Nigel Farage was giving a press conference in Church House, the Anglican headquarters, which lets out its rooms in return for mammon. It’s always a surprise that he doesn’t burst into flame as he walks across the threshold.
He was going to introduce us to this month’s party chairman, the last one, Zia Yusuf, having dramatically resigned on Thursday and then even more dramatically unresigned on Saturday. In the old days resignation used to mean something, a solemn ceremony at your garden gate, flanked by your doting family. These days it’s just a few words muttered on X, recanted by the weekend.
To a lesser leader, the departure of your chairman amid a flurry of claims that your party isn’t a friendly place for Muslims would have been a problem, but Farage arrived determined to laugh the whole thing off. He walked in alongside Yusuf, all smiles, and made a series of jokes about the other man’s “bid for freedom”. The chairman had “crawled out under the wire, and was running away in the woods, leaving a trail of not-so-brilliant tweets behind,” he said.
As ever with Farage, there was a slight edge to the jokes. If you talk about how forgiving you’re being, are you really being forgiving? Was Yusuf really being paraded before us as a free man? He was invited onto the stage, where he assured us that Reform were treating him well, and urged us to comply with their demands (specifically, to make Farage prime minister). He’d even brought his own joke: “I did realise the only way I was going to get a couple of days off was to resign.” His comments had been “ill-advised”, brought on by exhaustion. Although “ill-advised” isn’t quite the same thing as “untrue”.
Yusuz won’t be coming back as party chairman. Instead, he’s going to devote himself full-time to Reform’s crack “DOGE” unit, tasked with going into councils up and down the nation and misunderstanding their accounts. Last week he tweeted that Kent was spending £87.5 million a year on job ads. It was pointed out to him that this is simply untrue and though he hasn’t retracted the claim, on Tuesday he restricted himself to pointing out that the council’s own accounts identify £2.8 million lost to fraud. This was an “off-the-charts” level of corruption, Yusuf said, though another way of looking at it is that 99 per cent of Kent’s money wasn’t lost in fraud, which for a large organisation sounds amazing.
False claims and ill-tempered tweets are of course very much the model of Elon Musk’s American DOGE, and if Reform’s version can’t quite manage to kill as many people in third world countries as the US one, it won’t be for lack of ambition. “I actually think it’s going to be one of the most important missions this country will embark on since World War Two,” Yusuf claimed, putting the atom bomb and the NHS in their places once and for all.
The new chairman is David Bull, a former doctor who has spent the last three decades in a slightly disappointing career as a TV presenter. Farage explained that he’d once been on Newsround, making a face to remind us of his views about the bits of British TV that don’t pay him a salary. Yusuf, perhaps hinting at some of the experiences that prompted his brief departure, said that unlike him, Bull was “loved universally across the party”. What is the characteristic that makes it hard for Reform members to love Yusuf? He didn’t say, and we can only guess.
If we needed reminding that Reform is only about one man, it came when, having introduced Bull, Farage made his way to the far end of the room. The new chairman began his speech addressing the backs of everyone’s heads.
Farage does take a lot of questions from the press, although that may be because no one has really worked out how to make him uncomfortable. Asked about the structure of the party that, don’t forget, he set up and completely controls, he played the fool: “Oh gosh, that’s all a bit too clever for me.”
Challenged on comments about policy made by his MP colleagues, all four of whom were in the front row, Farage skated away again and again. Richard Tice and Lee Anderson supported bringing back the death penalty, did he? It was “an issue of conscience”, he replied. Personally, he was against, because of the number of miscarriages of justice he’d seen. Tice and Anderson are also old enough to remember the Birmingham Six, but presumably their view is that they can live with a few innocent Irishmen going to the gallows.
On banning the burka, the row that prompted Yusuf to quit, Farage was elliptical. He seemed open to banning them, but didn’t think it should be in the party’s “shop window”. It’s an interesting strategy: MPs are allowed to freelance around issues to keep the base fired up, but Farage is keeping his distance from the stuff that he knows give voters doubts about him.
Although there is a party position on some things. Asked about the plan to pay for Sizewell, he said was in favour, though other countries build nuclear plants “at a half or maybe even a third of the price!” Reform may want to market test “Cut-price nuclear power” before adopting it as a slogan. “We are,” Farage declared, “as a party, pro-nuclear.” Well, they’re certainly always on the edge of meltdown.
