Dr David Bull, who served as deputy leader from 2021 to 2023, and Co-Deputy Leader alongside Ben Habib from 2023 to 2024, has been announced by Nigel Farage as the new chairman of Reform UK, replacing Zia Yusuf who, despite resigning for 48 hours from exhaustion, has returned to the Party to head up the DOGE UK programme for ReformUK. He is a well-known opening voice at Reform conferences.
Dr Bull’s job is to provide “leadership to a volunteer army” said Farage saying that Dr Bull has come into the role with “terrific verve, energy, enthusiasm”, adding: “It’s going to be great fun.” Zia Yusuf said that he is “hugely excited” that Dr Bull was taking the role, adding: “I wholeheartedly congratulate him and I know he’s going to do an incredible job for us.”
Dr Bull said: “We are going to fight and we are going to win the next general election.”
David Richard Bull (born 9 May 1969) is an English television presenter, politician, and former medical doctor who was previously a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for North West England from 2019 to 2020. He studied at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School at Imperial College London and worked as a pre-registration and then senior house officer at St Mary’s Hospital, Ealing Hospital and Whittington Hospital and continued to work as a junior doctor in general medicine, surgery and accident and emergency and began a career in broadcasting in 1995 where he has presented or appeared as a commentator on numerous shows in the UK and US. He had had his licence to practise temporarily restored in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom (his licence to practise had previously ceased in 2009 and 2017). He is currently not licensed to practice medicine in the UK.
In 2006, Bull was selected as the Conservative candidate for Brighton Pavilion for the following general election, and stood down in 2009 to head up a Conservative policy review on sexual health, and was replaced by Charlotte Vere. He then joined the Brexit Party, later Reform UK, in 2019, and was elected as one of their MEPs for North West England at that year’s European Parliament election. He stood down upon the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU in January 2020.
At the 2024 general election he stood in West Suffolk and came third with 20.8% of the vote. Shortly after the election, he was replaced as deputy leader by Richard Tice.