In praise of Zia Yusuf

To promote his new book, Alastair Campbell appeared this week on Question Time alongside Zia Yusuf. Campbell went on the attack, accusing Yusuf of dishonesty, of failing to apologise, of failing to take accountability. ‘As far as I remember, Alastair,’ Yusuf responded, ‘you were the person who presented a dossier to the British people claiming Saddam Hussein could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.’ If we expect the descendants of immigrants to walk with their heads bowed for generations, too grateful to have opinions of their own, then we have a pretty poor idea of what immigration and integration can be With parents who came to Britain to work in the NHS – his father was a newly qualified doctor, and became a paediatrician, his mother is a nurse – Yusuf’s origin story would fit well into a progressive morality tale.

Less so his career at Goldman Sachs, as an entrepreneur catering to the very wealthy, and as a major donor and now home affairs spokesman at Reform. Is there any inconsistency in being the son of immigrants and believing immigration should be restricted? Probably no more than there is in being a Muslim worried about Muslim fundamentalism. But there is a difference between saying you disagree with someone’s opinions and saying that those are opinions they have no right to hold. ‘You cannot be Muslim and British,’ said Jason Powell, an aspiring Reform candidate, ‘it’s like oil and water.’

Powell was suspended. There are many who would regard his suspension as window dressing, and who are unshakeable in their belief that any sympathy for Reform marks a man out as far-right, if not fascist. The reality, even if you disagree with Reform, is that the party is not homogenous. Yusuf isn’t a silent frontman: he’s the emulsion. Daniel O’Connell said that being born in a stable didn’t make a man a horse. Wellington was born in Dublin.

O’Connell wanted to deny him his Irish identity for not sharing O’Connell’s politics. ‘You’ve got nice suits and nice shoes but you’ve got more chance captaining the Sri Lankan cricket team,’ tweeted Alastair Campbell, after the Question Time clash, ‘than you have of becoming Home Secretary.’ Yusuf was born in Scotland, to Sri Lankan immigrants, and he grew up in England. He infuriates the left because he has the sort of background progressives like and the sort of views they abhor.

At the same time he’s a living insult to those on the right for whom immigrants are anathema, and absolutely intolerable for those convinced all Islam is Islamism. That the two are the same is an assertion that often appears online. Certainly that wasn’t the view of Roger Scruton, and his grasp of the Abrahamic religions was far greater than mine. Believing Yusuf is using Reform as a Trojan horse in order to introduce sectarian beliefs into the British Parliament is on a level with those convinced the recent Spanish train crash was Mossad’s revenge for Spain’s stance on Palestine.

When did you first become conscious of being British? One of my earliest memories was of watching Daley Thompson win gold. The Union Jack was no stranger to me – I have photos of the Silver Jubilee party at my primary school – but at the 1980 Olympics I saw it in the context of others. That was the Olympics of the Afghanistan invasion, when Britain sent its athletes but, I half-remembered, not its flag to Moscow, so I’ve wondered if my memory was inaccurate – and somehow all the more true.

My father’s ancestry was Anglo-Saxon; my mother was a Jewish refugee. I never thought being a mongrel made me less British. I still don’t. Yusuf described himself in these columns as a ‘British Muslim patriot’. You can disagree with how he puts that into practice, but he has shown that those three words are ones nobody has the right to deny him. Patriotism had better come as naturally as the leaves to the trees, or it had better not come at all.

You cannot scold people into a love of their country, into feeling they belong; you have to show them, and allow them to feel for themselves. Being British is important – vital, even – but it is not inherited in one’s genes, or displayed in the colour of one’s skin. Was Yusuf making that error in September when he tweeted this? ‘The front runner being foisted on the people of Holborn by Labour to replace the former Prime Minister Keir Starmer in our Parliament was born in Somalia.

Do you understand what’s happening?’ I think he was expressing anxiety about sectarian Islamism contaminating British politics, not a dislike for those born overseas, although those words in isolation don’t say that. You can think differently, and think the less of him, without thinking the less of what his life represents. If we expect the descendants of immigrants to walk with their heads bowed for generations, too grateful to have opinions of their own, then we have a pretty poor idea of what immigration and integration can be.

The freedom to be ungrateful and unreasonable, socialist or conservative, gloriously triumphant or utterly mistaken – these are our freedoms, and they must belong to us all. I looked it up. No Union Jacks were raised for Thompson’s Moscow victory in 1980, and the Olympic anthem replaced our own. But while it played, Thompson, the son of a Nigerian father, on a podium without his flag, conducted the small contingent of British fans through ‘God Save the Queen’.

Nobody told him to.