ON THURSDAY afternoon, while voting in the Scottish Parliamentary by-election for Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse was in progress, Zia Yusuf announced on X that he would be standing down as Reform UK party chairman. He no longer thought working for the party was a good use of his time.
Forty-eight hours later he had changed his mind. He was back as Reform chairman and full of chutzpah, apparently to the delight of Nigel Farage.
According to an interview given to the Times’s Harry Yorke on Saturday, Yusuf said he had made an ‘error’ that he blamed on ‘exhaustion’ after working flat-out for 11 months. He said that he was also emotionally drained from a torrent of racist abuse on social media, and a sense of ingratitude from some in his party.
The fact is that his resignation followed what the Times reported as ‘an almighty bust up’ over Sarah Pochin’s call in Parliament to ban the burqa, the first intervention of Reform’s newest MP at Prime Minister’s Questions last Wednesday. Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice and chief whip Lee Anderson both backed her. Farage also said there needed to be a debate on the issue. Pochin’s question had been run past him beforehand. But not, it seems, past Yusuf, a practising Muslim. ‘I do think it’s dumb for a party to ask the PM if they would do something the party itself wouldn’t do,’ he said on X in a post he has since deleted.
He told the Times’s Yorke that he’s had a change of heart and ‘supports the principle of a ban – even if it doesn’t fit with his general worldview and the belief that it would not fly under the American constitution’. Yusuf surely didn’t appreciate not being kept in the loop on this.
Be that as it may, the main headlines missed another possible reason for his resignation, a story of a man not being able to take criticism. Yusuf’s resignation came days after he arrived in Kent to lead and launch the party’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency (Doge)’ scheme – a UK version of the scheme set up by Elon Musk to look at American federal spending. It has been tasked with identifying waste within the ten Reform-controlled councils across the country. No easy task.
Following May’s spectacular election results, the party has had to show it can deliver. Announcements on DEI and Climate Change were followed by the party’s next big PR move, the Doge-style scheme to be piloted in Kent. A letter to Kent County Council, co-signed by Yusuf, Farage and the council’s newly elected Reform leader Linden Kemkaran, announced their arrival last Monday, June 2. Council leaders were warned they risk ‘gross misconduct’ if they blocked the initiative. The team, which included Arron Banks, was said to be led by tech entrepreneur Nathaniel Fried (who subsequently announced he was ‘leaving’ with Yusuf).
In just two days Yusuf trumpeted Kent Doge’s first major ‘gotcha’ relating to ‘a contract for recruitment services for £350million over 4 years’. Unfortunately he got it a bit wrong. Quickly corrected by the AI unit Grok and people who knew what they were talking about, it turned out it was no such thing, explained in detail here. The bottom line was that: ‘This isn’t Kent splashing £87.5million a year on job ads for local admin staff. It’s a national framework agreement, hosted by Kent but open to every public body in the UK – councils, NHS trusts, schools, civil service arms-lengths, the works.’
It might well be a framework that Mr Fried needs to examine, but it was not an invoice. Did the public criticism of Yusuf’s heroic claim prove too much for him? Did it contribute to his exhaustion?
In Yusuf’s farewell tweet he boasted of his achievements, notably the increase in membership. This stood at 237,100 last Monday morning but was down to 235,107 on Thursday evening. Yesterday morning it was down a little more to 234,851. Did Yusuf know that his key metric was on the way down as historic resignations were being cleared out and low renewal rates started to kick in? (I do not know the details on this, I’m merely hypothesising). My reading is that the Goldman Sachs man in him didn’t like his pride metric going down and his aggressive style meant that he was increasingly unpopular within the party.
This unpopularity is rooted in a lack of trust that has less to do with his ‘race’ or religion and more to do with his handling of candidate vetting (people who later were either not selected or deselected for office without any explanation) and lack of local party support which I have criticised before. That, along with Reform’s treatment of Rupert Lowe, led several of us who know the difference between professionalisation and ruthless authoritarianism to leave the party.
To many of us looking for an alternative to the established parties this latest Zia Yusuf drama merely confirms that, in some respects, Reform UK are no different to the others. Supporters once again have been lined up to say the right thing and everyone is expected to suck it up again. Fundamental differences in policy are still fudged, while not-so-slick PR still covers for an absence of real professionalism and application. Sadly, Yusuf reminds me of an arrogant and ruthless ex-Goldman Sachs executive I worked with; someone I did not enjoy working with. It remains unclear as to whether Reform has a political and administrative mechanism that gives members a voice whilst providing central unifying themes. Meanwhile the public still wants elected representatives they can trust. Will we ever get them?
