Somewhere inside Zia Yusuf, there’s a competent politician trying to get out. The Reform UK home affairs spokesman is well-dressed, relatively charismatic and ambitious. Perhaps in normal times, he would have made a passable junior minister in the Conservative Party.
But these are not normal times. The Conservative Party is in a state of decay and right-wing politicians have every incentive to edge towards the extreme. Yusuf is either too weak to resist that pull or too venal to want to.
He is a true product of the social media age. A man whose every utterance appears to be subliminally guided by what will get him the most likes on X.com, even as each one of these likes makes his ultimate political success less probable.
Yusuf’s latest outburst saw him describe former Conservative defence secretary Ben Wallace a “traitor to Britain”. It was a fairly standard Yusuf outburst. “Incredible that this moron was defence secretary,” he wrote, before castigating him for the “import” of Afghans.
Just for the record, and so this is stated clearly: Wallace served in the Armed Forces for his country. In government, he presided competently and energetically over Britain’s defence response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He deserves better than to have a mewling child accuse him of treason.
