Inside the 24 hours in which Reform imploded

Reform leader Nigel Farage said he knew something was wrong on Wednesday morning, when he spoke to Zia Yusuf, his party chair. “I felt, ‘He’s really had enough of all of this,’” Farage told GB News. “He did seem very, very disengaged.”

The Clacton MP was obviously trying to present Yusuf’s resignation – he had “10 minutes” warning of it – as the result of the pressure of a tough job and a social media campaign of “vile trolls”, rather than the strain of working with one N Farage.

But he had to admit that Yusuf didn’t like the question about banning the burqa that Sarah Pochin, the party’s newest MP, asked at Prime Minister’s Questions at noon on Wednesday – a question that was obviously Farage’s idea: “So he disagreed. He thought Sarah shouldn’t have asked a question about the burqa.”

Farage said: “There is a debate about whether it’s worthwhile spending much time talking about this or not.” Farage said it was “right to have a debate about this”, while “Zia didn’t like it, obviously, but no, before she said that, he pretty much [had] had enough. And can I just tell you that it’s 100 hours a week, it’s seven days a week. It is totally unrelenting.

“X in particular is full of vile trolls, particularly the alt-right types, who have been just outright horrific towards Zia right from the very start. And I think he’s just said to himself: ‘You know what, there are other things I can do with my life.’”

That doesn’t explain why Farage failed to consult Yusuf, a self-described “British Muslim patriot”, about the burqa question. Despite saying that he and Yusuf had been “pretty much inseparable” for the 11 months that Yusuf was in post, Farage does not seem to have had the kind of relationship that a party leader needs to have with his chief organiser.

Which is why Yusuf’s departure is so damaging to Reform. The party’s great weakness is that it is seen as an amateurish one-man band, kept aloft only by the personality of Farage himself, who is incapable of building a team that might constitute an effective opposition, let alone a government.

Yusuf was brought in – hand-picked by Farage – to change that perception, to run a professional party, to win control of local councils and mayoralties in last month’s elections, and, having won, to show that the party could be effective in running them and rooting out waste. Despite some noses put out of joint, Yusuf had made progress in that direction.

All that disappeared in a statement from Yusuf at 5.25pm yesterday: “I no longer believe working to get a Reform government elected is a good use of my time, and hereby resign the office.”

Farage is now back to the one-man band with a reputation of falling out with everyone he has ever worked with.

That is a greater setback to him than the party’s third place in the Scottish parliament by-election in Hamilton on Thursday. Reform did well to win 26 per cent of the vote, outperforming its standing in Scotland-wide opinion polls of 18-19 per cent – but not spectacularly, and not enough to win. Thus it underperformed expectations, while Labour played a canny game of failing to mention that its vote was holding up while the Scottish National Party’s support had declined over the four years since the last Scottish parliament election.

Reform has proved that it is poised to replace the Conservatives as Labour’s rival as the main opposition to the SNP, and it has eaten into Labour’s support in Scotland as in the rest of the UK since Keir Starmer has been prime minister. Farage has shown that Reform will be a force in Scottish politics at next year’s Scottish parliament elections, confounding those who said his “English” nationalism would never find a market in Scotland.

But the departure of Yusuf has halted the forward march of Reform. The big test for Farage is whether this is a pause before a further advance, or whether the fissiparous relationships around him will force the party into a disorderly retreat.