David Bull has taken over from Zia Yusuf as chairman of Reform UK (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)
A phone call from Nigel Farage changed David Bull’s life – and now the doctor turned television presenter is criss-crossing Britain on a mission to make the veteran Brexiteer Prime Minister. He has worked in emergency departments across London and he relishes what he sees as a historic opportunity to bring Britain back to full health.
Mr Farage summoned Mr Bull onto the frontline of British politics this month to succeed Zia Yusuf as the new chairman of Reform UK. The party is in first place in the opinion polls and for weeks it has had a double-lead over the Conservatives.
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“It’s amazing I’m part of British political history,” Mr Bull says.
This is not the first time Mr Farage has sent him on a life-shaping adventure.
Ahead of the 2019 European election, Mr Bull had just returned from a holiday and was unpacking when he picked up a call from the then-leader of the Brexit Party.
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David Bull discusses Reform UK's 'meteoric rise'
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'Nigel Farage will be in Number 10, Downing Street as Prime Minister'
David Bull, Nigel Farage and newly elected Brexit Party MEPs in 2019 (Image: Getty Images)
Mr Bull – who happens to have been born in the same Farnborough hospital as Mr Farage – jumped at the opportunity to stand for election and won a seat for the North West of England in the European Parliament. When he arrived in Brussels, he quickly understood how ardent eurosceptics could start enjoying the plentiful perks and get “sucked into” the system.
“We were showered with goodies,” he says.
But in January 2020 the UK finally quit the European Union. Mr Bull describes the exit deal as “awful” but he is glad Britain is outside the bloc.
“I want Britain to be in control of its future,” he says.” I don’t want some supranational body telling us what we can and can’t do.”
He looks back with delight at the shock Brexit voters across the UK gave the British establishment.
“They never expected the result they got,” he says. “What we saw was the silent majority across the country, particularly in working class areas, say, ‘We’ve had enough of this. We want to be in control of our future.’”
He believes Britain will experience another moment of radical change at the next general election. Traditional political loyalties are melting away, he argues, amid frustration the country is “falling apart”.
“What we’re seeing is people who would normally bounce from one of the two monolithic parties to the other are now saying, ‘Hang on a minute. Let’s do something different.’”
Mr Bull speaks with confidence and ambition about the democratic revolution he is determined to help deliver.
“I have almost no doubt – if not no doubt – that Nigel Farage will be in Number 10, Downing Street as Prime Minister.”
David Bull worked as a doctor and spent years in television as well as serving as an MEP (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)
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'When the NHS is great it’s fantastic. When it’s bad its awful.'
The 56-year-old has a track record of turning dreams into reality.
From the age of three he was set on becoming a doctor. The eldest of three siblings and the son of an Ipswich-based insurance broker, he attended Suffolk’s Framlingham College and studied medicine at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London.
He remembers: “One of the proudest days of my life was to ring my mother and say, ‘Hello, it’s Dr Bull.’”
The hospital is where Alexander Fleming famously discovered penicillin.
“That’s mindblowing, isn’t it?” he says. “Because that was the advent of the medicine we now know where we are so used to treating stuff with antibiotics.”
He quickly realised he was not an “academic” doctor but one energised by talking to patients, holding their hands and explaining their conditions.
“My passion is still the NHS,” he says – though he claims it needs major reform.
“When it’s great it’s fantastic. When it’s bad its awful.”
He describes the health service as a “national treasure” which “doesn’t work”. He is particularly concerned about cancer survival rates.
The Macmillan charity last year warned survival rates are “as much as 25 years behind other European countries”.
“The current Government’s view is you just throw money at the problem and what you end up with is a very expensive problem,” he says.
Mr Bull talks with similar passion of wanting to “revolutionise” social care so people enjoy a “good life” and “grow old disgracefully”.
He hopes health will become a vote-winning issue for Reform at the next election. It is easy to imagine him holding this portfolio if he joins Reform’s five MPs in the Commons.
Nobody will be surprised if he stands in Central Suffolk and North Ipswich. The sitting MP, Patrick Spencer, has pleaded not guilty to two counts of sexual assault; he won the seat for the Conservatives with a 4,290 majority – with Reform coming third behind Labour – but has had the Tory whip removed.
“I know that constituency backwards,” Mr Bull says, adding: “My sister is my neighbour across a field; my mum lives there; my brother lives there... My friends are all farmers.”
Rachel Reeves has country in 'death spiral'
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Chancellor Rachel Reeves in Gateshead (Image: Getty Images)
He talks with anger at Labour’s treatment of farming families, many of who are incensed at Labour’s inheritance tax changes.
“You’ve got a metropolitan government that has no idea how farms work,” he says.
Farmers, he adds, work “blinking hard” and are the “backbone of this nation”. Stressing the need to “feed the country”, he insists “paving” arable fields with solar panels “makes no sense at all”.
He also despairs at net zero “madness” when the nation faces punishing energy costs and he is equally withering about Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s stewardship of the economy.
“You’ve got the cabinet dictating to [small to medium-sized businesses] how to run their businesses whilst taxing them into oblivion,” he says. “That is a death spiral and it has to stop.”
Zia Yusuf was formally chairman of Reform UK (Image: Anadolu via Getty Images)
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'I’m going to sort it out; it’s going to be fine'
David Bull forged a career as both a doctor and a broadcaster (Image: Daily Mirror)
Some politicians run from the limelight but Mr Bull talks with excitement of his plan to visit 50 constituencies in 25 weeks. He will put decades of expertise in front of television cameras to work as he campaigns for a Reform victory.
“I’ve always loved telly,” he says. “Always.”
As a young doctor he wrote to John Craven, the legendary presenter of children’s news programme Newsround with a simple pitch: “Look, we need to be telling kids about health so they can then empower themselves.”
He met Mr Craven in a “rather fabulous” BBC dining room and was offered a job three days a month.
“I gave myself a year to see if I could make it in television,” he recalls. “I did A&E locum so I was all over the place, all sorts of London hospitals, working all hours.”
The “pithy and punchy” Anne Robinson got in touch and he ended up working on Watchdog Healthcheck and fulfilling the “childhood dream” of appearing on Tomorrow’s World.
Now, he hopes Reform will get he chance to shape the future.
“It is a huge task ahead,” he says.
When he was a 23-year-old doctor he faced the challenge of comforting a “very elderly” and “absolutely terrified” patient.
He remembers: “I held her hand and I said, ‘Look, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is you’re having a heart attack.
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“‘The good news is you’ve got me, I’m going to sort it out; it’s going to be fine.’”
In the months and years leading up to the next election Mr Bull will be on the airwaves with the message that “nothing works” in Britain but with Mr Farage there is a chance to fix the nation’s woes.
The biggest challenge of his life is just beginning.
David Bull and Nigel Farage served together in the European Parliament (Image: PA)
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David Bull stood for the Brexit Party in Sedgefield in 2019 (Image: Getty Images)
Labour wants to make the NHS a liability for Reform
Nigel Farage has said the "NHS will always be free at the point of delivery under a Reform government". But Labour has jumped on his support for looking again at the funding model.
A Department of Health source said: "While Reform work out what their policy is, Labour has cut waiting lists to their lowest level in two years, with almost a quarter of a million fewer patients waiting for treatment."