Politics, at its core, has been a team game. It is what has often made Nigel Farage’s story so troublesome; a political career mired with spats and fallouts, from Ukip to the Brexit Party to Reform UK.
Reading Team Of Rivals about the political genius of Abraham Lincoln bringing together his cabinet with skill that saw grievances and grudges put aside, and you couldn’t imagine anything much further from Farage.
Yet Reform has continued to surge in the polls under Farage’s production, with him retaining star-billing, little sign of a serious supporting cast in the form of a shadow cabinet and next to no scripted policy.
These things don’t appear to matter so much, as one source tells The Times, Farage seems to have got this far “on vibes alone”. A vote for Reform, wherever you are, is a vote for Nigel. He is the leading man – and for once it seems to be working.
It is why Zia Yusuf’s resignation as chairman of Reform UK yesterday may have shocked, but not surprised those who have previously come across the party leader’s political path. But it is also why the Tories need to not jump to celebration just yet.
Yusuf, the 38-year-old multi-millionaire tech entrepreneur, first met Farage at a cocktail party a decade ago hosted by former Tory donor turned Ukip backer, Stuart Wheeler, and kept in touch ever since.
After donating £200,000 to Reform UK, he took on the official job as party chair and was being talked up as an heir to Nigel following Reform’s professionalisation drive, which Yusuf was widely credited for.
There have been rumblings and tension under the surface, with complaints around the culture at the party’s HQ and clashing egos. After Reform’s success at the local elections, Farage opted for a significant change to the party’s infrastructure, sidelining Yusuf and asking him to focus on their new Doge unit in local authorities – Reform’s version of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. (Look how well it turned out in the States, too.)
But it was this week that things publicly fell apart after Sarah Pochin, Reform’s newest MP, called for a burqa ban in her first intervention at prime minister’s questions this Wednesday.
While banning burqas was not party policy, Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice, and chief whip Lee Anderson, both rowed in behind her. Farage also said there should be a debate on the issue – and the question by Pochin, it turns out, had been run past him beforehand after all.
But the comments appeared to frustrate Yusuf, who is 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 Twitter (X) early yesterday morning.
A few hours later, he quit. “I’ve worked full-time as a volunteer to take the party from 14 per cent to 30 per cent, quadrupled its membership and delivered historic electoral results,” he said.
No matter what Farage tries to make out by suggesting Yusuf’s resignation was because “politics can be a highly pressured and difficult game and Zia has clearly had enough”, for Conservatives there is a section of Yusuf’s statement that provides something nice to read: “I no longer believe working to get a Reform government elected is a good use of my time, and hereby resign the office.”
Fundamentally, it is a stunning admission by Yusuf: the fight to get Farage into No.10 as Prime Minister is not one he thinks is worth having anymore, after pumping his own time and money into the cause since the general election last year.
The thing is, Reform UK may technically have two directors in Farage and Yusuf on Companies House, but what is the likelihood that most Reform voters actually know who Zia Yusuf is?
Much like the situation with the party’s former MP Rupert Lowe, there is a salience issue to be remembered.
When the millionaire former chairman of Southampton FC who had been elected as the Reform MP for Great Yarmouth unceremoniously had the whip suspended for going too far from the party line, it has prompted Farage to trade blows with Lowe ever since.
Although it was a spectacularly explosive row that dominated headlines, it barely registered in the polls – only three out of ten said they’d heard more than a little about the Lowe debacle (and that is at the top end as some over claim awareness).
Speculation over the exact reason for Yusuf’s departure may vary, but so does the approach of the Tory party following it.
One shadow cabinet minister thinks it would be “fantastic” if the Conservative Party managed to somehow convince Yusuf across. They told me: “It is possible. It would be quite smart if we could as he seems less mad than the others. He would be more of an asset than Ruper Lowe.”
But another immediately recognises that it is unbelievably unlikely. “You can dream on,” they say, especially given that Yusuf has previously argued that the Tory brand is fundamentally broken after 14 years in power. “Lowe, however, is doable. I’d have him over and joining us any second. We have been able to manage drifters from the party line before and we could do it again with him.”
If either Yusuf or Lowe wanted to seek refuge in the Conservative Party, a defection appears welcome – but the real Tory hope is that the more Reform continues to tear itself apart, the more it shows itself up as a serious, credible option for government.
If you do genuinely believe, as Farage himself has said, that we need to “fix broken Britain” – how can you also believe that Reform, who has struggled to keep a steady number of MPs and just lost a major donor in its party chairman, holds the answer to such problems?
How can you be a big state party when the party itself can’t retain its staff size? Do you really want to see them in charge of nationalising the steel industry and 50 per cent of utilities?
Reform remains a Potemkin party for Farage’s political ambitions. It feeds off well-deserved and acknowledged anger but offers little; holding within it very few tangible solutions or real principles.
The Conservatives have the potential to provide an ambitious, optimistic, hopeful vision for this country and the people in it. Come up with some answers to the real problems felt by those heading over to Reform and actually try to do something about it.
Not just point to a problem, but find a way it directly affects people’s lives and – most importantly – find a way to fix it to prove you can do something about it. You can build back that trust with voters by putting politics into action.
It may be tough to do in opposition but it is not impossible, it just requires some creativity from Kemi Badenoch and LOTO that other members of her shadow cabinet have been showing.
Badenoch’s response to Reform’s internal implosion was that “Reform is not a political party. It is a fan club”. But she needs to be wary of throwing stones in glass houses as there are regular complaints from those within her own party that the Tory leader’s rewarding of loyalty has gone too far, with friends in undeserved top jobs and failing to perform.
She needs to be careful, too, castigating on the point of party management. It is not so long since there were five Tory prime ministers in just six years. Disunity and Tory psychodrama is something the public lost patience with.
If Reform is seen as a continuation of that, it will hurt them, but as Luke Tryl from More in Common points out, it is more likely to be vibes than specific cut through and infighting has, so far, ranked quite low in the list of reasons why people wouldn’t vote Reform.
For Farage to have any hope of forming an actual government though, you would expect at some point he will need to learn how to work with those around him successfully – and create his own Team of Rivals from defectors across the political spectrum from Tories to Greens, Lib Dems to Labour.
If you’re a Tory MP, you might be able to enjoy Reform ripping at each other, but you can’t rest easy; not when you are continuing around the 16-18 mark point in the polls. Take a look at the Scottish by-election up in Hamilton last night – Labour might have been able to take it from the SNP with Reform coming third, but they were up 26.2 pts while the Tories were in fourth and down 11.5 pts, coming in at just 6 per cent of the vote (only one per cent away from losing their deposit).
Reform will not be handing out many opportunities for attack, and even so, with Farage’s leadership there is a world in which none of this seems to stick this time around.
The real problem is that a number of Tory shadow cabinet ministers have told me that they think Labour seems to be learning how to do government while facing up to Reform’s flank. They fear whether a Badenoch version of the Tories is ever going to take to opposition, especially while Farage is breathing down her neck. Shadow chancellor Mel Stride somewhat patronisingly said at his big economic speech yesterday: “She will get better.” Is that really going to be good enough?
