Reform UK Zia Yusuf is confident Nigel Farage can become PM and does not want Boris in the party (Image: Main pic: Tim Merry)
Boris Johnson is one of the “most damaging prime ministers” in British history and would not be welcome in the ranks of Reform UK, the insurgent party’s chairman has declared. Zia Yusuf, the millionaire entrepreneur who is now working to make Prime Minister, also predicted that Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch’s days are numbered and said a pact with the would drive people away from his party.
Mr Yusuf claimed he does not live in fear of Mr Johnson staging a political comeback as Conservative leader, claiming this would “reinforce” the view the “Tory brand is so broken”.
Insisting that Mr Johnson “would certainly not be welcome here,” he said: “I think history will judge him as one of the most damaging prime ministers in this country’s history. The word you hear most often from people who support Reform when someone says Boris’s name is ‘betrayal’.”
Mr Johnson won a landslide in the 2019 election, when Mr Farage’s Party did not field candidates in Tory-held seats.
Mr Yusuf said: “Nigel stood down candidates to ensure he won and kept Corbyn out because people wanted secure borders and they wanted immigration to come down. What did he do? He threw open our borders.”
He blasted Mr Johnson as the “most religiously obsessed [of] net zero fanatics,” adding: “If he came back to lead the Tory party, I don’t think it makes any difference to the diagnosis that the Tory brand is so broken – all he would do is reinforce that point. There is no chance that the are going to get back into Government again.”
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Stamping on speculation that Reform and the could form a pact ahead of the next election, he said: “If Reform did a pact with him or with the Tory party an enormous amount of the supporters Reform has would leave the party because they would see it as frankly a betrayal of what we stand for. I would be, frankly, totally understanding of that sentiment so, no, we have no intention of doing any pacts.
“We don’t think we’ll need to. Look, we’ve gone from 14% in the general election eight months ago to 27%… Imagine where we’ll be in four years.”
He does not expect Mrs Badenoch will be Conservative leader when the election comes.
“Any organisation that has had six leaders in eight years doesn’t then have the same leader for four years,” he said. “The Conservative Party has an insoluble physics problem – half of the party are basically Lib Dems and the other half are small-c , many of whom have values which align well with us. So how can you lead such a party?”
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He added: “If you are the leader of the Tory Party you have one thing going through your mind and one thing driving every decision you make – preventing letters going into the 1922 Committee. And that’s an awful, terrible way to run a political country, let alone a country. I think she’s got an extremely difficult job. I don’t envy it.”
Mr Yusuf said Reform has “a lot of work to do” but boasted the party is “already in a position where if a general election were held tomorrow pretty much every pollster shows we’d win meaningfully more seats than the ”.
Mr Johnson and the were invited to comment.