Zia Yusuf remembers the night when, as a student at the London School of Economics, he watched Barack Obama win the US presidential election. “It was a really important moment, I think, for history,” he says. “I had a lot of high hopes at the time.”
Yusuf’s contemporaries at the LSE will be shocked to see him – the leftwing Muslim student of international relations whose parents emigrated to Britain from Sri Lanka – become chair of Reform UK, the rightwing populist party led by Nigel Farage.
In different circumstances, Yusuf, now 37, might have become a rising Tory star. Born in Bellshill, a town in North Lanarkshire, to a paediatrician and a nurse, he attended the exclusive Hampton school in south-west London on a 50% scholarship.
After LSE, he worked for Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs until he quit to start the luxury concierge service Velocity Black with his schoolfriend Alex Macdonald.
The idea was to allow the ultra-rich to make restaurant bookings and pay the bill using their phones – and offer luxe experiences such as swimming with orcas in Norway and designing a shoe with Christian Louboutin’s head of design in Paris. They sold the company last year for a reported $300m (£235m).
For most of his adult life, Yusuf has voted Conservative and is a former Tory party member – he is unsure whether he ever cancelled his direct debit. But his political idol is not Margaret Thatcher, David Cameron or Boris Johnson. It is Farage.
He makes no secret of his admiration and desire to make him prime minister. They first met a decade ago at a cocktail party hosted by Stuart Wheeler, the former Ukip treasurer who was expelled from the Tories, and have kept in touch ever since. Asked about Farage appearing to stoke conspiracy theories about the Southport stabbing attack this week by questioning “whether the truth is being withheld from us”, Yusuf says he was asking perfectly valid questions.
Farage’s decision to stand for parliament in Clacton-on-Sea this year was a catalyst for Yusuf. He exploded on to the political scene in June by donating a six-figure sum to Reform UK and embarking on a round of interviews. As they watched him being questioned on GB News, Reform party strategists turned to each other to ask who had given him media training. No one had.
After a high-profile speech at a Reform rally in Birmingham on 30 June, Yusuf is already being talked up as a future party leader. “He should scare the Tories,” one senior figure on a Conservative leadership campaign said. “At the moment it’s hard to see where that party goes without Nigel. You add a young dynamic businessman who has time on his hands, a fuck-ton of money and the ability to communicate with the public, and you have a problem.”
Reform attracts support from people with far-right views and has been at the centre of a series of scandals. A Channel 4 investigation recorded party members making racist and homophobic comments while campaigning for Farage in Clacton. Several election candidates were dropped over links to the British National party or comments they had made about ethnic minorities.
But the party defended others, including one who wrote in a now-deleted post that Jews were “agitating” to import “third-world Muslims” and the government was deliberately “injecting” Britain with African men.
When Yusuf was unveiled as Reform’s new chair, many self-declared supporters decried the decision on social media. “I voted Reform to get Britain back for the British, not for it to be led by a Muslim. I will be resigning my membership tomorrow,” one user said on X. “I personally don’t buy the ‘good Muslim’ line. If he believes in the Qur’an, and is still chairman at the next election, I won’t be voting Reform again,” said another.
There are dozens of such posts, but Yusuf insists the response to his appointment has been “overwhelmingly positive”. “I’d love to go for a cup of tea with them and explain why what Reform stands for, what Nigel stands for, what I stand for, are British values. The reality is there are many, many Muslims in this country who contribute a great deal.”
Does his party have a problem with racists? “All of the parties have had candidates that have said unacceptable things.” Will he categorically say that racists are not welcome in Reform? “Yes, I will gladly say that, and so will Nigel.” He says his job is to build the party’s infrastructure from scratch, including a branch network and a vetted roster of candidates who are “upstanding members of society, ideally people who have had real jobs”.
Though Yusuf had a career before politics, he would struggle to claim he is in touch with the concerns of everyday voters. After attending an elite school and university, he worked in high-level finance, which by his own admission involved entertaining clients at some of the most expensive restaurants in the world, then running a company whose purpose is to give the outlandishly wealthy anything they want at the touch of a button.
How can he claim to understand ordinary people? The question throws him. “I spend a lot of time actually talking to them. You know, I spent a lot of time walking my dog over the years. I have a husky. A dog is a great way to engage lots of people from all over the community.
“You know, also, my parents came to the UK about 40 years ago. They really didn’t have anything to their name other than my father had newly qualified as a doctor … My mother still works as a nurse in an intensive care ward, I’m very proud of that. My father has only ever done NHS work out of principle, again something I’m very, very proud of.”
Asked about his ambitions, Yusuf says he is focused on building a party structure that can make Farage prime minister in 2029. Could he run for parliament? “I’m absolutely open to it. This is a sincere comment. I will serve in whatever capacity Nigel asks of me.”
• This article was amended on 5 August 2024. An earlier version said that Bellshill was near Aberdeen when it is in North Lanarkshire.
