The Daily T: Has Reform just imploded?
Just ten minutes after we published today's Daily T podcast about Reform and Nigel Farage's hopes of pulling off a stunning victory in Scotland's Hamilton by-election, a bombshell dropped.
Party chairman Zia Yusuf, the businessman who Farage said had professionalised the party since his arrival last year — and attributed many of their recent successes to — had resigned.
The news came after a row during Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday when Reform's newest MP, Sarah Pochin, asked Keir Starmer whether it was time to ban the burka.
Yusuf publicly criticised the intervention as 'dumb' and 'nothing to do with me'. He then announced his shock departure while the polls were still open in Hamilton.
Gordon Rayner and Tony Diver react to the news in a bonus extra Daily T, with Tony having just spoken to a Conservative MP delighted that Reform had 'imploded, at last'.
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We shall not continue as a free country if we continue to submit to radical Islamists
It shows in what strange times we live that it is the chairman of Reform, of all parties, who resigns over the question of banning the burka. Surely his party is the likeliest to favour a ban or – at least – to be able to contain internal disagreements on the subject. Probably Reform's chairman, Zia Yusuf, had other reasons to go. He is not the first person to find it challenging to work closely with Nigel Farage. In a spooky way, Reform tends to act as a mini-Maga, mirroring Trumpery in its highs and lows. Over there, Donald Trump and Elon Musk explode with a cosmic bang; over here, Farage and Yusuf then go off with a smaller pop. For this reason, I suspect that when Maga falters, as it eventually will, so will Reform. Nevertheless, Mr Yusuf is a Muslim. Partly for that reason, he was a recruitment coup for the supposedly 'Islamophobic' Reform. On Thursday, he said his party's newest MP, Sarah Pochin, had been 'dumb', at Prime Minister's Questions, to call for a burka ban; then he resigned. Let me take two other recent examples of where attitudes to Islam raise knotty problems. On Monday, Hamit Coskun, an atheist Turk, was found guilty of a 'religiously aggravated public order offence' and fined. He had burnt a copy of the Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London. In an article in this week's Spectator, Mr Coskun says he was protesting about President Erdogan of Turkey changing his country from a firmly secular state to 'a base for radical Islamists while trying to create a sharia regime'. The magistrate, however, decided otherwise. Mr Coskun had been 'motivated at least in part by hatred of followers of the [Muslim] religion', he said, and so he was a criminal. My other example comes from events outside Parliament on Wednesday. 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At worst, this takes the form of terrorism. The words 'Allahu Akbar!' ('God is great!') have become the war-cry of an imminent explosion or attack. Even without actual violence, Islamism often involves naked anti-Semitism and unreasoning hatred of Israel. Militant Islam also tries to assert its power against the sort of freedoms which the rest of us (including, do not forget, many Muslims) cherish. Examples include forcing women and girls to cover their heads and even their faces, prohibitions on school swimming or singing, protests against being served by women in the public services and the banning of certain books and films. A leading Islamist demand is for a blasphemy law, although its supporters use other words to describe it. Most Muslims are highly sensitive to any perceived insult to their prophet, Mohammed, or to the Koran. Because they regard the Koran as 'the unmediated word of God', some take the view that disrespect to the physical object, the book of his word, is a direct attack on him, and therefore must be avenged. Belief in the sacredness of religious scriptures should be respected by non-believers, but it must not be defended by law, no matter how much transgressions may offend Muslims. It is unpleasant and foolish to burn the Koran in public, just as it was – which often happened in Britain until quite recently – to burn effigies of the Pope. But the only conceivable justification for banning would be in special incidents – burning a Koran in front of worshippers entering a mosque, for example – which would amount to an incitement to violence. The offence here should not be because the act was 'religiously aggravated'. A modern country should not adjudicate between the sincerity, truth or competing ardour of different religious claims. All it can judge is that some things in some places breach civil peace. In all the cases cited above, you can see politicians and public authorities tiptoeing round the subject. Surefootedness is certainly better than clodhopping where religion is concerned. But there is a growing, justified fear that we shall not continue as a free country if we defer to the angriest Muslim voices. Two concepts need to be faced down. The first is the idea of 'Islamophobia', to which this Government wants to give legal shape. The word 'phobia' suggests psychological abnormality, yet surely people are entitled to be frightened of any religion, especially of Christianity and Islam, which aims for conversion and claims universal truth. Such fears may be misplaced, but they are not criminal. 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'Russia has hardened as an adversary in ways that we probably hadn't fully anticipated,' Hill said, arguing that Putin saw the Ukraine war as a starting point to Moscow becoming 'a dominant military power in all of Europe'. As part of that long-term effort, Russia was already 'menacing the UK in various different ways,' she said, citing 'the poisonings, assassinations, sabotage operations, all kinds of cyber-attacks and influence operations. The sensors that we see that they're putting down around critical pipelines, efforts to butcher undersea cables.' The conclusion, Hill said, was that 'Russia is at war with us'. The foreign policy expert, a longtime Russia watcher, said she had first made a similar warning in 2015, in a revised version of a book she wrote about the Russian president with Clifford Gaddy, reflecting on the invasion and annexation of Crimea. 'We said Putin had declared war on the west,' she said. 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She said simply that the Trump White House 'is not an administration, it is a court' in which a transactional president is driven by his 'own desires and interests, and who listens often to the last person he talks to'. She added that unlike his close circle, Trump had 'a special affinity for the UK' based partly on his own family ties (his mother came from the Hebridean island of Lewis, emigrating to New York aged 18) and an admiration for the royal family, particularly the late queen. 'He talked endlessly about that,' she said. On the other hand, Hill is no fan of the populist right administration in the White House and worries it could come to Britain if 'the same culture wars' are allowed to develop with the encouragement of Republicans from the US. She noted that Reform UK had won a string of council elections last month, including in her native Durham, and that the party's leader, Nigel Farage, wanted to emulate some of the aggressive efforts to restructure government led by Elon Musk's 'department of government efficiency' (Doge) before his falling-out with Trump. 'When Nigel Farage says he wants to do a Doge against the local county council, he should come over here [to the US] and see what kind of impact that has,' she said. 'This is going to be the largest layoffs in US history happening all at once, much bigger than hits to steelworks and coalmines.' Hill's argument is that in a time of profound uncertainty, Britain needs greater internal cohesion if it is to protect itself. 'We can't rely exclusively on anyone any more,' she said, arguing that Britain needed to have 'a different mindset' based as much on traditional defence as on social resilience. Some of that, Hill said, was about a greater recognition of the level of external threat and initiatives for greater integration, by teaching first aid in schools or encouraging more teenagers to join school cadet forces, a recommendation of the defence review. 'What you need to do is get people engaged in all kinds of different ways in support of their communities,' she said. Hill said she saw that deindustrialisation and a rise of inequality in Russia and the US had contributed to the rise in national populism in both countries. Politicians in Britain, or elsewhere, 'have to be much more creative and engage people where they are at' as part of a 'national effort', she said. If this seems far away from a conventional view of defence, that's because it is, though Hill also argues that traditional conceptions of war are changing as technology evolves and with it what makes a potent force. 'People keep saying the British army has the smallest number of troops since the Napoleonic era. Why is the Napoleonic era relevant? Or that we have fewer ships than the time of Charles II. The metrics are all off here,' she said. 'The Ukrainians are fighting with drones. Even though they have no navy, they sank a third of the Russian Black Sea fleet.' Her aim, therefore, is not just to be critical but to propose solutions. Hill recalled that a close family friend, on hearing that she had taken on the defence review, had told her: ''Don't tell us how shite we are, tell us what we can do, how we can fix things.' People understand that we have a problem and that the world has changed.'
