Farage deploys the rottweiler to distract from awkward £5m gift story | John Crace

It’s a classic from the Donald Trump playbook: everything’s been going a bit tits up, so you create a distraction. Get everyone looking in the wrong direction. Last week was the worst in months for Reform. First the party was pegged back in the opinion polls, then the Guardian revealed Nigel Farage had been given a £5m handout by Christopher Harborne, a Thai-based crypto dealer. A donation that Nige had never thought to declare.

Not the best look for a party leader who claims to be a man of the people. I mean why don’t we all get by on multimillion-pound handouts from our friends. The best you can say is that at least Nige wasn’t trying to defraud the state by claiming universal credit. Since then, Reform has been on the back foot. Sending out countless press releases trying to explain the situation away. Ones that often contradicted each other.

Nige had had no thought of becoming an MP when he was gifted the money. All he had wanted was a secure retirement, so there was no need to declare the dosh. It had been a total coincidence that he had chosen to stand for parliament just a short while later. The money wasn’t just for his personal spending. It was for his security so he could resume his political career. Though obviously not nearly enough. In the two years since Nige has been MP for Clacton he has done very few constituency surgeries. Largely because he says he doesn’t feel safe.

Time to change the dial. So who better to call on than his own pet rottweiler, Zia Yusuf? The man Farage calls his “shadow home secretary”, though he has yet to be brave enough to stand for parliament. Zia is a strange man. Someone who actively enjoys being disliked.

While others in Reform, such as Dicky Tice, Danny Kruger and Honest Bob Jenrick (Sarah Pochin is too dim to know what she wants) have an urgent desire to be loved – even if you think they have an odd way of going about it – Zia is at his happiest when he has alienated the whole room. Only his therapist knows quite why. Put it down to childhood trauma. He makes Kemi Badenoch look like an abject people pleaser.

So over the weekend, Yusuf took to social media to announce a new policy. One that was so high and wild, he’d never need to deal another. One that was so batshit mad, it would go viral on a slow news day. And it worked an absolute treat. Zia hadn’t had so much fun all year. He had had no idea that so many people would take the idea of building detention centres for “illegal immigrants” exclusively in areas that voted Green so seriously.

But the more he had thought about it, the more he liked it. Though he was a bit concerned the Greens would like the idea so much – after all, they were the ones who claimed to want to be nice to foreigners – that it would increase their vote at the local elections on Thursday. And there would be no problem finding places to build these detention centres. There was plenty of space. I mean, imagine if Lewisham was to turn Green. Then you could just dig up the whole of the South Circular and put up a massive prison. Most of the Greens wanted to turn Lewisham into a car-free zone, so no harm done.