‘Guess who’s back?’: the inside story of Nigel Farage’s quest for power

With a new HQ and digital-savvy staff, Reform UK is trying to tighten its operation – but there are tensions over fringe views and trouble brewing at the grassroots. Nigel Farage seems to be everywhere again: striding into rallies to the beat of Eminem, popping up at Maga parties in Washington, hosting a champagne-soaked fundraiser in Mayfair and grinning on the ITV breakfast sofa taunted by a Chinese dragon.

Since July, Reform UK has soared in the polls, threatening the Conservatives and Labour and leaving many backers daring to dream that one day Farage could enter government. “This is a 1789 or 1917 moment,” says a new Reform donor who claims to be one of many former Tories now battering down Farage’s door to give money. “The ancien régime is going to be swept away and the UK is going to have a political revolution.”.

Farage may be the ubiquitous face of Reform, but inside the party he is surrounded by a coterie of men – and they are nearly all men – working to make its hard-right leanings appeal to the British public in the way Americans were drawn to Donald Trump’s politics. At the helm is Zia Yusuf, the entrepreneur and party chair, while Nick Candy, the billionaire property developer, is in charge of raising funds. George Cottrell, a wealthy friend of Farage and former fraudster, has no official role but is nevertheless “always around”, according to insiders.

Alongside them, a band of digitally savvy gen Z advisers are behind Farage’s phenomenal success on social media, mixing polemic against immigration, net zero and diversity policies with jokey clips of their leader downing pints. Their collective goal is “professionalisation” while at the same time keeping Farage “fun”. In other words, pushing to make a once shambolic party into a credible electoral force.

Reform has moved into Millbank Tower, on the banks of the Thames and minutes from Westminster. Fittingly for a party aspiring to govern, this block was once home to David Cameron’s Tories, and it was where Tony Blair’s Labour plotted its 1997 victory. Yusuf, Reform’s 38-year-old chair, is said to be there “all the time” and Farage also has a desk. Insiders say that after the 2024 election, Farage delegated almost all operational control of the party to Yusuf, who had emerged as a donor months before. They quickly shut Reform’s HQ in the Leicestershire town of Ashby-de-la-Zouch and left a serviced office in London’s Victoria that was considered to be “little more than a meeting room”.

Yusuf, who has known Farage for more than a decade, is said by staffers to have got in touch last spring out of the blue and offered to donate a six-figure sum. Insiders say he appeared ready for the next thing after selling his concierge company, Velocity Black, and making a reported £32m. Staffers say the former Goldman Sachs executive caused surprise within HQ when he suggested introducing key performance indicators (KPIs) to spur on Reform’s army of canvassers. “It took some of the old guard who’ve been around to point out we were basically talking about older volunteers in the country who were doing this for free,” a source said. But Yusuf appears to have been persuasive about the targets: Reform officials are now subject to KPIs.

Yusuf has helped the party grow from zero official constituency branches to more than 400 across Britain, and he told the Guardian that Reform was building its own tech that he believed would be “decisive” in the next election. Recalling the first time he met Farage, Yusuf said: “It was very clear that mine and Nigel’s views of the world and our philosophies aligned very, very well.”. Last year Yusuf replaced the Ukip veteran Paul Oakden as Reform chair and set about removing old hands, including Gawain Towler, the party’s communications chief who had been removed and reinstated at least twice before.

Yusuf is now gatekeeper to Farage and at his side for crucial conversations, such as those with defecting politicians. Ann Widdecombe, the former Conservative minister and Reform candidate, said: “I tend to feed my thoughts in via Zia, who is very sharp. Nigel is leading the party and has his constituency [too].”. Aside from Yusuf, Reform’s engine room features a crew of young male advisers who are instrumental in building Farage’s social media image. He now has more than 1 million TikTok followers and 2.2 million on X – more than Keir Starmer’s 1.8 million and far outstripping Kemi Badenoch’s 300,000.

These staffers are responsible for Farage’s packed rallies from Essex to the north-east of England, which are unlike anything Labour or the Conservatives are doing. The events typically kick off with high-energy warm-up speeches before Farage, flanked by bodyguards, makes a passage through fans to the sound of Eminem’s Without Me. With the lyrics “Guess who’s back?”, the song was deployed in last year’s election. Insiders say the party “picked it up and ran with it” after supporters used it in online memes.