What if the Change Succeeds? By Peter Chappell review – great awakening | Political books

For a few years now, British politics has changed dramatically the question of how to stop Nigel Farage. What started ten years ago with Brexit may end in a general election that comes down to one question: do you want to or don’t you want to risk putting this man in Downing Street? That said, we still know surprisingly little about what a Reform government would mean in practice.

Of course, it probably won’t happen. But if it did, why exactly he would What does he do with the many who helped him achieve his wildest dreams? And will the unwritten constitution of Britain, still dependent on good people volunteering to be good boys, cope with the masses?

This is the heaviest part of the book, but what makes Times reporter Peter Chappell so readable is his courage. Although based on interviews with government officials, Reform Insider and others, it is not set up as a regular analysis but as a story: entertainment and political wisdom that is both fiction and non-fiction, which captures the actions of the Reform government from success to disaster.

It is a high-risk approach that requires the writer to express his opinion, regardless of how the world will look at the upcoming elections (at a time when Chappell thinks that Keir Starmer will be replaced, and Donald Trump has succeeded on health grounds with JD Vance). While his bold bets – that the head of MI5 will only remove Farage’s embarrassing files so as not to upset the new Prime Minister, or that Peter Kyle could become Labor leader after he loses – seem old-fashioned to me, others are more fixated on recent events. By now there is enough gossip about coffee stains on the Downing Street carpets, a strange way of dressing, or personal conflicts within the Reformation to warrant the truth.

Given that the party’s intentions for many areas of British life remain unclear, the play focuses on three things where its ambitions are clear: immigration, zero-rating and tax cuts. What follows is an undeniably powerful tale that makes the Liz Truss era seem well-planned, with an unexpected episode of (no spoilers) an old enemy returning in a new way.

Farage’s first move is to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights and scrap the 1951 refugee convention, set the stage for mass deportations, end the indefinite stay period and send navy boats to return small boats. From there he goes to fight the BBC. Things are happening fast, with very serious facts, say, how much power does the law enforcement have to get into the story.

Although its focus is on power struggles in Whitehall rather than on public outcomes for vulnerable people, this is a moral fable because it is designed to deliver a warning: in particular, that the British system concentrates too much power in the hands of a populist prime minister and does not exercise it. Future Prime Minister Farage can legally go to war without consulting parliament, civil servants who stop him, and use emergency powers if he chooses to call for emergency measures (for example, in response to mass protests). The biggest obstacle to his ambitions will not come from parliament or the streets, but from the facts, or the tendency of lists of ideas written on the back of fag packets to collapse when confronted with reality.

Without giving too much away, the flaws that characterize Reform – including the threat posed by extremists, represented here by a critical thinker who still strongly reminds me of a real person wandering somewhere near his limits – are true enough. As a “nonsense entertainment”, it’s satisfying. As a reviewer of Reform in power, my concern is that Chappell may be too optimistic about the speed at which things are collapsing. Let’s hope he is a better forecaster than I am.