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.”
After LSE, he worked for Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs until he quit to start the luxury concierge service Velocity Black with his schoolfriend Alex Macdonald. He makes no secret of his admiration and desire to make him prime minister. They first met a decade ago at a cocktail party hosted by Stuart Wheeler, the former Ukip treasurer who was expelled from the Tories, and have kept in touch ever since. Asked about Farage appearing to stoke conspiracy theories about the Southport stabbing attack this week by questioning “whether the truth is being withheld from us”, Yusuf says he was asking perfectly valid questions.
Though Yusuf had a career before politics, he would struggle to claim he is in touch with the concerns of everyday voters. After attending an elite school and university, he worked in high-level finance,involved entertaining clients at some of the most expensive restaurants in the world, then running a company whose purpose is to give the outlandishly wealthy anything they want at the touch of a button.
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