churches from being used as mosques. This hardly ever happens, but such policy is intended to reinforce an Islam-vs-Christianity narrative.

Sikhism. He proposes making the UK one of the few democracies in the world to ban the kirpan, a ceremonial knife worn by all initiated Sikhs. You can argue that banning the burka for Muslims is more about dress than faith, but banning the kirpan is a direct infringement of religious liberty. The risk is that the Jews start to see a patten, and wonder who might be next. As is is already happening in America and with Restore UK, which is already gunning for kosher food.

So many of the above now seem like signature Reform themes that it’s hard to distinguish between the party and the Yusuf machine. But this is becoming the problem.

It was brought to a head by Yusuf’s reaction to Ben Wallace yesterday. Calling a Tory a ‘traitor’ is hallmark Yusuf, but he chose the wrong target with the former Defence Secretary. Before politics, Wallace was a Captain in the Scots Guards and was mentioned in dispatches while deployed in Northern Ireland. Yusuf made his money selling jaunts to plutocrats - taking them fighting with ninjas in Japan or tracking snow leopards. All through a company he ended up selling for £250 million. His segue from billionaires’ gofer to a denouncer of elites has been a bit rich. But to accuse a veteran and former Defence Secretary of being a traitor is too much even for Reform members.

Tim Montgomerie, one of Reform UK’s higher-profile signings, says he has raised this issue privately and repeatedly with Farage and Yusuf. He has now gone public with his criticism.

“Opponents are opponents... they aren’t enemies... or ‘morons’. One of the biggest question marks over Nigel Farage’s leadership is whether he brings Zia under control.” Yusuf, he says, “is a man of huge talents but too much of his social media output is intemperate and reinforces Reform’s number one problem: our negative tactical voting challenge.”

The tactical voting is the issue: Reform has moved so far to the authoritarian end of the spectrum (it’s not a move to the right) that there are people on the right, left and centre now united in their main political desire: to vote for whoever, locally, will stop Reform. They’d rather see Andy Burnham in No 10 than someone like Yusuf in the Home Office.

Montgomerie’s post says what a lot of Reform supporters think: that Yusuf, for all his eloquence and talents, now looks out of control. And is starting to damage a party that needs to build alliances if it stands any chance of power. Some Tories even joke that Yusuf (a former Tory member) is a sleeper agent. So why doesn’t Farage take action?

Some argue that Yusuf was one of Farage’s original sugar-daddy donors, getting in there before the crypto kings and that he has a hold over Farage that puts him beyond discipline. I think it’s something else: Yusuf is very popular with the party’s membership. His framing - ‘we speak for the people, they’re all traitors’ - fits with how Reform’s most dedicated members see themselves. Lord Ashcroft is the only pollster to have gauged opinion on who members would most like to see succeed Farage, and found Yusuf clearly above Richard Tice and (a far less popular choice) Jenrick. Perhaps Yusuf is preparing for exactly this contest.

But how is Farage supposed to lead the party? Is Reform for or against mass deportation? Farage thinks against. This was one of the points of departure for Rupert Lowe, whose Restore party has now run with the ethnonationalist ideas cooked up on Reform’s fringes. The Daily Telegraph is now going hard after Lowe for his ambiguity over whether the King, being born to a Greek father, is White British - and it’s a significant campaign. This bizarre, toxic theory - that White British people will be in the minority by 2063 - was launched last summer by Matthew Goodwin, a GB News presenter and Reform by-election candidate. He cooked up the 2063 figure by assuming no child or grandchild of a migrant can or would want to classify themselves as White British, and by disregarding the well-documented trend of migrant birth rates converging on the mean. At the time, it was ignored as a weird, fringe figure - but the firepower the Telegraph is now devoting to it makes clear where it draws the line. And Allister Heath is explicit: Reform needs to be on the right side of that line, rather than maintain an ambiguous position on ethnonationalism.

During the Makerfield by-election, Reform responded to the rise of Restore by adopting racial politics, presenting whites as victims of UK government policy. Jenrick even ended up advocating the death penalty. This served only to harden strategic votes against Reform - Tories said the rejected racial grievance politics of the woke left and the ‘woke right’. This is what happens when you go over a line. It’s not about caustic editorials in newspapers: it’s about voters deciding that their number one priority in an election is to stop you.

Would Yusuf’s detention-camp plan to deport up to 2m work? Of course not. But would you want to live in a country where he is Home Secretary, trying to implement Trump mark two? If not, then you vote for whoever is most likely in your constituency to stop Reform. This is already starting to happen, and it is depriving Farage of his most powerful weapon: the idea that he stands a serious chance of taking power at the next election.

Farage has discovered where the pale lies in British politics, and is discovering what happens to parties who move beyond it. Either he reins in Yusuf - or decides, if his policy chief cannot be dialled down, whether to part company with him entirely. Yusuf is prone to resignation: he quit as party chairman in a huff, then quit as head of Reform’s DOGE unit when it became clear it would not deliver the savings promised. It’s conceivable that he quits again.

But if he doesn’t - and keeps up his social media campaign denouncing people like Ben Wallace as ‘traitors’ - then Farage will have to end his strategic ambiguity and do something.

Farage has spent decades testing the limits of British politics, but he has also understood those limits rather better than most. Yusuf represents one possible future for Reform: furious, uncompromising and convinced that moderation is betrayal. All of this can generate high online engagement and loyalty: bread and circuses for the party faithful. But it can also generate something more powerful still: a coalition of voters determined to stop you.

“I'm not going to get dragged down the route of mass deportations or anything like that,” said Farage in Sep24. “If I say I support mass deportations, that's all anybody will talk about for the next 20 years. So it's pointless even going there.” But he was, in the end, dragged down that route - and Yusuf did the dragging. The question now is whether he can make his way back, or whether Reform slowly perishes where it is.

Farage’s great achievement was to make Reform look not merely like his latest protest project but the most likely next UK government. His own crypto-money scandal has dented this momentum. But if he can overcome this and recover his recent achievement, he will have to get back to doing what he used to do best: drawing and policing boundaries. And making clear to Yusuf where those boundaries lie.