Busy Zia Yusuf fails to pay tribute to the police

It was another busy weekend for Zia Yusuf, the man who self-defines as Reform’s ‘shadow home secretary’ despite (a) being the joint fourth-largest party in the House of Commons and (b) never actually having run to be an MP.

The man never knowingly unplugged from his X account was at it all weekend, starting on Friday night by hitting out on how “for too long Westminster has run on who you know and what school you went to” but “Reform is doing it differently” (Nigel Farage went to Dulwich College, Richard Tice the private Uppingham School, Yusuf himself the boys-own private Hampton School in south-west London).

Suggested Reading

Will Boney M sing for Reform UK?

Rats in a Sack

He then spent much of the rest of the weekend variously attacking the police after the death of Henry Nowak and the Conservatives for the levels of immigration under their rule, musing over the murder of a 13-year-old girl in Vienna by an Afghan man and vowing to prosecute employees of Serco for “placing foreign sexual predators into British communities” once Reform is in power.

He also found time to vow to “impose the harshest penalties in the world” on fast-food delivery company bosses who employ illegal migrants, hit out at David Lammy for giving Andy Burnham a wrong phone number, promise to “deport all foreign national offenders, including to countries like El Salvador” and to give priority for social housing to British-born workers and veterans.

Suggested Reading

Zia Yusuf’s not-very-coded attack on the Right Honourable Robert Jenrick

Rats in a Sack

What he didn’t find time to do is write a single word about the two police officers killed in a wrong-way crash near Middlesbrough. PC Tom Clough, 38, and PC Matthew Blades, 37, died when a Volkswagen Passat, travelling the wrong way along the road, collided with their marked police car.

Both home secretary Shabana Mahmood and actual shadow home secretary Chris Philp managed to find the time to pay tribute to their service and express sympathy to their families. Yusuf, alas, was too busy.