Conservative shadow defence minister Mark Francois has launched an attack on Reform UK’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf, saying he could not support a pact between the two parties after Yusuf called Conservative and Labour MPs “traitors”.
Asked about a pact during The Camilla Tominey Show on GB News, he said: “I’m someone that at one point was open-minded to some form of collaboration with Reform, but I’m afraid, having seen Zia Yusuf, having seen this man who is their head of policy calling all and sundry traitors as soon as they have the temerity to disagree with him, he screams the word traitor, which is a very powerful word, and forget the fact that he called all Tories and Labour MPs traitors.
“To say that about Ben Wallace, a distinguished former Defence Secretary, a Scots Guards officer, a man who was decorated for capturing an IRA active service unit red-handed in Northern Ireland, to call him a traitor is beyond ludicrous.
“Why on earth would any party, a party that’s now doing better in the polls under a new leadership, want to go into some kind of an alliance with another party who behave in that way and whose sworn aim, repeated by Nigel on many occasions, is quote to destroy the Conservative Party, something which, if you look at the polls, he has palpably failed to do?”
Asked if he would support a pact if Zia Yusuf was not in Reform, Francois said: “That is not my decision. I still think there’s a tremendous amount of bad blood, but I think Zia Youssef just makes that far worse.
“If you go back to 2019, Nigel stood down his candidates in what were then Tory incumbent seats. You could argue he put country before party, and there was all this talk at the time about should we have given him a knighthood or a peerage. Boris never even gave him lunch, and I know for a fact that that burns deeply in Nigel’s breast.
“And on that thing, he’s got a point. But I think that for him, in some ways, has become almost all-consuming. I think saying they want to destroy the Conservative Party, whilst at the same time some of them saying we somehow need to cooperate to prevent Burnham being re-elected, and I, like you, think there’s a chance it might come earlier.
“I think Brenda from Bristol might need to worry. Their policy is completely schizophrenic on that side. One minute some of them hint they want to work with us, the next minute they want to destroy us. So I cannot realistically see what you’re talking about happening in the current environment, all right. And in the meantime, we’re getting on with opposing Labour, and we ain’t doing too badly at it.”