Deep trouble at the heart of Nigel Farage's Reform party

On Wednesday evening this week, an explosive cry rang out at the London HQ of Reform UK. ‘How much longer do we have to put up with Zia?’ demanded a senior figure in Nigel Farage’s upstart party.

The question should have been heresy. After all, hadn’t Muhammad Ziauddin Yusuf, Reform’s 38-year-old chairman, only last month masterminded the party’s stunning success in the Runcorn by-election, overturning a 14,696 majority?

Reform captured one of Labour’s safer seats that day, while simultaneously pushing the Tories into fourth place in the county council elections.

But despite these successes, the talk among senior Reformers has long been that the outspoken millennial would shoot himself in the foot one day thanks to his unerring ability to speak before he thinks.

None, however, dreamt that he would implode within 24 hours of that Wednesday night explosion at Millbank Tower – Reform’s nerve centre in what was once the heart of the New Labour machine.

Last night, it was clear that Yusuf’s tweet about calling Reform’s newest and only female MP, Sarah Pochin, ‘dumb’ for having mused about banning the full-face Islamic burka was one mistake too many. Farage was not impressed. ‘There is no room for tall poppies in Reform. There is one leader – and it’s Nigel,’ a Reform supporter tells me.

And though Yusuf’s ill-judged comment may have been the catalyst, I can reveal that his fate was sealed in March by his equally inadvisable decision to make an official complaint to the police alleging threatening behaviour by the party’s then-MP Rupert Lowe.

This explosive allegation was timed to leak on the same day that Reform made a public statement that Lowe’s office was being investigated for bullying, with the inevitable result that Lowe, 68 – a popular figure on the Right – was suspended before quitting the party, triggering huge internal strife and hundreds of grassroots resignations.

Readers may remember that Lowe’s defenestration from Reform was triggered by my interview with him in the Mail in March, at which he questioned whether Farage’s ‘messianic qualities’ would translate into real leadership.

Yusuf went to the police the very day that interview appeared; Lowe is now suing senior Reform figures, including Yusuf, for defamation.

To lose one senior figure may be regarded as a misfortune – to lose two looks like the most abject carelessness.

Some will now inevitably question Farage’s judgment in appointing Yusuf, who made £30million from the sale of his upmarket concierge company, in the first place.

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Farage hired the precocious political ingenue, a former Tory, after Yusuf made a £200,000 donation to Reform and pledged to work full-time without pay.

Yet I’ve long heard talk he was failing to gel with other senior Reformers.

He also alienated many grassroot members and minor party officials.

Last month, I revealed that Farage was bitterly regretting appointing Yusuf because of his high-handed manner and his evident preference for the TV studio over party HQ. So why did Yusuf call Pochin ‘dumb’ hours after her maiden question in the Commons?

Yusuf, who was born in Scotland, was aghast by her remarks on the burka, which he feared risked scuppering his plans to recruit thousands of Muslim members to Reform.

Last night, I’m told Yusuf felt ‘angry and humiliated’.

And mark my words: this will not be the last we hear from him.

The fallout from the brutal treatment of Rupert Lowe continues – and these events speak of deep trouble at the heart of Britain’s fastest-growing political movement.