Arriving in style by helicopter for the Cheltenham Gold Cup yesterday, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage was full of his trademark swagger and bluster. Behind the scenes, however, he has been less self-assured over recent days, having endured one of the most torrid periods of his political life. The suspension from Reform of Rupert Lowe, one of the most effective of the party’s five MPs, has not just hit membership and fundraising. It has also damaged Farage’s personal standing. A YouGov poll this week showed a third of Reform voters want a new leader. This would have been unthinkable before the party went to war with Lowe after his exclusive interview with me in the Daily Mail last week in which he questioned whether Farage’s ‘messianic qualities’ would translate into strong leadership. One trusted former candidate for Reform with close links to the party HQ, told me: ‘Nigel is absolutely shocked by the turn of events. He’s horrified.’ If Reform’s leaders thought Lowe, a successful businessman worth some £30 million an ex chairman of Premier League football club Southampton, would go quietly they were mistaken. Despite another poll this week showing 85 per cent of voters don’t know who Lowe is, he has won the backing of many Reform supporters over his threat to set up a rival party. Lowe might even have the support of Elon Musk. In January Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire, and one of President Trump’s leading allies, said Farage ‘doesn’t have what it takes’ and that Lowe could take over. Some Farage supporters blame much of the chaos on Zia Yusuf, the Reform chairman. The irony is Yusuf, 38, was picked by Farage last July to make the party more competent and professional. He was a surprise choice. Undoubtedly clever, he studied international relations at the London School of Economics and had a stellar business career, but has no political experience. Yet Farage gambled on Yusuf – who donated £200,000 to Reform last year – because he was willing to work full-time for the party. It was chairman Yusuf who decided to hire a KC to hold an independent investigation into bullying complaints made by two female employees in Lowe’s office. The Reform statement about the KC gave the impression Lowe was accused of the bullying, which is not the case. Now Lowe is consulting defamation lawyers and the parliamentary authorities are conducting their own inquiry. In the escalating war of words some have suggested he might have early onset dementia, which he emphatically denies. Lowe has also been accused of misrepresenting the KC, which he also rejects. All deeply damaging to Reform. But what has dismayed Farage’s supporters most is Yusuf’s decision to report Lowe to the police for allegedly making ‘verbal threats’ against him on December 13. Yusuf went to the police on the day the Mail article appeared on Thursday, March 6. Reform’s explosive statement confirming the complaint to the police was made public the next day, as was the KC inquiry. It reinforced the suspicion among many Reform backers that it was a knee-jerk response to Lowe’s criticisms. And far from lancing a boil, Lowe’s suspension has raised question marks over Yusuf’s strategy and also lifted the lid on a simmering feud within Reform over the lack of consultation of members over policy – the so-called democratisation of the party. The former candidate, a senior party member, told me: ‘It’s just terrible. Why go to the police the same day that Rupert Lowe’s criticisms appeared in public? The decision to call in the police was Zia Yusuf’s. Nigel had no knowledge. It looked inept and vindictive. Zia has no political experience, he’s a control freak.’ Asked if Farage was upset at the turn of events, the source said: ‘Nigel is shocked.’ Does he regret appointing Yusuf? ‘Oh, yes.’ A Reform spokesman insisted: ‘The timing of the statement being released, the day after the Mail article, is a coincidence. The decision to go to the police on March 6, the day the article was published, was a coincidence.’ Reform has moved its HQ into Millbank Tower, on the banks of the Thames, only minutes from Parliament. Fittingly for a party aspiring to govern, the office block was once home to David Cameron’s Tories and it was where Tony Blair’s Labour plotted its landslide 1997 victory. Reform has made much of Yusuf’s business credentials. He has had an impressive career at finance firms Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs. He also set up the luxury concierge company Velocity Black which was sold for £230 million in 2023, netting Yusuf an estimated £31 million profit. Successful he may be. But his people skills – essential for the party chairman – appear to be in woefully short supply. The evidence is there, apparently, on an online platform called Glassdoor which enables employees to anonymously share their experiences and opinions about working at various companies. ‘Zia is prone to temper tantrums,’ says someone who claims to have worked for Reform. He is capable of ‘petty punitive action’, another. The chairman’s autocratic approach has upset many in a party whose membership has grown to 212,000. More than 200 Reform members, barred from representing the party by Yusuf, are now fighting May’s local elections for a new movement: Independent Britain Group. Some are standing as candidates in Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire. The number of those who’ve switched allegiance has been growing since the row. Last week officers at Reform’s Stafford branch were stood down, triggering a bitter response from them on social media. They posted: ‘Letters to Zia Yusuf have gone unanswered. We have been trying to support candidates for the county council elections but this is no longer possible. The growing evidence from around the country is that Nigel seems to have lost control of the party that he created. ‘It seems to have been bought up by someone who has zero experience of politics and zero experience of local democracy.’ In Great Yarmouth, which Lowe captured from the Tories at the last election, there have been many resignations from Reform. Barry Gravenell, who was a leading figure in the branch, said: ‘Hope you are paying attention Nigel Farage. Your branch committee members of the Great Yarmouth branch have resigned as a result of the actions “your”party, as you seem to like to refer it, have taken towards Rupert Lowe. ‘If you continue to follow the path you have adopted, you will rapidly find the movement, which Reform has benefited from, will just as quickly move elsewhere.’ Yet despite Yusuf’s clear out, the party’s website shows that more than 20 Reform’s chairmen are reported to have made sexist, racist and anti-Semitic comments in the last election. Farage described such people as the ‘at best, loopy’ candidates and blamed them for the party underperforming at the election. Comments made by such ‘loopy’ candidates included references to women as ‘thick tarts’ as well as anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. One, Pete Durnell, who likened the Covid pandemic response to the Holocaust, is now a party regional director. And another member attacked the late Queen as a benefits scrounger, and one who compared Islam to Nazism – and their views were widely reported before the election. However, Yusuf let them become chairmen of new branches despite boasting ‘the most rigorous vetting procedures of any party’. Jo Hart, the Reform chairman for Aberdeenshire, made the scroungers comment about the late Queen and Royal Family during the Platinum Jubilee celebrations. Her 2022 Facebook post included messages such as ‘f*** the Royals’ and ‘make Lizzy the last’. Jake Fraser, the chairman for Widnes and Halewood, wrote in July 2021 soon after vaccine certificates for travel were introduced: ‘We’re on the precipice of a Health Holocaust. The same methodology the Nazis used to rise to power with minimal opposition by appealing to both sides of the political spectrum... is unfolding before our eyes.’ Jack Aaron, Reform branch chairman for Welwyn Hatfield, described Adolf Hitler as ‘brilliant’ and ‘able to inspire people to action’. Steve Chilcott, chairman of the Ealing and Brent branch, ranted at Speakers’ Corner in London in 2017 that Islam and Nazism were the same. ‘They both want to kill Jews. They both hate homosexuals, they both want to kill homosexuals. Islam, Nazis.’ He also said Islam was the fastest growing religion due to a ‘lack of contraception’. It seems one of the most vital tasks of Team Yusuf – to weed out ‘loopy’ candidates and bring in professional campaign organisers – has gone disastrously wrong. For in the process, they have ejected loyal and long-serving supporters of first Ukip then the Brexit Party, then Reform while allowing some ‘loopies’ to continue in influential roles. Last summer, Reform crowed after hiring Richard Murphy as a campaign organiser. He had worked for the Tory party for 44 years. But last month he quietly quit as he could no longer stomach the way Reform was run. A source told me: ‘In politics you cannot buy loyalty and we have lost too many good loyal foot soldiers but we still appear to have some strange people in our ranks.’ The Reform spokesman, when asked to explain, said he could not discuss how many members had been suspended or who they were. ‘They are party matters,’ he added. While Reform is doing well in opinion polls in by-elections to local councils they are not performing anywhere near their national showing. In 215 council by-elections since the general election Labour has won 74, the Tories 57, Reform only 12. They have also lost ten councillors in Derbyshire who quit in protest at Farage’s leadership. Despite the row of the last ten days, a new MRP poll to predict the May 1 local elections put Farage’s party on course to win or dominate eight councils compared with ten for the Conservatives. It found that had elections in a further nine areas not been delayed, after they were postponed by Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner due to local government re-organisation, Reform would have won 12 councils to the Tories’ 11. Farage, who will take heart from the poll and from the news that a further one by Lord Ashcroft sees Reform well-placed to win the upcoming Runcorn and Helsby by-election, has boasted that the party has been ‘democratised’ but Lowe and his supporters are not convinced. Earlier this year Reform wound-up the old limited company that ran the party and in which Farage was the majority 53 per cent shareholder – a stake that enabled him to seize the leadership of the party before the last election without consulting members. But the Daily Mail pointed out last week a new company has taken its place, Reform 2025, which has two directors: Farage and chairman Yusuf. There is no requirement for Reform to have a chairman. Which is why many are wondering if Zia Yusuf could go the same way as Rupert Lowe and be dismissed from his job if Reform don’t perform as well as they expecting in May’s local elections.