This Book Tells us More About the Snobbery of its Author than a Future Reform Government

A review of What if Reform Wins (Bloomsbury, 2026) by Peter Chappell.

You wake up on a cold, grey day in 2030. Six months ago, Reform UK won a slim majority in the General Election and Nigel Farage, party leader and MP for Clacton, became Prime Minister. The United Kingdom teeters on the verge of war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. Bristol is practically wiped off the map by Biblical-style flooding (the fault of climate change, natch). As a consequence of defunding the BBC, Antiques Roadshow is cancelled – forever.

This is the dystopian nightmare imagined by Times reporter Peter Chappell in his new book, What if Reform Wins, published by Bloomsbury last week.

Naturally, all the usual suspects have decided this is chilling, visionary stuff. The front and back cover boast glowing reviews from the Guardian, and veteran political biographer Sir Anthony Seldon solemnly warns that “we all need to take this scenario very seriously, as Chappell’s invigorating book does”.

The trouble is, Chappell’s book doesn’t seem to take the prospect of a Reform government very seriously at all. Spoiler alert for the few among you who will read the book: Prime Minister Farage doesn’t make it past a year-and-a-half in No.10. His fictional government collapses after a convoluted series of events revolving around the UK’s withdrawal from the ECHR and Richard Tice’s proposed defence cuts mean that the budget fails to pass and – in one of the book’s two endings – Farage is convinced to resign. In the alternate ending, Farage refuses to go and is threatened with arrest.

If this sounds dramatic and implausible, that’s because it is. The book is equal parts sneering and hysterical. You get the sense that Chappell is genuinely horrified at the idea of the technocratic “grown-ups” leaving the proverbial room. Gone are Sir Keir Starmer (who has, in Chappell’s world, since been replaced by another faceless grey suit anyway) and his human-rights lawyers, civil-service mandarins, and policy wonks. Instead, we get a government led by “[military] veterans, self-employed accountants, professional landlords, driving instructors, pub landlords, farmers and call-centre managers”. The horror!

It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that Chappell finds such a scenario difficult to realistically imagine, despite this being the entire premise of the book. For a work that bills itself as being meticulously researched and based on “dozens of new interviews”, the scenarios it presents are almost entirely unrealistic. Take, for instance, the fact that Nigel Farage nearly ends up getting the Falklands invaded by Argentina, when Energy Secretary and newly minted baroness Andrea Jenkyns announces her plans to drill for oil off the coast there. (This forms part of Reform head of policy James Orr’s larger plan to “reverse Net Zero and reverse economic decline” to “fund a renewal of British Christian civilisation”.) Farage then decides to apparently send the entire British Armed Forces – including reservists – to defend the Falklands, thus leaving no troops available for when an apocalyptic-level flood threatens to decimate Bristol.

Why would Farage do this, you might ask. This is never really explained, but it also doesn’t need to be. Chappell, like many of his ilk, has no theory of mind for anyone who might be remotely Right-wing. As far as he is concerned, all those involved with the Reform UK project are simultaneously stupid and evil. It’s not important that the characters (and they are, for all intents and purposes, fictional characters with only a passing resemblance to their real-world namesakes) act in ways that are believable or sensible.

Chappell’s approach to writing What if Reform Wins can be boiled down to namedropping. While the scenarios he presents may be absurd, he clearly has done some research in that he knows his way around the Reform “inner circle”, as well as the broader Right-wing scene, decently enough for an outsider. Figures like Dan Jukes, one of Farage’s right-hand men, play a central role in the narrative, while names like Farage aide Jack Anderton, the Right-wing magazine Pimlico Journal, and the X-born concept of the “Yookay”are sprinkled in with sufficient frequency to suggest that Chappell knows vaguely what he’s talking about. Even Laurie Wastell, the host of the Daily Sceptic’s own Sceptic podcast, gets a mention – he is accused of mainstreaming far-Right activist Tommy Robinson by having him on as a guest to discuss, somewhat bizarrely, his mental health.

But this kind of insider wankery can only take Chappell so far, because he suffers from a remarkable lack of imagination. There may be nothing new under the sun, but you’d think Chappell could have at least given it a go. His vision of a Reform government feels oddly reductive, because practically all of his scenarios have played out before. Vote Leave mastermind and former Boris Johnson advisor Dominic Cummings, for example, reappears as a Reform strategist, but is fired after he criticises the Prime Minister. Sound familiar?

On the very same page, Farage is chucked out of a pub by an angry, plain-speaking West Country landlord, while visiting the scene of flood-stricken Bristol. Again, this might ring some bells, because almost the exact same thing happened to Keir Starmer in Bath, over a row about COVID-19 lockdown measures.

In a similar vein, Chappell’s Farage is constantly getting milkshaked – apparently the only liquid that anyone in this universe can think of to chuck at the Prime Minister.

All this makes for a confusing, inadvertently hilarious read. To give some credit to Chappell, he at least paints a colourful picture of a Reform government. Lee Anderson turns up to the election day count in a Reform-teal-coloured three-wheeled car that was used in the party’s anti-Motability campaign. Girlboss pornstar and unlikely Reform supporter Bonnie Blue pops up at one point to decorate the Earl Haig Memorial in Whitehall with a turquoise Hawaiian garland. There are t-shirt cannons galore.

What if Reform Wins tells us less about Reform UK than it does about the neurotic fantasies of its opponents. Chappell’s vision of a hypothetical Reform government is presented as frightening not just because of the repeated scandals, cataclysmic flooding, and possibility of all-out war. No, this future represents something much more terrifying in the mind of the liberal establishment – the idea that the people – those dreaded accountants, publicans and farmers – might one day get their hands on power.

Lauren Smith is a writer based in London.