An hour before our lunch date, I get a text message from Zia Yusuf asking where we’re supposed to meet. I remind him that he picked the venue, just five days earlier — an Italian restaurant in the heart of London’s Mayfair called Frescobaldi. “Its great,” he writes back.
Yusuf has a lot on his mind. He has spent the past year trying to reconfigure Nigel Farage’s rightwing populist project Reform UK, so often mired in controversy, into a professional, socially acceptable party capable of winning the next UK general election. If all goes to plan, by the end of the decade he will be sitting at the cabinet table helping to run Britain.
But in June, the 38-year-old became the centre of acrimony himself when he dramatically quit as chair of Reform after its newest member of parliament suggested that the burka — a full-body covering worn by some Muslim women — should be banned in Britain. Farage seemed genuinely shaken by his departure. But Yusuf returned to the party within 48 hours, blaming exhaustion for his decision, and has taken on a new role as head of Reform’s Elon Musk-inspired cost-cutting division.