{"id":528956,"date":"2026-04-13T18:34:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T18:34:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/528956\/"},"modified":"2026-04-13T18:34:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T18:34:08","slug":"nige-and-zia-set-out-plan-to-send-boriswave-traitors-to-the-gulag-john-crace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/528956\/","title":{"rendered":"Nige and Zia set out plan to send \u2018Boriswave\u2019 traitors to the gulag | John Crace"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Reform UK press conference began a little behind schedule. Time in which Nigel Farage<\/a> had gathered Zia Yusuf and a few others into a circle for a two-minute silence. A moment to reflect on the sad news from Hungary that Viktor Orb\u00e1n\u2019s 16 years as prime minister had come to a premature end. Orb\u00e1n had had so much more to give the world. There would be no one left in the EU to block the \u20ac90bn loan to Ukraine. Will there be no one to think of Russia\u2019s brave struggles against the west? It was a tragedy. The end of an era. Nige would now have to go it alone.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a law of diminishing returns to these Reform press conferences. We now get two or three of them a week, each one promising to be of national importance. The reality is that they are no more than a chance for Farage to indulge his narcissism and get himself on camera once more. It\u2019s the only time he feels truly alive. But the audiences are dwindling. They are no longer \u201cmust-screen\u201d events for the main news channels. Reform\u2019s idea of importance is the broadcasters\u2019 idea of eminently missable. You can see the desperation in Nige\u2019s eyes. He is in danger of becoming last year\u2019s news.<\/p>\n

This time, Farage wanted to talk about immigration. The Boriswave. It was 10 years since the Brexit referendum and the country had voted to leave by a huge margin, he said. The rest of us may remember that the country had been almost evenly split, 52% to 48%. But for Nige, it had all been downhill ever since. Brexit had been perfect in its conception only to be betrayed by Tory governments who had never believed in it. And the worst offender had been Boris Johnson<\/a>, whom Farage had temporarily forgotten had led the Vote Leave campaign.<\/p>\n

For reasons Nige didn\u2019t quite understand, hundreds of thousands of EU citizens who had been working in the UK had left to be replaced with hundreds of thousands of people from outside the EU \u2013 in order to work in the UK. And many of them had wanted to bring their families. Selfish foreigners. Always thinking of themselves and their own needs. Ideally they should come here to do the jobs we don\u2019t want to do and then fly home at the weekend. That had always been the true meaning of Brexit<\/a>. Immigrants were now costing every household \u00a320,000 per year and pensioners were out of pocket, subsidising foreigners.<\/p>\n

Next up was Yusuf. He is the sidekick Nige lets out when he wants his audience to feel angry. Because no one does snippy better than Zia. He wakes up ready to pick a fight and gets steadily more furious throughout the day. It\u2019s him against the world. Everything is a battle. One man fighting the injustice of having made enough money to do nothing but indulge his fantasy of being an important unelected politician.<\/p>\n

Zia took to the stage, waving a copy of his latest pamphlet called \u201cStop the Boriswave\u201d. On the front cover was a picture of a grinning Kemi Badenoch<\/a> next to Boris, with thousands of what appeared to be Muslim men standing behind them. Some, seemingly, were more than 7ft tall.<\/p>\n

What Yusuf really wanted was for there to be a national inquiry. One where Boris, Priti Patel and Kemi were all put in the dock and forced to tell the truth. A show trial. Though Boris has never told \u201cnothing but the truth\u201d in his life, so it felt a little unrealistic to start now. And once they had all been found guilty of betraying the British people on immigration, they would be thrown in jail. Or in the gulags.<\/p>\n

Several reporters pointed out that Suella Braverman had been the home secretary and Robert Jenrick the immigration minister during the relevant years. And before they had both defected to Reform, no one had been more critical of them than Zia himself. Somehow, though it sticks in his throat, Yusuf had found it within himself to forgive them. Besides which, Suella and Honest Bob would be delighted to appear before a public inquiry. Not least because they have both already been found totally innocent by Reform\u2019s Revolutionary Guard Corps.<\/p>\n

There were more questions about the alleged failure of Reform\u2019s deputy leader, Richard Tice, to pay the right amount of tax in the right way and at the right time. Now it was Farage\u2019s turn to get snippy. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Sophisticated tax avoidance schemes were necessarily very complicated, he said. And never forget that Dicky is actually quite dim. His wealth has been inherited. That\u2019s why he has a small fortune, because he started with a large one. The tax form had too many pages and Dicky had lost concentration. If anything, he had ended up paying too much. And what\u2019s a minor mistake with HMRC between friends.<\/p>\n

We ended with Nige claiming total amnesia. He appears to have forgotten that at the beginning of the war with Iran he was all in favour of the UK joining forces with the US. Nige would have ridden a nuke down on to the presidential palace in Tehran. Now, he tries to play the wise elder statesman, keeping the war at arm\u2019s length. \u201cI don\u2019t know how this war ends,\u201d he said. \u201cThere doesn\u2019t appear to be an exit strategy.\u201d Keir Starmer got to this point six weeks ago.<\/p>\n

Even more bizarrely, Farage now insists he has no relationship with Donald Trump. Donald Who? Never had any dealings with him. We don\u2019t speak. I\u2019ve deleted all my tweets in support. Must remember to do the same with Orb\u00e1n. Nige couldn\u2019t even bring himself to categorically state the US president was not suffering from cognitive decline. The Donald was nearly 80 and he had been like this for 10 years now. Blame the Americans for electing him. Trump was dead to him.<\/p>\n

With that, the presser was wrapped up. Nige had bitcoin to buy from Kwasi Kwarteng, the greatest chancellor in British history. What could possibly go wrong? After all, what was the point of being in politics, if not to cash in?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Reform UK press conference began a little behind schedule. Time in which Nigel Farage had gathered Zia…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":528957,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-528956","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-greatbritain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=528956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528956\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/528957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=528956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=528956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=528956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}