Britain’s former finance minister has defected from the Conservatives to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, warning “the most civilised nation on earth” needs to crack down hard on the “sickness” of radical Islamism festering in the country.
The bifurcation of Britain’s formerly governing Conservative Party into its long sublimated right-wing and centrist-liberal parts continues apace with the defection of former top government minister Nadhim Zahawi to Reform UK on Monday morning. The founder of YouGov, one of the UK’s best-known pollsters and once a key figure in the Boris Johnson cabinet, erstwhile finance minister, education secretary, and vaccines minister Zahawi was considered the knifeman whose fatal blow brought that government down.
Declaring Nigel Farage as Prime Minister the only chance the country has to turn its fortunes around, Iraqi-born Zahawi hailed the “beautiful, ancient, kind, magical island” of Britain, but in clearly pointed remarks alluding to open borders and failures on integration, warned it was seriously at risk from sectarianism. Zahawi said:
…I also know a thing or two about growing up in a country that is fundamentally broke, riven by sectarian strife, economic depression, and cratering living standards. So I have decided not to stand by and watch that happen to the country that took me in and let me live my British dream… there are radical Islamists waiting in the wings to supplant half the cabinet at the next general election and enter parliament.
Is there not still a teacher in hiding in Batley, is there not an attempt by the CPS to introduce blasphemy laws by the back door? Just last week did we not learn that a police force whose response to uncovering a plot by a group of Muslims in the West Midlands to organise into an armed militia and to commit a pogrom against Jewish football fans was to lie, to lie to the public and to blame the Jews?
This is a sickness deep in the heart of our country, that for 40 years we have let fester. We should have nipped political Islam in Britain, in the bud, the moment there were protests against an author for the crime of writing a book.
Zahawi warned that radical Islamists had moderate Muslims, Jews, and majority Britons “in their sights” and hailed Farage for being willing to act. He continued:
…the only political leader who has spoken up about this, at great personal threat, and who has pledged to ban the Muslim Brotherhood and the whole sinister fifth column in Britain? Nigel Farage, the man sitting by me now. I am inspired by his willingness to say difficult truths… [there is] in my view the undervalued risk of sustained civil unrest if we don’t get back on track.
Farage and Zahawi have clashed before, particularly during previous election campaigns, but the Brexit pioneer pointed out that despite terse words he’d long been public on admiring Brexiteer Zahawi’s competence and core values. Zahawi’s former role as vaccines chief is also a point of contention, but Farage stated the defector’s competence during this period spoke well of him.
While Reform UK is dead set against the Conservative Party, under whose leadership migration and taxation soared, nevertheless the importance of getting people into the party who have worked in the inside of government to help it prepare for what Zahawi called “another Glorious Revolution” saw Farage remark himself: “what Nadhim proved [during covid] is that this bloke gets stuff done, and if we win the next General Election we’ll have a lot of stuff to do, including him… our weakness is that we lack frontline experience. And with people like Nadhim, they’ve been on the inside and they’ve seen how it works, or perhaps more accurately, how it doesn’t work”.
Nadhim Zahawi was born in Iraq and came to Britain with his family as a boy in the 1970s. He entered politics after founding to pollster YouGov, the sales of shares of which ultimately led to him leaving the government in 2022 over “tax irregularities” said to have been settled with the Exchequer at a cost of £5 million. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer for two months during the transition from Boris Johnson to Rishi Sunak governments.
As a Conservative Member of Parliament, Zahawi was a Brexiteer who served in a number of senior roles including in Vaccines rollout during Covid. With evidence and views on the necessity for the vaccines and the rest of the Covid-era government interventions aside, Zahawi’s vaccine procurement programme was probably one of the only really competently executed government projects in recent memory.
As noted at the time, he impressed some with his ‘air of professionalism and performance in the ministerial jobs he’s held’, but evidently was not well loved by his fellow Conservative Members of Parliament — who generally were not fond of Brexit — and he failed at the first hurdle in his bid to become Conservative Party leader. Some of that bitterness evidently persists: Zahawi said he’d already let his party membership lapse before today, and after news of his defection to Farage’s ranks broke, Tory insiders sought to portray him as a grasping pole-climber who left the Conservatives because they refused to promote him further.
In a glossy promotional video of Zahawi broadcast by Reform on Monday to mark Zahawi crossing the floor, displayed is a fraction of Zahawi’s art collection, including an Andy Warhol print of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, and an unusually large Edwardian oil painting. Last sold at auction in 2018 for £22,500, the British painting portrays French anti-English warioress Joan of Arc, captured and bound by pro-English soldiers at the siege of Compiègne. Zahawi mirror’s Joan’s pose with his hands held behind his back.