Zia Yusuf: British politics feeds you to the wolves

On the eve of a conference that Reform hoped would put the wind back in their sails, a potentially devastating Channel 4 documentary aired. The broadcast, at a time that will inflict maximum damage, exposed senior party figures allegedly plotting to bypass British political donation laws regarding foreign funding . With an internal investigation now underway, Reform are saying very little on the matter, but the mood at the NEC in Birmingham is, mostly, one of defiance.

For during the past two years, Zia Yusuf has been Reform UK 's attack dog, willing to speak out – and forcefully – on almost any subject. The 39-year-old former entrepreneur, who sold the luxury concierge business he co-founded for a reported $296m (£219m) in 2023, has become the party's most unapologetic provocateur: combative, prolific, entertaining, seemingly incapable of allowing an outrage to pass without joining in.

He has amassed more than 150,000 followers on X and appeared on BBC Question Time five times in the past year, despite not being an MP. An interview with Cathy Newman on Sky News went viral after footage emerged of Henry Nowak 's final moments, and he repeatedly challenged the presenter to say whether "white lives matter as much as black lives".

On August 26, another social media storm broke. "The front runner being foisted on the people of Holborn by Labour to replace the former prime minister Keir Starmer in our Parliament was born in Somalia ," he wrote. "Do you understand what's happening?" Yusuf later told me Keir Starmer's Holborn and St Pancras constituency, where there will soon be a by-election, has been "overwhelmed by mass migration". As for Zack Polanski , the quondam breast hypnotherapist and Green Party leader who intends to run, Yusuf says that "running in this seat is his last chance to save his job" after his approval rating has plummeted, and YouGov has just given the Greens their lowest ever polling.

The Yusuf familiar to – or perhaps caricatured by – detractors is brooding, accusatory and perpetually convinced that Britain is being betrayed by people too stupid or too cowardly to understand what is happening to it. In recent weeks, he has called former defence secretary Sir Ben Wallace a "moron" and asked whether he should be prosecuted for treason. Even Nigel Farage thought that went too far, promising Yusuf a "ticking off".

In person, however, something is different – even since the last time we crossed paths, late last year. This time, he is more empathetic, reflective – mellow, almost.

On the day we meet he's just returned from a personal visit to Hampton, south-west London, where he spent much of his childhood. At the weekend he was in Piddington , the Oxfordshire village whose roughly 350 residents are desperately trying to block Government plans for a large asylum accommodation centre nearby. As Yusuf repeatedly reminds me, it would house around 1,250 illegal migrants, all men.

Some on the Right might be tempted to tell Piddington's residents that they are getting what they voted for. The village backed the Lib Dems, a party that opposed the Rwanda scheme and remains committed to the ECHR. Shouldn't the villagers, then, live with the consequences?

"I don't have much purchase with that," Yusuf says. "Whichever party you support, you don't expect the Government to just dump 1,200 illegal migrant men into your village." It's a striking response from a man who, just four months ago, announced that a Reform government would avoid building migrant detention centres in Reform-held constituencies and council areas, instead prioritising areas that had voted for parties with more liberal immigration policies. Yusuf called it "democratic consent": voters who endorsed a more welcoming approach should experience its consequences.

In Piddington, however, he says his role is now simply to listen. "I told them I would amplify their concerns. It's all I can do. We're not in government. But when I told them I was worried about what was happening in their area, they opened up." He met young mothers who, he says, are taking their five-year-old and six-year-old daughters to self-defence classes. "But what world are we living in? We haven't been invaded, we're not being subjugated by some foreign power. This is what politicians are inflicting, in peacetime, on their own people."

This is how Reform's spokesman for home affairs talks about immigration: not principally as an argument about Office for Budget Responsibility projections or labour-market effects, but as an existential question about the kind of country Britain wants to be. This makes sense, given the growing consensus that migration may no longer do quite as much electoral work for Reform as it once did. If the Government succeeds in getting net migration towards zero by the next general election – albeit by happenstance rather than the effect of its policy changes – there's a chance the party's USP could lose its potency.

Yet Yusuf is unconvinced. "Under Boris Johnson, we had the largest spike in immigration over 170 years of recorded data ," he says, "2.5 million people between 2021 and 2024. It's not just a fiscal catastrophe, it's making our culture unrecognisable."

He puts little faith in Andy Burnham to change that trajectory, even if headline migration does come down. He is similarly unenthused by the wider Burnham project, despite the Manchester Messiah's personal rating of +13 and the just-about-detectable Labour bounce in the polls. "I wouldn't underestimate him. He's clearly a superior politician to Keir Starmer. But this HDMI cable," he says, pointing to one in the middle of our table, "is a superior politician to Keir Starmer."

If anything, Yusuf thinks Burnham may prove more dangerous because his political talents allow him to disguise the same underlying failures. "At least Starmer didn't have all these David Brent moments where it almost appears he's mocking voters." But Burnham's yearning for approval, he predicts, will eventually "disintegrate on contact with reality".

"And he has a Chancellor who brought down the Government of the sixth-biggest economy in the world over a policy he now refuses to commit to." The 3 per cent defence climbdown might not puncture into the public consciousness, he adds, but it is just "another piece of shrapnel in the endless decay of trust in politicians in this country".

'People just want the state to be competent'

The question is whether Reform can benefit from that decay. Its annual conference – which concludes on Sunday – comes after a difficult summer. Some of the momentum that propelled it to the top of the polls has fizzled; internal arguments have spilt into public view; Tim Montgomerie, an influential figure on the Right, has been suspended; Farage has endured weeks of scrutiny over his financial affairs. After reaching the low 30s in some polls last year, Reform has fallen back, with one More in Common poll this week putting it on 22 per cent, behind both Labour and the Conservatives.

Yusuf doesn't pretend otherwise. "We've obviously declined in the polls," he says – though one senior Reform figure insists internal figures still put them five or six points clear of the Tories. "But nothing has changed in terms of the facts on the ground. I came into politics just over two years ago, from the world of business, because I want to make Nigel Farage prime minister. My conviction has only intensified since then."

Perhaps a bigger question is how much Farage wants it. Unlike most politicians who get within touching distance of No 10, the Reform leader says he wants the job not for the title, but for what he believes he could do with it. That absence of obvious personal hunger may be a strength: the premiership as a means to an end, rather than the culmination of some lifelong quest for self-fulfilment. But can Reform afford that apparent ambivalence? For all its efforts to construct a broader cast of credible figures around him, the party remains extraordinarily dependent on its prodigious leader.

"I've worked with Nigel pretty much every day for the past two years," Yusuf says. "He will do whatever it takes to try and ensure this country has a future. He's not a career politician. Good. Most British people have no time for politicians who promise the world to satisfy their personal ambitions then fail to deliver."

If anything, the external risks are even greater. But if Yusuf was worried about Reform's future post the funding scandal revelations, he didn't let it show in the NEC's Main Hall on Friday afternoon, where he announced that Nigel Farage becoming Britain's next prime minister is "within our grasp".

He later tells me, steadfast, if a little lugubrious, that: "We expect this from the establishment. It's something we're used to. But there's a record number of attendees here, many thousands who see Reform as the last resort, and no one can take that away from us."

The conference also saw Nigel Farage sign a "stop the boats forever" treaty with Jordan Bardella , the leader of the French National Rally party, pledging to return illegal migrants to France.

When Yusuf initially announced Operation Fortress – a proposal to use the Royal Navy to intercept small boats in the Channel and return their occupants to France or Belgium – last month, he was widely derided. But today's Memorandum of Understanding is, he thinks, the answer to all those "talking heads who rubbished" his Royal Navy scheme, who "might find themselves eating humble pie". However, it's a lot for the French public – no less aggrieved about the situation in the Channel – to swallow. And the controversy over Reform's financial affairs hasn't gone away.

There was a time when such scandal didn't seem to matter, simply further evidence that Reform was an anti-establishment party. Now, however, its fortunes seem to be in the balance, notably at the ballot box.

In a Dover council by-election last week, Restore split the Right-wing vote, allowing the Greens to triumph . And the prospect of an "anyone but Farage" coalition mobilising in our first-past-the-post electoral system could help keep Reform out of power for good. "It's obviously true that there are people in this country who are motivated to vote against Reform, come what may. I find that sad," Yusuf says. "We are not the threat they think we are. We have to find ways to articulate our arguments in a way people will be most receptive to."

How, then, does Reform regain lost ground? "We have to lay out our vision. Demonstrate we are ready for government, and have serious people capable of delivering the promises we are making. People don't expect the world. They don't want the state to transform their lives. They just want it to be competent and willing to stand up to vested interests."

'Name the epithet, and I've probably been called it'

Yusuf's morning return to Hampton has left him "re-energised". As a child, he believed in a fairly uncomplicated bargain with Britain: do the right thing, study hard, work hard and you could succeed. "Would the 15-year-old Zia feel like that today?" he wonders aloud. "No." Most young people, he says, now feel "the whole game is rigged against them".

He was actually born in Bellshill, North Lanarkshire, to Sri Lankan immigrants who arrived in Britain in the early 1980s and worked for the NHS, his father a doctor and his mother a nurse. The family moved repeatedly before settling in Hampton, where Yusuf attended Hampton School on a 50 per cent scholarship.

"They gave me a great childhood, where I was loved," he says. "They worked two jobs, both of them, so I could attend private school. I still remember my parents arguing about signing a deed for a second mortgage on the house, so that I could go to that school." He went on to study international relations at the LSE, worked at Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs and then co-founded Velocity Black, the concierge service acquired by Capital One in 2023. The money gave him an option available to relatively few political insurgents: emigration. "When I sold my company, I had financial advisers extolling the benefits of moving to Monaco, Singapore, Dubai. It was never on the cards. I owed it to this country to stay."

So Yusuf is the son of immigrants who has become one of the country's most uncompromising critics of mass immigration, a Muslim who has been accused of Islamophobia, a multimillionaire who talks about the country in which he grew up as though something precious is being taken from people who followed the rules. "Politics is hard. I've been fed to the wolves. People come after you, after your family. They've accused me of being a racist and a fascist. Name the epithet, and I've probably been called it."

If Yusuf has a political weakness, it's arguably that he can seem temperamentally incapable of making an argument at nine-tenths volume. The episode with Wallace was not anomalous: Yusuf tends to see disagreement as betrayal and policy failure as something approaching criminality. Last month, he accused Vodafone of "helping to facilitate the invasion of Britain" because it had provided 2,000 SIM cards to Care4Calais. He warned its chief executive that under a Reform government, the company's directors could be held "criminally liable" for such assistance.

And under the policy Yusuf calls the "Deliveroo Law", executives at companies with systemic illegal-working breaches could face five years in prison, whilst the companies themselves could be fined as much as 10 per cent of worldwide turnover. "Corporate CEOs have been making a fortune by hiring illegal workers and undermining British youngsters," Yusuf wrote when announcing it. "Reform will jail them." These firms don't appear too troubled: VodafoneThree will host a fringe event at Reform's party conference and he tells me Deliveroo is sending staff along, too.

If immigration worked so well for the Yusufs, why does he believe it is failing now? Why don't more recent immigrants, or their children and grandchildren, develop the same sense of belonging? "Quantity is a quality of its own," he replies, a phrase famously misattributed to Stalin. Integration, he argues, becomes harder as numbers rise and communities become sufficiently large to sustain lives detached from the national mainstream. He references the Boriswave again and shakes his head. "Jeremy Corbyn couldn't have designed a more damaging immigration system."

There are also, he argues, Islamist organisations actively discouraging integration. "We should proscribe them," he says. "And lock the border, stop people coming from Pakistan, Syria, Afghanistan." Is it easier to make these arguments as a Muslim yourself, I ask. "I don't know," he replies, unexpectedly. Perhaps identity does grant politicians permission to make arguments others would approach more gingerly. "When I said, as a second-generation immigrant, that 'I don't care how ceremonial Sikh daggers are', it did still get me in hot water," he says, flashing a grin.

'This shows what we're capable of'

The Nowak killing returns us to one of his core themes: why the people who governed Britain through the migration surge should not be allowed to govern it again. "The people who broke the country should be nowhere near the levers of power again." There are obvious problems with this assertion, and two of them now sit on Reform's green benches. Suella Braverman was Home Secretary and Robert Jenrick was immigration minister while net migration reached a record 906,000 in the year to June 2023. Both subsequently reinvented themselves as uncompromising critics of the immigration system they once administered; both are now Yusuf's colleagues.

"My working relationship with all the key people in this party is appropriate," he says carefully. "It's not about who defected against who hasn't. It's about truly honouring the people who support Reform." But, does he actually like them? "I get on with people. Look at my career. I've hired teams, supported teams, got the best out of people. That's what I'm focused on."

Yusuf and Jenrick, though, have history. Before Jenrick defected from the Conservatives, the two regularly attacked one another online. As Jenrick joined Reform, the adversaries became colleagues, although the truce hasn't always held. In May, during the Makerfield campaign, Jenrick told Sky News that foreign nationals living in social housing would not be deported simply for occupying a council property. Yusuf promptly declared: "This is not Reform policy." Under Reform's proposals, he insisted, foreign nationals in social housing would indeed be deported.

There was inevitably speculation that Farage's lower profile during August had created rival centres of gravity around Yusuf and Jenrick. Could he ever see himself leading the party? "Not really," he says, with what looks like genuine nonchalance. "I came into politics specifically to make Nigel prime minister. He's a singular talent." What about becoming an MP? That, at least, interests him.

On Question Time in June, Yusuf acknowledged that he had wanted to stand in the Makerfield by-election but had been blocked. Reform confirms this to me. "We wanted a local," a spokesman says. "And we didn't want to waste our best players on a difficult contest." In the event, Reform's Rob Kenyon came second to Burnham with 34.5 per cent of the vote against Labour's 54.8 per cent. Yusuf will try for Parliament one day, to "increase my impact".

Even without a seat, he doesn't appear to do much with his time that isn't working for Reform. He does not discuss his relationship status publicly, yet is not married and has no children. In his spare time, he plays tennis and rides horses – both he says, self-deprecatingly, to an average standard.

At 39, he has enough money never to need to work again. Instead, he spends his days visiting villages threatened with asylum centres, arguing with former cabinet ministers on X.

It is work that broadcasts Reform's message to the outside world, convincing voters that its policies are worth taking seriously. But now, following the sudden departure of its policy chief and a senior aide, there is a more urgent task at hand: convincing the wider public that Farage's political insurgency can be trusted with power.

Towards the end of an exhausting day at Reform conference, Yusuf and I speak again. I expect him to be downcast, seething at what many delegates consider the latest attempt by the establishment to tear the party down. Yet he is as energised as ever. "The Memorandum of Understanding has given us a big boost," he says, quietly vindicated. "It's a big moment, and it shows what we are capable of."

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