Reform’s new chair Zia Yusuf: a man intent on making Nigel Farage PM

Former leftwing student defends leader's Southport comments and insists party stands for British values

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.