Has Nigel finally shown he can be a team player?

Yahoo07-06-2025

Court intrigue always makes good copy, and for that reason we journalists should be sure to add to any speculation about Zia Yusuf's dramatic yo-yoing in and out of Reform UK this week an important qualifier: his proffered explanation, that it was a misjudgement due to 'exhaustion', is perfectly plausible.
Politics can be a gruelling business at the best of times, especially when trying to bootstrap a new party into a national force – not to mention a culture shock for people more used to the world of business.
Yet if speculation was rife about Yusuf's spectacular (if short-lived) departure, it was in large part because Nigel Farage has in his long career in politics proven time and again that for all his strengths as a campaigner, he has a critical weakness: an apparently chronic inability to work with others and build institutions that last.
No potential leadership rival lasts long. In 2015, he recommended Suzanne Evans as his replacement as leader of Ukip – only for the party to end up 'rejecting his resignation', leaving his rival's wings well and truly clipped.
A year later, Diane James had the privilege of being Farage's successor for less than three weeks before he was back once again as interim leader (although he did then step back for good).
Most recently, we have seen Reform UK struggle to coordinate even a small number of MPs, most obviously with the expulsion of Rupert Lowe (single-handedly responsible for almost half the recorded parliamentary work of Reform's entire caucus).
But before that, Farage almost wrecked his party's alliance with the Northern Irish TUV by endorsing his old friend, the DUP's Ian Paisley Jr, against TUV leader Jim Allister – despite Allister having the Reform logo all over his leaflets.
Awkwardly, Allister went on to win North Antrim. Things were eventually smoothed over, but the deal had to be renegotiated, and the cost of that may have been huge: had the Commons authorities accepted Allister as counting as a Reform candidate at the election, the party would have had six MPs – the magic number needed to unlock hundreds of thousands of pounds more in public funding each and every year.
The history of the Faragist parties tells the same story. If Yusuf has his work cut out building a national campaigning force from scratch, part of the reason is that Farage allowed decades of effort to fall by the wayside when he abandoned Ukip.
At the 2015 election, Ukip came second in a hundred seats; it had also started to make a breakthrough in local councils, albeit with many of the same teething problems now facing Reform. It even won seven seats in the Welsh Assembly in 2016.
Farage's ability to snap his fingers and call a new party out of the earth, as he did with the Brexit Party, is undoubtedly impressive. But it reset the clock on all that organisational effort. In Europe, Right-wing parties successfully challenging the status quo tend to have a decade of work behind them: Spain's Vox and Germany's AfD were both founded in 2013; Giorgia Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia in 2012.
Patching things up with Yusuf removes one big question mark about the long-term viability of Reform UK. But only one. Back-room organisation is necessary but not sufficient for sustained success, and Farage has yet to prove he can work with other politicians, especially ones of the calibre to succeed him one day.
Until he does, Reform will remain a one-man band – and it's hard to build the party of the future around a man in his sixties who has already, more than once, tried to leave politics behind.