Internal divisions within Reform UK spilled out into the open last Thursday, when the party’s chair Zia Yusuf termed new MP Sarah Pochin’s parliamentary question about a burqa ban “dumb” and subsequently resigned, saying that working to get the party elected is no longer “a good use of my time”.
Just two days later Yusuf returned to the party, taking a downgraded role. But last week’s row isn’t the only sign of splits in Reform.
When Reform MP Lee Anderson was asked on GB News in January whether the anti-Muslim extremist and serial criminal Stephen Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson) would be allowed to join the party, he declared: “I wouldn’t welcome him into Reform UK.”
Anderson noted that “we made our position quite clear on that,” before explaining: “I think Tommy Robinson would be a distraction.”
But despite Anderson’s keenness to distance Reform from the far-right extremist, his head of office was once a fan of Lennon.
Ethan Thoburn is listed as one of Anderson’s staffers in parliamentary documents and describes himself on LinkedIn as having been head of office since October last year.
On a now deleted X/Twitter account, Thoburn regularly promoted Lennon’s content and endorsed his politics.
In 2017, Thoburn retweeted Lennon 91 times and also promoted posts supportive of him, such as one claiming that an anti-Muslim demonstration in Manchester was “full of passionate people” and another which simply read: “I support Tommy Robinson.”
Thoburn also shared a post by far-right politician and then UKIP leader Gerard Batten in 2018 which harrumphed that “the MSM lie about Tommy Robinson, and others, being ‘far right’”.
Thoburn was not only keen to promote the content of Lennon and his backers, he was happy to voice his support for the anti-Muslim activist as well.
In one post, in July 2017, he wrote of Lennon:
“He’s not a bigot… If you actually listen to him you’ll understand.”
In another, the same month, he said he had “just met” Lennon and that he was a “really nice bloke”. Shortly after that, he tweeted: “Brilliant meeting you Tommy… No surrender.”
Thoburn’s politics have remained very firmly on the right. From June 2021 to October 2024 he worked for Orthodox Conservatives, a pressure group for social conservatism aiming to pull the Tory party further to the right. He served as the group’s head of operations and then associate director, according to his LinkedIn.
He is now, of course, working for Anderson, a MP whose politics share some similarities with Lennon. Last year, Anderson had the Conservative whip suspended after he refused to apologise for claiming: “Islamists have… got control of [London mayor Sadiq] Khan, and they’ve got control of London.”
Anderson’s Islamophobic comment was too much for the Conservative party, but apparently not for Reform, who welcomed him with open arms and appointed him chief whip.
The head of Anderson’s office isn’t the only figure associated with Reform to have shown sympathy towards Lennon.
Television personality Ant Middleton, who spoke at the party’s conference last September and accompanied Nigel Farage to Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, wrote on X last Thursday that Lennon “is a phenomenal, credible journalist whose work is extremely accurate”.
Lennon spent seven months in prison, from October 2024 to May 2025, for repeating false and defamatory allegations about a Syrian refugee.
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Prefer to listen? Click the play button to hear the audio version. Harry Shukman Reform UK is staffed by oddballs and enigmas, but none odder…
