If anything, What If Reform Wins? A Scenario – the new book by Times reporter Peter Chappell – is too cautious about the chaos, cruelty and stupidity Nigel Farage would inflict on Britain. (I had a “probably” there, but The New World is a safe space. We all know what a disaster it would be.)
Chappell has done an astute job of predicting the consequences should Reform be the largest party after a 2029 general election. Political insiders will enjoy seeing themselves namechecked and “quoted”, though the fact that the reactions of the British commentariat are so predictable is a bit of an indictment. “Would I really say that?” Yes, I think you would.
In this scenario, the European Union suspends its trading agreement with the UK, and we move back into no-deal Brexit territory. Farage dismantles what he can of the progress made on net zero, even as Bristol is underwater.
Thousands more irregular migrants are rounded up and crammed into Manston camp. They riot and escape into rural Kent. Paul Dacre takes over the BBC and turns it into a Reform propaganda tool.
In a timely section, President JD Vance refuses to help us defend the Falklands when Britain wants to drill for oil nearby, and the US recognises the islands as the Islas Malvinas. Perhaps someone at the White House got hold of a review copy.
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Chappell explains why the liberal fantasy of Charles III stepping in to prevent a Farage premiership will not happen – although the sick King does have a moment of redemption towards the end of the story. He describes how Farage, frustrated at the uselessness of the grifters and yes-men he has surrounded himself with, becomes increasingly annoyed by the slow progress of his anti-immigrant Great Repeal bill through parliament.
I am not convinced that Reform’s attempts to stop small boats – the one thing that Farage knows he must do to satisfy his supporters – would only involve pulling out of the European Convention on Human Rights and rounding up migrants to deport them, catastrophic as those would be. The Rwanda scheme did not work for the Conservatives, and not only because of the legal rulings against them. The One Simple Trick mindset that informs the vast majority of Reform policy would demand performative cruelty, quickly.
This Labour government has done its best to repel immigrants and is largely succeeding. Even that appears not to be enough to satisfy some of the British public.
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Farage understands this. I suspect that immediately after winning the election he would invoke a Covid-like state of emergency (“the invasion of our country has gone on too long!”) that would enable him to pass laws with minimal scrutiny.
I also suspect that Chappell underestimates how ready Reform politicians would be to enrich themselves with public money. Donald Trump – and indeed the scandal of Covid procurement – have shown how quickly a democracy can become a cash machine for opportunist politicians and their friends.
While the focus on just how easily Reform could in effect take over the BBC is detailed and welcome, Chappell overlooks the way politicians on both the left and right have undermined institutional trust in the corporation for years. Would Zack Polanski, a critic of the BBC like almost everyone on the populist left, really lead a march to defend the BBC’s independence? Maybe. Maybe it would serve his purposes to be able to legitimately write it off.
And as you would expect from a journalist on a national newspaper, the question of whether the Lobby is at least partly responsible for the public’s disgust with politicians goes unaddressed. Fair enough: this is about Reform, not the state of the nation.
I won’t give away the ending. It does rely rather too much on the common sense of a hypothetical group of Reform MPs, on the intervention of Farage’s wife, Laure (there are, as you would expect, few women in this story), and on the hope that most of Britain’s institutions will survive assault by Nigel Farage. We should not assume, as Democrats in the US have done, that very little of a democracy can be swept away in a few years.
But we could quibble for hours about precisely what Farage intends to do with Britain if he gets his hands on it. What If Reform Wins? is a valuable piece of work, and a largely entertaining account of an unfolding disaster.
Before the next general election, I would like to see Bloomsbury commission Scenarios based on each party’s manifesto, each of them written by a different sceptic. Not all of them would be a “compulsive non-fiction thriller”, as What If Reform Wins is advertised to be, but they might just act as a corrective to the populism that so many politicians are indulging in.
What If Reform Wins? A Scenario by Peter Chappell is published by Bloomsbury
Ros Taylor hosts the Oh God, What Now?, Jam Tomorrow and Bunker podcasts
