Kuenssberg Calls Out Reform Over Zia Yusuf’s Dramatic Return

Laura Kuenssberg slammed Reform UK this morning over Zia Yusuf’s dramatic resignation as the party chairman after it was reversed within 48 hours.

Yusuf abruptly quit on Thursday after arguing that it was “dumb” of a new Reform UK to ask the government if it intended to ban the burqa.

Then on Saturday, he announced he was returning to the party fold, leading the UK’s DOGE team – a reference to the Department of Government Efficiency which was headed up by Elon Musk in the US.

Despite initially claiming he no longer believed working to get Reform into government was a “good use of my time,” Yusuf later backtracked and said his resignation was “born out of exhaustion”.

He added: “I will continue to give all my time to the most important project of my life, getting a Reform government elected with Nigel as prime minister.”

On the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, the presenter suggested to Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice that this whole incident looked rather “chaotic”.

She said: “It doesn’t look very professional, does it, for your chair to be in – then out – then back in again?”

“The reality is Zia Yusuf has done a brilliant job,” Tice replied.

He said the chairman role had been “too much for one person” so the party is re-organising and Yusuf will be focusing on leading the Doge department.

Kuenssberg replied: “It doesn’t look like to the public that you really know what you’re doing if you have on one day the guy who was the chair of the party who says it’s ‘not worth his time’ campaigning for a Reform government, and two days later, he’s back in.

“Doesn’t it look chaotic?”

“No, we know exactly what we’re doing, we’re leading in the national polls,” Tice said.

Pollsters at YouGov recently put Reform in first place according to respondents’ voting intentions, with an eight-point lead over Labour.

Tice also said Yusuf was exhausted because he had been working 24/7 for the last 11 months.

“One of the reasons Zia Yusuf left Reform was because of the racist abuse he had been receiving,” Kuenssberg noted. “But this week Reform has been accused of trying to stir up some tensions itself.”

In the run-up to the crunch Scottish by-election in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse, Reform leader Nigel Farage claimed the Muslim Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar had said he would prioritise the Pakistani community.

But Sarwar has not actually used those words.

So Kuenssberg asked Tice: “Was Nigel Farage’s claim false?”

“No, look, what we were talking about was that the Labour leader in Scotland was essentially sort of developing sectarian politics and we called that out,” Tice insisted.

He pointed out that Reform secured 26% of the vote in the Scottish by-election this week – although that did mean they came in third behind Labour, who claimed the seat, and the SNP.

“The ridiculous claims made by the other main politicians in Scotland about us, frankly the voters have just ignored,” Tice said. “We came within a whisk of creating a shock, an absolute seismic shock.”

Kuenssberg hit back: “But Mr Tice, do you not think it is important to say things which are true in politics?

“Mr Farage claimed that Anas Sarwar had used words that he simply did not. He made a false claim on a sensitive issue, was he wrong to that?”

Tice said it was a “sensitive issue”, but that Sarwar had claimed Pakistani communities should “dominate and dictate the Scottish educational agenda”.

“I think in the overall context it was not a false claim, it was what Mr Sarwar was doing and that was bringing sectarian politics into Scottish politics and that is wrong, it is not how we do things,” Reform’s deputy leader said.