Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party is often touted by its critics as a one-man band. Events of recent weeks point to another emerging personality in the party who is viewed by many in British politics as possessing box-office quality.
Former Goldman Sachs banker Zia Yusuf (38), the Scotland-born Muslim son of Sri Lankan immigrants, seems an unlikely candidate for prominence in an insurgent English nationalist party. Yet Farage calls him a “star” and he is seen in Westminster as the Reform leader’s right-hand man.
Strictly speaking, Yusuf isn’t even a politician, or at least not yet. He has never run for election. Rather, Yusuf is a Reform party official who until almost two weeks ago was the party’s chairman before quitting, only to return two days later in another role.
While Farage fills the role of Reform’s frontman, driving its connection with voters and helping to set Britain’s political agenda by dominating the airwaves, Yusuf is recognised as the backroom genius who, in less than a year, has built the party infrastructure to turn Reform into the Labour government’s biggest political rival.
When he first took control of the party’s operations last year, Reform had only about 35,000 members. It now claims to have 235,000, almost twice as many as the Tories are believed to have. Yusuf also built 435 local party branches from scratch.
Yusuf has been credited with building Farage’s increasingly-smooth Reform machine, but he has also clashed with others in the party, some of whom he has ousted.
Gawain Towler, a long-time Farage loyalist who is popular in Westminster press circles, jokes he was “Goldman-sacked” by Yusuf two months after its July 2024 election breakthrough. There is said to have been a high turnover of other staff at the party’s headquarters. The workaholic Yusuf is known for his irascible office persona.
So who is this former Barack Obama-supporting globalist who is now seen as indispensable by Farage as he attempts the once unthinkable feat of becoming Britain’s prime minister? And what does Yusuf want?
These days he has a standard upper-class English accent, but Yusuf was born in Bellshill, about 10 miles outside of Glasgow. His father was an NHS paediatrician who moved to Britain soon after qualifying as a doctor while his mother is an NHS nurse.
The young Yusuf won a part-scholarship to the Hampton school, a £26,000-per-year private institution in London whose alumni includes the Queen guitarist Brian May. He went from there to the prestigious London School of Economics, before going to work in the City of London as a banker with Merrill Lynch and, later, Goldman Sachs.
In his mid-20s he quit the gilded world of investment banking to set up a luxury restaurant app, Velocity Black, with a childhood friend. They later expanded it into a high-end digital concierge service for wealthy clients in Britain and the US. In 2023 they sold the business to Capital One for a reported £233 million, of which Yusuf is said to have personally pocketed about £31 million.
A few years earlier when aged 26 or 27, Yusuf first met Farage at a cocktail party hosted by a wealthy Conservative Party donor. It had already been quite the political journey for Yusuf, who was once a left-leaning Obama fan at college. He was a disaffected Tory and supporter of leaving the European Union by the time he bumped into Mr Brexit.
Farage says he was struck by the ambition and ability of Yusuf, who in turn says he quickly became a huge fan of the man he now describes as his political “lodestar”.
Last summer, when Farage announced he was returning to lead his party into the July general election, the now-wealthy Yusuf reconnected with him to make a £200,000 donation. They met in a pub garden near Farage’s home. The Reform leader says he spied potential in Yusuf beyond his ample resources.
A week after Reform’s election breakthrough, in which it got five MPs elected, Farage made Yusuf the party chairman and put him in control of building the Reform machine.
It hasn’t been all smooth. Exhausted by relentless 18-hour days, he said, Yusuf threw a mini-tantrum on social media two weeks ago after Sarah Pochin, one of its newest MPs, called in parliament for a ban on the burka worn by some Muslim women. Then he quit the party after he received a barrage of abuse online.
Yet within 48 hours, he backed down and was immediately welcomed back by Farage. No longer the membership-facing chairman, he is in now charge of critical backroom functions such as the party’s Maga-inspired Doge (department of government efficiency) unit, which Reform is sending into councils to find wasteful spending.
Yusuf doesn’t want to stay behind the scenes forever. He has indicated that he wants to run as an MP in the next election. British media remain fascinated with this conservative Muslim who has jumped into political bed with a party full of critics of Islam.
