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| Zia Yusuf returning to Reform UK two days after quitting | Zia Yusuf returning to Reform UK two days after quitting |
| (33 minutes later) | |
| Zia Yusuf, who resigned as Reform UK chairman on Thursday, is to return to work for the party in a new role. | Zia Yusuf, who resigned as Reform UK chairman on Thursday, is to return to work for the party in a new role. |
| Yusuf will lead what the party calls its "Doge team" – which is modelled on the Department of Government Efficiency set up by US President Donald Trump. | |
| Earlier this week, Yusuf quit the party, saying working to get the party elected was no longer "a good use of my time", without expanding further. | Earlier this week, Yusuf quit the party, saying working to get the party elected was no longer "a good use of my time", without expanding further. |
| On Saturday, Reform leader Nigel Farage told the BBC that Yusuf will take on a more public role for the party in a new role, appearing more frequently in the media. | |
| He said: "Zia regrets what he said and did the other day. It was a combination of 11 months hard work and exhaustion." | |
| In a post on X, Yusuf said he had received a large number of messages urging him to reconsider leaving the party and explained why he quit two days ago. | |
| "After 11 months of working as a volunteer to build a political party from scratch, with barely a single day off, my tweet was a decision born of exhaustion," he wrote. | |
| Yusuf said he came into politics "out of belief that Nigel Farage was the man" to lead the country, adding "I believe in these things more than ever". | |
| Before his resignation, Yusuf had criticised Sarah Pochin, who won last month's Runcorn and Helsby by-election for the party. | |
| She urged Sir Keir Starmer to ban the burka "in the interests of public safety" during Prime Minister's Questions debut on Wednesday. | |
| Yusuf said it was "dumb for a party to ask the PM if they would do something the party itself wouldn't do". A burka ban is not Reform party policy. | |
| Farage told the BBC Yusuf, who is a Muslim, "gets even more racial abuse on X than ever" when Islam is being discussed. | |
| "In retrospect he knows a lot of it is bots trying to damage Reform. It is not Reform members," he added. | |
| "Yes some of it is the alt right, but there's a lot of bots. He regrets it and wants to continue working for us." | |
| Further appointments by the party in what are expected soon in what it described as an "expanded management structure". | |
| A new party chairman is expected to be appointed next week and a deputy chairman will be hired too. |