Zia Yusuf remembers the night when, as a student at the London School of Economics, he watched Barack Obama win the US presidential election. “It was a really important moment, I think, for history,” he says. “I had a lot of high hopes at the time.
” Yusuf’s contemporaries at the LSE will be shocked to see him – the leftwing Muslim student of international relations whose parents emigrated to Britain from Sri Lanka – become chair of Reform UK , the rightwing populist party led by Nigel Farage . In different circumstances, Yusuf, now 37, might have become a rising Tory star. Born in Bellshill, a town outside Aberdeen, to a paediatrician and a nurse, he attended the exclusive Hampton school in south-west London on a 50% scholarship.
After LSE, he worked for Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs until he quit to start the luxury concierge service Velocity Black with his schoolfriend Alex Macdonald. The idea was to allow the ultra-rich to make restaurant bookings and pay the bill using their phones – and offer luxe experiences such as swimming with orcas in Norway and designing a shoe with Christian Louboutin’s head of design in Paris. They sold the company last year for a reported $300m (£235m).
For most of his adult life, Yusuf has voted Conservative and is a former Tory party member – he is unsure whether he ever cancelled his direct debit. But his political idol is not Margaret Thatcher, David Cameron or Boris Johnson. It is Farage.
He makes no secret of his adm.