Zia Yusuf is Reform UK’s spokesperson for home affairs.

Yusuf was previously chairman of the Reform UK party before stepping down in June 2025, and later led Reform’s “department of government efficiency” or Doge initiative.

Yusuf reportedly was the largest donor to Reform in the run-up to the 2024 general election.

Before entering frontline politics, Yusuf was an entrepreneur. He co-founded the luxury concierge service Velocity Black, which was later sold for a significant sum.

Political Career

Yusuf was appointed as Reform UK’s home affairs spokesperson in February 2026. Despite the fact that he is not an MP, the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage styled Yusuf as the party’s “shadow home secretary”.

At the time, Farage stated: “With Labour’s growing instability, and Keir Starmer’s leadership on the verge of collapse, it is vital we prepare seriously for government.

“I am bringing together a strong, disciplined and experienced team ready to rebuild Britain. The British people deserve a real alternative. Today we are demonstrating that Reform UK is ready to provide it.”

Yusuf was appointed as chairman of Reform in the aftermath of the 2024 general election.

In March 2025, the party leadership accused Reform MP Rupert Lowe of bullying staff and making verbal threats against Yusuf. The party announced it had referred the matter to the police. The explosive allegations were made just one day after Lowe had publicly criticised Farage in a Daily Mail interview. Lowe, who had been touted as a future Reform leader by tech tycoon Elon Musk, argued Reform needed a “proper plan”, more policy and official spokespeople.

In a joint statement by Yusuf and Reform’s chief whip, Lee Anderson, they said they were “obligated to disclose that the party received complaints from two female employees about serious bullying” in Lowe’s offices. Lowe immediately denied the allegations, describing them as “entirely untrue”. He claimed the accusations were a fabrication, orchestrated by the party leadership in response to his challenge to Farage’s authority. In May 2025, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) announced that no charges would be brought against Lowe.

In June 2025, Yusuf resigned as party chairman after Reform MP Sarah Pochin, in her first intervention at prime minister’s questions after the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, called for the burka to be banned “in the interests of public safety”. Yusuf, a self-described “British Muslim patriot”, initially took to social media, saying he had “learnt about the question and the party’s position re: it not being policy for the first time on my X feed”. He described Pochin’s line of inquiry as “dumb”.

Yusuf then announced his resignation, saying that working to get the party elected was no longer “a good use of my time”.

In a social media post, Yusuf said that “I no longer believe working to get a Reform government elected is a good use of my time, and hereby resign the office.”

However, mere days later, the former party chairman announced he would return to the political frontline to lead Reform’s “Doge team”. This brief was modelled on the Department of Government Efficiency set up by Donald Trump as US president and led by Elon Musk. David Bull, a former medical doctor and broadcaster, was appointed as Yusuf’s replacement as Reform chair.

At the time, Yusuf said that he was returning to the party, and that his decision to quit was a “mistake” from “exhaustation”. He said: “I left my business interests behind, I’ve volunteered full-time, because I love my country and I believe the best way to save it and turn it into a great one is for Nigel to be prime minister.”

Yusuf told the Financial Times in August 2025 that “What Doge is doing has no precedent in British politics”.

Before his appointment as chairman, Yusuf was the largest donor to Reform UK ahead of the 2024 general election, donating £200,000 to the party.

Despite his major donation to Reform UK in June 2024 and his appointment as party chair in July of that year, Yusuf was a paid-up member of the Conservative Party until August 2024. His Conservative Party membership was revoked by the party after his role and donations to Reform UK were publicly disclosed by the Guardian.

Political Views

Reform UK is a right-wing populist political party in the United Kingdom. Originally founded as the Brexit Party in 2018, Reform has evolved into an insurgent force in British politics, threatening the standing of the established Labour and Conservative parties. The party’s emergence has coincided with a realignment on the British right.

In August 2025, Yusuf announced that a Reform government would pay the Taliban to take migrants back who entered the UK illegally.

Yusuf argued: “I think it is quite reasonable. Again, British people have had enough of their goodwill being taken advantage of.

“The notion that Afghans topped the list in terms of foreign nationals crossing the Channel illegally, the majority of them fighting age males into this country, while this country gives £151 million of aid to Afghanistan. We don’t think that’s fair.”

Yusuf is a vocal opponent of current climate action policies.

Yusuf has called North Sea oil reserves a “gift from God” and argued that not exploiting these reserves is a “catastrophic act of self-harm” for the British economy. He has also described the UK’s target of achieving net zero emissions by 2050 as “religious madness”.

Yusuf has called for a significant reduction in the size of the state – a position he expressed as the leader of Reform’s Doge initiative.

At the time, Yusuf stated, that “we do need to massively cut the size of the bureaucratic state and probably cut the civil service by more than half”.

Following Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 US presidential election, Yusuf stated: “President Trump’s victory represents the rejection of open borders, socialist economics, woke ideology, net zero fanaticism and [diversity, equity, and inclusion] by right thinking people in America.

“The UK is next”.

Before Politics

Muhammad Ziauddin Yusuf was born in October 1986 in Bellshill, North Lanarkshire, Scotland. His parents migrated from Sri Lanka to the UK in the 1980s. Both his father, a doctor, and his mother, a nurse, worked for the National Health Service.

Yusuf was educated at Hampton School, a private fee-charging school for boys in south-west London, where he received a 50% scholarship. It was here he met his future business partner, Alex Macdonald.

Yusuf studied international relations at the London School of Economics (LSE), graduating in 2009.

After university, Yusuf worked at Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs. He later co-founded Velocity Black, a luxury concierge app, with Macdonald, serving as its CEO. The company was sold in 2023 for a reported £233 million, from which Yusuf reportedly earned an estimated £31 million.

Personal Life

Yusuf describes himself as a “British Muslim patriot”.

One of the factors thought to have led to Yusuf’s resignation in June 2025 was the level of racist abuse he was receiving online. Nigel Farage said the abuse came “from the very hard extreme right” and blamed “Indian bots”.

At the time, Farage told Times Radio: “When Zia says anything you cannot believe the absolute tirade of personal racist abuse that he gets… just think he snapped.”

Trivia

Yusuf and Farage first met at a cocktail party hosted by Stuart Wheeler, the former Ukip treasurer.