Fomer chancellor Nadim Zahawi defects to Reform UK

Former Conservative Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi has defected to Reform UK.

The former MP said he felt the UK had reached a “dark and dangerous” moment, and the country needed “a glorious revolution”, as he outlined why he was joining Nigel Farage’s party.

Zahawi was chancellor for two months under Boris Johnson and served as a government minister from 2018 to 2023.

Farage unveiled Zahawi’s defection at a press conference on Monday morning, making him one of several former Tory MPs to join the party.

Speaking at the press conference, Zahawi said problems with free speech “on X or even just down the pub” was one of the reasons he was joining Reform.

He cited an “over-powerful” civil service and quangos that he said had been started under Labour PM Tony Blair and continued under his own Conservative government, adding that he shared some of the blame for “constitutional vandalism” and “our failure to take back control over the entrenched, unelected bureaucracy”.

He added there had been major failures with mass migration and “bad, virtue-signalling legislation that has made us less competitive and less prosperous”.

Farage insisted that this latest Tory defection did not mean Reform was becoming the Conservatives 2.0, and said he had fought the party “tooth and nail” over Brexit.

Zahawi is the most senior of the former Conservative MPs to have joined Reform UK.

As well as his two months as chancellor at the end of Boris Johnson’s time as prime minister, he was education secretary, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and chairman of the Conservative Party.

He was sacked from that last position by Rishi Sunak in January 2023 after the prime minister’s independent ethics adviser found that he had broken ministerial rules by failing to disclose that his tax affairs were under investigation by HMRC.

Asked by the BBC about being sacked over his tax affairs, Zahawi said: “The mistake I made was not to be specific about my declarations to the Cabinet Office.

“I absolutely think that politicians should be held to a higher level of accountability but I shouldn’t be precluded from doing the right thing by my country.”

The former MP was a candidate to succeed Johnson as prime minister in 2022 but only attracted the support of 25 of his colleagues and was eliminated in the first round of the leadership contest which Liz Truss won.

Zahawi was education secretary from September 2021 to July 2022 and had a short stint as chancellor of the exchequer between July and September 2022.

In November 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, he was appointed vaccines minister and oversaw the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine programme for nearly a year.

Born in Iraq in 1967, he could have been sent to fight in the 1980s Iran-Iraq War but instead he and his parents fled Iraq and he grew up in the UK.

Questioned on whether he had concerns about allegations of racism made against his new party leader by more than 30 school peers, claims denied by Farage, Zahawi responded: “If I thought the man sitting next to me had in any way a problem with people of my colour… I wouldn’t be sitting next to him.”