Within two days, after a lot of “I love you really, mate,” bro-motional calls with the one and only Reform figure who counts – Nigel Farage – Yusuf was back, albeit in a new role.
Reform treads a line here between avoiding the outright nativism and knee-jerk hostility to political Islam of the rising Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), while not alienating sympathisers of its own who are more virulently Islam-sceptic.
But being stricter on symbols of separation also appeals to a strong gut feeling among many people that the face-covering of young women goes against the grain of an open society. If liberals are too mimsy in their beliefs to take this on, then such sceptical voters are open to hearing from parties on the Right on the matter.
Those tensions tend to surface in the worst of circumstances: there was simmering discord over how to handle the aftermath of Pakistani grooming gangs offending with impunity, and the underlying aggression towards second-generation immigrants revealed in the Southport riots.
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For the Tories, Kemi Badenoch was loath to allow a good Reform row go to waste and added her take: employers should be permitted to ban staff from wearing burkas and other face coverings in the workplace, describing Sharia law as “nonsense”, and highlighting a growing unease at the high rate of first-cousin marriage in some Muslim communities.
He did not say what his response was if they refused; the problem with mandating changes to face-covering is that the policy must be implemented in an agreed number of settings to be legally effective, or else it becomes unenforceable without the inverse of Iran’s morality police chasing around to tell women what to wear.
In the way of on-the-hoof Cameron-era remedies, there was no strong impact study which told us which women were then targeted to take part and what the outcome was.
In this new context, the face veil is an easy focus for a quick and heated exchange. But parties which intend to be more serious – and less merely cynical – will need to think more about what they want to do about it than a vague plan to outlaw a symbol of separation.
Anne McElvoy is co-host of the Sky News/Politico podcast Politics at Sam and Anne’s
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