00:00Zia Youssef, welcome. You've come fresh from a Reform Party press conference this morning.
00:08Last week you were Reform Party chairman. This morning you have been watching your colleague David Bull, named as party chairman. How do you feel?
00:18I feel good. I feel very good. It's great to be back. It's great to be back.
00:21And, you know, when I, in those 48 hours or so that passed after I sent that tweet, which I now regret, I was inundated with messages, emails, DMs from people who told me how important Reform was to them.
00:39You know, it's much more than a political party. It is a movement, they believe, which, frankly, many of these people were putting in their messages.
00:48It represents, for many of them, the last hope the country has to turn itself around.
00:54And I'm paraphrasing what almost all the messages said. They were lovely. They were heartfelt.
00:59They also underscored how important they thought I was within the movement.
01:03And many of them were just very declaratively asking me to reconsider.
01:07And as is often the case, as I said at the press conference, and I think people watching this hopefully can empathise with this,
01:13sometimes it takes a little distance from someone or something for you to realise how important something is.
01:19And so those things coming together just made me realise, look, I'd made a mistake.
01:25I think this is the most important work of my life.
01:27Did you apologise to all of your colleagues after?
01:31Yeah. Yeah, I did. I did.
01:32Because my tweet was an intemperate tweet born of exhaustion, which I regret.
01:39How did you regret? Was it dumb?
01:43No, no.
01:44The burqa?
01:45Well, so we'll come to the burqa bit in a minute because it would be useful just to clarify that.
01:49But in terms of the tweet, it was, A, the decision to resign.
01:55And I don't mind saying, you know, I'm a workaholic.
01:58I've given my all.
02:00You know, one of my favourite passages from Scripture is,
02:02Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, doeth with thy might.
02:05And I've always subscribed to that.
02:07I give my all to everything that I do.
02:09I give my all to you.
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