Zia Yusuf, Reform’s increasingly erratic home affairs spokesman, has been lashing out here, there and everywhere since party colleague Tim Montgomerie publicly accused him of not being a “team player”.
Montgomerie, a former Tory commentator who defected to Nigel Farage’s mob, was this week suspended from the party after criticising key figures, including Yusuf and Farage himself, in a podcast interview. He said Farage’s “aggrieved” tone was “his Achilles heel, when he is facing hostile questioning he doesn’t perform well”.
But it was his criticism of Yusuf which seems to have stung, the charmless former chair barely coming off X in the following 24 hours. Montgomerie said Yusuf was “loyal to Nigel as he has to be if he wants to succeed him” but did not act as a “team player”.
He also added that Yusuf “did not talk to me” for three months after he helped Tory MP Robert Jenrick defect to Reform, and accused him of behaving “like a child”.
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Since then Yusuf has been hitting out on X, mainly at the media, who he believes to be terrified of him. Yusuf is – it must be remembered – a man who has never managed to be selected as a parliamentary candidate by his own party and is expected to be plonked in the Lords if Reform wins an election, which would side-step the need for any actual contact with the electorate.
“The entire Tory client press is now out to get me because they’ve seen same the [sic] polling I have,” he wrote.
“I am a lethal electoral threat to their party. They know I am locked onto the target of making @Nigel_Farage Prime Minister. And I will not be deterred.”
But internally there may be more interest in a post he wrote before that, saying: “Have you noticed the people with ‘Right Honourable’ in their titles are among the most dishonourable people in the country?”
To hold the title “Right Honourable” tends to mean the person is a serving or former cabinet minister or other senior politician appointed to the Privy Council (although there are exceptions, such as some ceremonial civic leaders and appeal court judges).
So who might Yusuf be talking about? Current Reform figures who are members of the Privy Council and may call themselves Right Honourable include former Tories Suella Braverman, Nadhim Zahawi, Nadine Dorries, David Jones, Jake Berry and… Robert Jenrick, good friend of Tim Montgomerie and a fellow member of Reform’s “shadow cabinet”, with whom Yusuf is said to have an increasingly dysfunctional relationship.
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