DARREN LEWIS: ‘Reform’s helpful fool Zia Yusuf has been left to sow seeds of hatred’
When 39-year-old Yusuf took his place on Question Time in April, it was his seventh appearance since the General Election – more than anyone else. Why? Someone needs to tell us.
Zia Yusuf, Reform UK Shadow Home Secretary, speaks during the party’s Shadow Cabinet announcement at a conference in London, United Kingdom on February 17, 2026.(Image: Anadolu via Getty Images)
This column is insanely jealous of all the people who have never heard of Zia Yusuf. Reform’s tedious Home Affairs spokesman would bring nothing to the table if he didn’t have lies, drama and misrepresentation. He is the epitome of the useful idiot.
Now, I don’t use that last sentence lightly. Yet the actual definition remains particularly appropriate in his case. A “useful idiot” is a political term for a naive or credulous person who is manipulated into promoting a cause or agenda without fully understanding its consequences.
Consequences are key. The UK right now is a tinderbox, whipped up by a social media platform run by an extreme right-wing billionaire. Racists are now running around, subverting truth and seizing on any crime where the perpetrator is a person of colour and the victim is white.
So amid it all, why does the BBC, our national broadcaster, repeatedly gift prime political airtime to Yusuf, one of the most mendacious exponents of the poison?
Sunday’s Laura Kuenssberg show was the second time in as many weeks a Reform UK representative (they have just eight MPs compared to the Lib Dems’ 72) had been allowed an uninterrupted segment. When 39-year-old Yusuf took his place on Question Time in April, it was his seventh appearance since the General Election – more than anyone else. Why?
Is it because the Beeb wants to deliberately inflame the tensions that erupted into country-wide, random attacks on Black and Brown people during the summer of 2024? Does the BBC have a deal we don’t know about to hand Yusuf a season ticket to it’s biggest political shows? And why is it determined to legitimise a lie: that people of colour enjoy any kind of privilege over people who are white?
Someone needs to tell us. Because even though his appearances consist of easily provable lies and misrepresentations, Yusuf is still able to sow the seeds of hate that take root in the people who don’t read the detail. Then you remember that the BBC is the broadcaster that forced one of its news presenters to apologise TO FARAGE in 2024 after she correctly described him as using his “customary inflammatory language”.
Apologists pointed to the archaic, anachronistic BBC charter as justification, claiming the presenter’s job is just to read. Not to opine. Just to follow orders. So we just sit back and allow racists to send the country up in flames do we? No wonder TV news is rapidly becoming unfit for purpose.
You know the facts already: there is no such thing as two-tier policing in this country. Statistics prove it is mostly people of colour suffering disproportionate violence, harassment, arrests and incarceration at the hands of police. And yet, no amount of gotcha journalism is an antidote to Yusuf’s kind of evil. He doesn’t care.
Just like his boss Nigel Farage with “Get Brexit Done” and Boris Johnson with “Stop The Boats”, the message is all that matters to him. You will know that the family of Henry Nowak, stabbed to death last December, explicitly pleaded for his name not to be used to drive hate. The millionaire corporate lobby group that is Reform don’t care. Anger, lies and hate is its business model.
They then sit back in their splendour, enjoying a nice red as decent, ordinary folk, radicalised by their rhetoric, are at each other’s throats. In many ways the phrase “useful idiot” is too mild for Muhammad Ziauddin Yusuf. His and his boss’s inflammatory rhetoric is the kind that will get someone killed. How do I know? Because I’ve seen it firsthand during the 80s and 90s as a teenager.
For goodness’ sake, Yusuf’s own parents – Sri Lankan Muslims who emigrated to the UK in the early 1980s – would have suffered it.
Are you seriously telling me nobody at the BBC, or any of the other broadcasters falling over themselves to platform him, hasn’t said in a meeting at some point: “There’s something a bit weird about this guy weaponising his heritage for the benefit of racists”?
Or is all their supposed solidarity with ordinary, law-abiding people who look like me simply performative?
