Former Conservative Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi announced he has defected to Reform, saying the UK ‘really does need Nigel Farage as Prime Minister’.
Zahawi, who spent two months in charge of the nation’s finances following the resignation of Rishi Sunak in 2022, is the highest-profile Tory yet to join the party.
He told a press conference: ‘I’ve made my mind that the team that will deliver for this nation will be the team that Nigel will put together, and that’s why I’ve decided that I’m joining Reform UK.’
The news adds to a string of defections from Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives to Farage’s right-wing challengers.
Reform has spent close to 10 months at the top of the opinion polls following a sharp decline in support for Labour, though the Tories have made up some ground since the start of December.
Farage suggested Zahawi’s defection demonstrated his party was not a ‘one-man band’.
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He said he hoped the one-time Tory chairman – who was sacked from the role amid a tax row – would use his skills to ‘raise a huge amount of money’ for his party.
Zahawi also led the rollout of the Covid vaccine between 2020 and 2021.
At today’s event, he was repeatedly pressed on whether he was troubled by the speaker at the 2025 Reform conference – introduced as a co-author of the party’s health policy – who suggested the vaccine caused cancer.
The ex-Tory refused to answer the question each time, dismissing it as ‘stupid’.
This afternoon, the Telegraph cited Tory sources saying he was rejected for a Conservative peerage just weeks before his defection.
A new poll from YouGov – the company co-founded by Zahawi – found that the public still prefers Starmer to Farage for the role of prime minister by 36% to 29%.
It also found that Badenoch had pulled ahead to draw with Starmer on the same question, with each polling at 28% in a head-to-head.
In a scathing comment, a Conservative spokesman said: ‘Reform is fast becoming the party of has-been politicians looking for their next gravy train.
‘Their latest recruit used to say he’d be “frightened to live in a country” run by Nigel Farage, which shows the level of loyalty for sale.’
Labour Party Chair Anna Turley, meanwhile, said the defection showed ‘Reform UK has no shame’, describing Zahawi as a ‘discredited and disgraced politician’.
She pointed to past comments from the defector calling Farage ‘offensive and racist’ – as well as from Farage, criticising Zahawi for ‘climbing the greasy pole’ by accepting the Chancellor role.
Asked about his comments, posted on Twitter 11 years ago, Zahawi said: ‘If I thought this man sitting next to me in any way had an issue with people of my colour, or my background […] I wouldn’t be sitting next to him.’
Who is Nadhim Zahawi?
Before going into politics, Nadhim Zahawi was best known as the co-founder of influential polling company YouGov.
He was born in Baghdad to a prominent business family, and fled from Iraq with themat the age of 11 as Saddam Hussein rose to power.
Zahawi was elected as MP for Stratford-on-Avon at the 2010 election, and first entered government as a minister in the Department for Education in 2018.
He was the government lead in the deployment of the Covid vaccine from November 2020 to September 2021, when he continued his rise through the ranks by becoming Education Secretary.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson made him chancellor in July 2022 following the resignation of Rishi Sunak, but he only stayed in the job for two months as new PM Liz Truss replaced him with Kwasi Kwarteng in September.
It later emerged he had been under investigation by HMRC during his term as chancellor, a revelation that led him to be sacked as Conservative Party chairman by Sunak.
In May 2024, he announced he would be stepping down as an MP at the next election.
Who else has defected to Reform?
Zahawi is the latest in a long line of people who have defected to Reform in the past two years, as the party rose to the top of UK opinion polls.
Overwhelmingly it has been Conservatives who made the leap to their more populist right-wing counterparts.
Among the first was Lee Anderson. He joined Reform in March 2024, one month after being suspended from the Tories over claims that ‘Islamists’ were in control of London.
In September last year, East Wiltshire MP Danny Kruger – who was regarded as a Tory rising star – shocked many in Westminster by switching to Reform.
At the beginning of last month, former Conservative deputy chairman Jonathan Gullis defected alongside two other fellow Tory MPs.
Then, less than a week later, ex-Conservative business minister Lord Malcolm Offord announced his defection to become the first Reform member of the House of Lords.
Offord could soon become the party’s first leader in Scotland ahead of this year’s Holyrood elections.
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