The secret Afghan resettlement scandal has exposed many things about the condition of the British state. One of the more neglected implications is the lack of suitability for national politics of Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf.
The erstwhile Chairman of Reform, now running a copycat DOGE looking at waste in local councils, appeared from nowhere and seemingly managed to buy his way into Reform with a reported (bargain) sum of £200,000.
To start with, Yusuf looked like a slick operator; young, charismatic, a good media performer, and able to boast of being a successful tech entrepreneur.
Then came the election of Reform’s newest MP, Sarah Pochin, in the Runcorn by-election, who used her new station to bravely raise the issue of the burka in Britain. It was an unfashionable opinion, perhaps, but one that many Brits feel strongly about as a distinctly un-British symbol. My old boss Nadhim Zahawi has a great uncle, Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi, who was a famous poet and who called for the veil to be banned in Baghdad a hundred years ago. Yet in 2025 it is increasingly prevalent in Britain’s streets. Ms Pochin was courageous for trying to start a debate about it. The then-Chairman disagreed — calling it, and perhaps Reforms’ newest elected MP, “dumb” on Twitter.
This precipitated his abrupt and dramatic decision to quit, saying that working to get the party elected was no longer “a good use of my time”. 48 hours later, he returned in a new role, but the patina of professionalism has not come back with him.
The uglier side has become more dominant. Think of Rupert Lowe accusing Yusuf of spreading a disgraceful rumour that Lowe is suffering from dementia. Think of Nigel Farage’s kind and capable veteran press chief Gawain Towler allegedly being fired by a flunky despite Yusuf sitting close to him.
Yusuf seems determined … to damage the goodwill that many on the right have towards the Party
The BBC then reported lurid details of his private sector experience. This included “his unpredictable behaviour which meant people ‘lived in fear’, a complaint from a female ex-employee alleging inappropriate conduct, and a failure to take others into account, epitomised by unhygienic office conditions caused by Yusuf allowing his dog to defecate on the carpet.” Wholly accurate? Maybe not. Increasingly plausible? Yes.
I am not a Reform insider, though I have friends in the Party, and many people whom I respect. Yusuf seems determined, though, to damage the goodwill that many on the right have towards the Party.
Things have come to a head after the disclosure of the superinjunction that prevented MPs or journalists from discussing the existence of a covert scheme to resettle Afghans who may — or may not — have been involved in the war effort to come to Britain.
Rather than lean on years, or even decades, of experience to wait until enough details of a scandal emerge, as Reform’s leader Nigel Farage wisely did, Yusuf decided to single out and attack both Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman for their alleged part in this scandal.
The logic, presumably, is that Jenrick is a threat to Reform (Farage has admitted that Jenrick is to his right on immigration), and that Suella joining Reform could further sideline Yusuf. The latter attack caused Braverman’s husband to publicly quit Reform, rightly refusing to accept his wife being called a “traitor” by Mr Yusuf.
The allegations made by Yusuf were aimed to score cheap political points, though they do not appear to be on Yusuf’s side. Both Tories issued statements highlighting that they were either fired or quit the Government before the scheme began. They further pointed out how they were bound by the Official Secrets Act — something confirmed by both the Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsey Hoyle, and the Defence Secretary John Healey.
There are differing interpretations on the precise legality of this view, but Lord Wolfson KC, the former Justice Minister, has pointed out that there is “a well-established rule of the House that an MP should respect court orders and not use privilege to flout them.”
Successive Speakers have repeated this; the idea that an MP would ignore this rule, having left government and not been privy to confidential security or operational information liable to put lives (including British lives) at stake is to grossly misunderstand the responsibility of lawmakers.
If this is untrue, why did Nigel Farage not use that privilege to say what he claims to have known about Southport, when hinting at it at the time? Because he understood that with privilege comes responsibility.
To be clear, I think the whole scandal is a travesty; the length of the superinjunction and the amount of money involved, among other things, seriously damages the legitimacy of the state. But using this issue as a short-term political attack against opponents (not even the ministers pushing for the scheme!) damages Reform’s attempts to look like a Government in waiting.
This is not the prim handwringing of a dying old order. I hope I’ve been as outspoken as anyone on the need for, say, mass deportations of illegal immigrants, the need to radically reform our bureaucracy, and the failures of the State on almost every front for decades.
But an unelected representative of an upstart party calling elected MPs “traitors to their country” and misrepresenting the facts — which is what Yusuf is doing — is bad for Reform and bad for the country.
The current competition between the Tories and Reform is moving the Overton window dramatically to the right in a way that may yet help save Britain. Farage, along with Richard Tice, Rupert Lowe before his defenestration and others have played an important part in that, as have Badenoch, Jenrick, Braverman, and others.
What is not going to help produce an intellectual climate that has a plan to reform the British state and restore us to our former glory — and then convince enough of the electorate to buy into it — is a loose cannon more interested in hiring videographers to raise his profile than doing proper (often boring and laborious) policy work.
I’m told that many in Reform are furious with the way Yusuf has been behaving. Sure, politics should be a contact sport; Roman insults from Cicero’s wonderful Philippics attacks on Mark Antony to Ovid’s son-in-law being called a struthocamelus depilatus (hairless ostrich) prove that. But spreading outright falsehoods and damaging the critical work of developing a right-wing platform for government that will save Britain from socialism and managerialism is unforgivable. Reform, and the right more broadly, deserve better.
