Without Zia Yusuf, Farage is in trouble

The resignation of Reform’s chairman is a major blow to Farage’s political prospects.

Nigel Farage’s political career has been a strange one. Most ambitious politicians, in their relentless pursuit of power, will calculate their shortest route to Downing Street and will navigate ruthlessly and rigidly along that path.

Farage is different. If he wanted to be prime minister more than anything else, he would’ve joined the Conservative Party – famously the most successful political party in the Western world.

Instead, he has preferred to be an outsider – running short-lived insurgent campaigns and generally being a troublesome wart on the side of Westminster’s two-party system.

In the past year, however, Farage has changed tempo. Since his return to Reform as its leader, he has looked and sounded more like a power-hungry politician. He’s ditched some of his hardcore libertarianism in favour of traditionally left-wing policies, even backing the selective nationalisation of public utilities and industries.

So, for the first time, a party led by Farage has gained meaningful power. He’s had political success before of course – not least in the European Parliament elections before and after the 2016 EU referendum. But those victories largely resulted in a bunch of Farage’s mates being sent to Belgium, causing a bit of trouble, making a few grandstanding speeches, and then retiring to the bars of Brussels.

By contrast, following May’s local elections, Farage and his tribe finally have their hands on the wheel, having taken control of 10 authorities and two regional mayoralties.

And yet, within weeks, it has all begun to unravel – and in a fashion reminiscent of the old Farage.

Today, Reform’s chair and Farage’s chief lieutenant Zia Yusuf has resigned from Reform – saying he no longer believes that working for the party is worth his time.

The papers are all saying that his departure follows a clash with Reform’s newest MP Sarah Pochin over her call for Britain to ban the burqa, but the fault-line inevitably runs deeper. Reports have also circulated of Yusuf being marginalised in Farage’s operation in recent weeks – consigned to a marginal role, despite his previous status as Nigel’s right-hand-man, billed by the Reform leader as a potential successor to his throne.

Yusuf’s exit is deeply revealing – and ultimately damaging – for Reform and Farage’s Downing Street ambitions.

It exposes the eternal flaw at the heart of Farage’s political projects: the belief that his charisma alone is a substitute for party infrastructure, and that loyalty means absolute acquiescence to his supreme leadership.

Yusuf was a rare example of professionalism in a party otherwise cobbled together by ideologues, contrarians, and career discontents. Granted, he holds many of the noxious views shared by his former leader. Yusuf is not an angel – after all, he decided to run Farage’s outfit in the first place – and shouldn’t be allowed to morph into one just because he has finally come to his senses.

But Yusuf brought strategic clarity, financial nous, and operational discipline to a party that desperately needed all three. Under his stewardship, Reform began to look less like a cult and more like an electoral machine. I have taken no pleasure in witnessing the party’s success in recent months, but it’s important to recognise Yusuf’s role, and what his absence now means to Farage’s prospects.

The rapid rise of Reform – now consistently standing ahead of Labour in the polls – has coincided with the return of Farage as party leader. His predecessor Richard Tice – wooden, arrogant, entitled – was simply a placeholder, and even Tice knew it.

But Farage’s third-coming (maybe it’s his fourth or fifth, I have lost count) has been elevated to new heights thanks to Yusuf’s ability to compensate for his former leader’s personal deficiencies.

Now he has left, Farage will once again be unmoored and likely undisciplined. From UKIP to the Brexit Party and now Reform, Farage has consistently surrounded himself with acolytes rather than administrators; with yes-men rather than professionals. And so, he has repeatedly failed to win meaningful power – a trend bucked by the recent local elections.

Ultimately, Yusuf’s presence in the party threatened the thing Farage holds most dear: the monopoly of his personal brand. In that sense, Yusuf didn’t just leave – he was pushed to the periphery by the gravitational force of Farage’s ego.

If this pattern feels familiar, it’s because it is. Farage has a long and well-documented history of burning through allies. Key figures who helped to build Farage’s parties have all found themselves out of favour, discarded, or marginalised once they ceased to serve the singular purpose of amplifying his profile.

This is not the behaviour of a leader building a sustainable political movement. Instead, it’s the hallmark of a man who sees the political party as a personal stage for self-glorification. He views Reform as an extension of his persona, not as a collective endeavour that requires coherence, compromise, or a long-term plan. That might make for great television and viral TikTok clips, but it’s political quicksand.

The Yusuf resignation speaks to a larger truth: Farage remains fundamentally incapable of building a team. That is why none of his past political ventures have endured.

Ironically, the man who constantly decries “the Westminster elite” behaves like a court monarch – intolerant of dissent, surrounded by flatterers, and obsessed with control. He’s an autocrat who pretends to champion democracy as a way of hoarding personal power.

Consequently, Yusuf’s exit will not simply be a footnote in Reform’s history – it will surely be seen as the moment that Farage’s self-destructive instincts caught up with him.

Yes, there’s a chance Farage will find an adept replacement for Yusuf who can carry on his work and propel the party to victory in 2029. Alternatively, voters may be so angry with the status quo that they will vote for Farage – a political wrecking-ball in human form – regardless of the competence (or incompetence) of his operation.

But I struggle to believe that a serious party can operate as a Farage fan club. Eventually, the electorate asks tougher questions: about policy, about delivery, about credibility, that Farage simply cannot answer alone.

By losing Yusuf, Farage has once again shown that he is not interested in differing opinions. He prefers to speak over the dissenters – making him ever louder, angrier, and alone.

Populism without infrastructure is just noise. That has been Farage’s modus operandi for decades. He has been a disruptor, a tabloid showman, an extremist clothed as a man of the people – but never a statesman. Where others build coalitions, he burns bridges. Where others compromise, he doubles down. And where others try to assemble a serious political machine, Farage consistently turns his into a one-man circus.

I’m an investigative journalist and current affairs writer who specialises in exposing dark money and radical right-wing ecosystems.

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About me

I’m an investigative journalist and current affairs writer who has worked with the New York Times, the Guardian, the Mirror, the New European, Novara Media, New Statesman, Led By Donkeys, and others.

I specialise in exposing dark money and radical right-wing ecosystems.

I also write a lot about inequality and elitism, and am the author of two books on those very subjects: Fortress London, and Bullingdon Club Britain.

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