Reform UK is ready to make electoral history

It is less than a fortnight since Zia Yusuf made his first ever political speech.

To coin Michael Caine’s famous Italian Job line, Reform UK’s new star was only supposed to blow the bloody doors off. Instead, he brought the house down.

Standing in front of a 5000-strong audience of Reform supporters at the Birmingham NEC, the multi-millionaire Muslim entrepreneur – hitherto a complete political unknown – gave a stunning performance. Setting out his vision for a mass movement to reshape this country’s future, he sounded as passionate and compelling as a young Tony Blair.

Just weeks after becoming Reform UK’s biggest election campaign donor, Yusuf – who sold the luxury concierge app he created for a reported £233m last year – has been dramatically installed as the party’s Chairman. He replaces Richard Tice, who is now one of the party’s five MPs and will become Deputy Leader. After crunch meetings yesterday, Farage, Yusuf and Tice agreed a series of other personnel changes as part of a radical restructuring programme.

What is it all about? In short, Reform UK is striking while the iron is hot. The party leadership is determined to capitalise on the political momentum created by its breakthrough at last week’s general election and is positioning itself to exploit the vacuum left by the turmoil in the Tory party.

Following the bruising controversies of candidate selection, they are losing no time professionalising their fledgling party. The changes at the top are the start of a radical restructuring ahead of the 2028/2029 general elections, and local and Welsh elections before then. The ultimate goal could not be more ambitious: to oust Labour, and install Farage as prime minister.

Critics will of course mock this as impossible. The party has just five MPs, versus Labour’s 411, and the Conservative rump of 121 seats. Even the Liberal Democrats have 72 seats – more than they had in 2010, when their leader Nick Clegg became Deputy Prime Minister and they governed in coalition. Reform UK can complain all it likes about the injustice of a “first past the post” voting system that delivered just five seats for 4.1 million votes – that’s 822,000 votes per MP – when Ed Davey’s party only needed 43,000 votes per seat; Labour even less, at 23,000.

For Reform UK, the bare statistics are both shocking and depressing: Sir Keir Starmer, having persuaded just 34 per cent of the electorate to vote for him, landed 63 per cent of all seats; while Reform, having won not far off half that number of votes (more than 14 per cent of those cast) can count victory on the fingers of one hand. But an all powerful Labour party with a historic majority has no reason whatsoever to change the system – so Farage and his colleagues will have to play the hand they’ve been dealt.

Behind the scenes at Reform UK, nobody underestimates the scale of the challenge. It is what business schools call a “BHAG”: a Big Hairy Audacious Goal. The thinking is that if anyone can pull it off, it is Yusuf. Still only in his thirties, he built one of the fastest growing companies in the country, selling it for so much money that he can now afford not only to help bankroll what he sees as a “start-up”, but devote his full time to it.

There is no doubting his own track record. A self-confessed workaholic, in 2015, having just been offered a tantalising promotion at Goldman Sachs, he gave it all up to start an online concierge service for the rich, famous and time-pressed. By March 2021, based on four years of revenue growth data, the Financial Times ranked it the 32^nd fastest growing company in Europe.

Here, he sees parallels with Reform UK, which is now the fastest growing political party in the country. Just when voters might have been expected to be fed up of politics and politicians, they are still flocking to Reform, which is signing up some 1000 new members a day. This is quite extraordinary. Party membership now stands at around 65,000. The precise number of paid members of the Conservative party is not public knowledge, but is thought to be around 150,000, and falling rapidly.

Against this backdrop, the ambition of overtaking Tory numbers within the next 12 months does not seem unrealistic. Reform UK strategists are particularly encouraged by a surge in enthusiasm for the party among young people, especially in the 16-22 age bracket. On their own initiative, many of these teens and students are already organising activist groups and preparing to volunteer for the less glamorous but nonetheless vital electoral challenges ahead, such as local council elections.

For Reform UK, there are perils with this frenetic pace. Perhaps the gravest is that, confronted by the cold hard reality of building a mass political movement under relentless hostile media scrutiny, the party’s big new star decides he rather prefers the world of business. As I am sure he knows, in this country, politics rarely if ever makes rich people richer. Then again, there are other rewards: not least a once in a lifetime opportunity to change history.