Confused Zia Yusuf's video nasty

“I am delighted to be Reform’s Shadow Home Secretary,” cheered Zia Yusuf on X this week – a claim so egregious that even Elon Musk’s useless context notes stirred into action, pointing out the yo-yoing former party chair is actually no such thing.

“The Shadow Home Secretary is an MP member of the Official Opposition (currently Conservative),” it pointed out, unhelpfully to the party Musk until recently championed. “Other parties appoint an MP as Shadow Spokesperson. Zia Yusuf is not an MP so cannot be a Shadow Spokesperson.”

And indeed, several people replied with a screenshot of a post by Lee Anderson, GB News presenter and part-time Ashefield MP, mocking a tormentor just last month with: “Thicko alert. We cannot possibly have a shadow cabinet, we have spokespersons.”

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Still, that wasn’t even the worst thing about Yusuf’s post, which included a glossy video attacking successive governments’ records on illegal migration.

“More people have turned up on our beaches uninvited in the last seven years than stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day,” he fumes in the video, a favourite claim of his which, when one thinks about it, means nothing whatsoever.

“The Tories promised to cut immigration down to the tens of thousands in four consecutive manifestos and then allowed in 12 million people in their 14 years,” he says, to the backdrop of a rogues’ gallery of David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. Hang on – hasn’t he forgotten somebody there? Or is he exempting Liz Truss – a minister for a full 10 years of that time – as rumours increasingly circulate that she is about to bring her experience and intellectual ballast to Yusuf’s party, Nigel Farage having backtracked on being unprepared to admit her?

But best of all, Yusuf’s attack on Labour doing nothing to stop illegal migration is illustrated by… footage of illegal migrants being removed, which Reform appears to have lifted unattributed from the Home Office’s much-derided securebordersuk TikTok account. So Yusuf’s message is: the government is doing nothing, but, er, here’s footage showing that they are.