Is Nadhim Zahawi really such a boost for Reform?

Former Conservative chancellor Nadhim Zahawi has defected to Reform UK – but how big a coup is that really for Nigel Farage’s party? Farage has said Zahawi believes “in what we’re doing” and also has the necessary “conviction”, but history shows the short-lived chancellor’s convictions have a history of changing.

Back in 2015, the Iraqi-born Conservative MP, then a member of the No 10 policy board, likened calls by Farage to scrap race discrimination laws to Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s minister for propaganda, telling LBC: “It’s a remark that Goebbels would be proud of”. He branded the then UKIP leader “deeply racist”.

“I came here from Iraq, but I absolutely feel British and proud of it,” he said at the time. “To be told this man could run the country and discriminate against you in eight weeks’ time is frightening. I am disgusted by that.”

Now Zahawi – who Conservative sources say was sniffing around Kemi Badenoch’s top team in search of a peerage just weeks before defecting – thinks that not only could Farage run the country but should. “Britain needs Nigel Farage as prime minister,” he told a press conference on Monday. Asked about his previous comments about his new pal being a racist, he brushed them off as youthful indiscretions he had made when just 47 years old, saying: “If I thought the man sitting next to me had in any way a problem with people of my colour… I wouldn’t be sitting next to him.”

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What are Reform getting in Zahawi? A former chancellor, albeit for just 63 days, during which he delivered no budget nor any fronted any form of fiscal statement whatsoever – almost unique in those to hold the role. He did, however, display his astonishing political acumen, calling for his boss and then prime minister Boris Johnson to resign two days after being appointed, before changing his mind and backing him. He then supported Liz Truss as Johnson’s successor.

When Truss lasted even less time in No 10 than Zahawi did in No 11, he threw his support behind a Johnson comeback, cheering “He got the big calls right… Britain needs him back” and penning an article for the Daily Telegraph headlined “Get ready for Boris 2.0, the man who will make the Tories and Britain great again”. Alas for Zahawi, by the time it was published, Johnson had already announced he would not stand again.

He later served as Conservative Party chairman under Rishi Sunak, only to be sacked after carelessly forgetting to mention he was being investigated by HMRC over his tax affairs – something he initially dismissed as “smears” by the notoriously left wing British media, only to later have to cough up £5 million. He failed to recoup the amount from sales of his little-read memoir The Boy From Baghdad.

Now he’s giving Reform the benefit of his experience and insight, as well (in his own mind, at least) providing competition to Richard Tice and Zia Yusuf, who are already scrapping behind the scenes as to who is going to be Farage’s chancellor. What a star signing!