QAnon for centrist dads

It is January 2030. The Cultural Reformation is launched to shore up power after the disastrous Great Leap Reformward — the Backyard Chip Fabricator drive having ended in total failure. Professors and civil servants are hauled into Reformaoist struggle sessions as part of the Anti-Wokist Campaign. The “Little Turquoise Book” becomes required reading in schools. Pensioners chase down young professionals to steal their wallets — made legal by the quintuple lock policy. This isn’t quite the world described by Times reporter Peter Chappell in his new book, What If Reform Wins, but it’s not too far off either.

What If Reform Wins cannot decide whether it is a forecast, a thriller, or a morality play. Despite supposedly being based on “dozens” of interviews with supposed “insiders”, the events of the book are a Rube-Goldberg machine of increasing complexity and absurdity. A book like this can be difficult to review without merely repeating all the plot points, as they are so implausible as to invite derision, but a short summary may help illustrate.

In the early segments, we have Lee Anderson arrive at his count in a three-wheeled turquoise anti-Motability propaganda car. Meanwhile, Farage causes embarrassment to the King by immediately mentioning fracking in a discussion about Kent’s natural beauty.

It only gets worse from there. Mere months after scrapping Net Zero targets, Bristol is annihilated by floods worthy of Roland Emmerich. Furthermore, a diplomatic spat over drilling for oil in the Falklands leads to no military personnel being available to help. We are told that all troops, including reservists, are being readied — assuming that the numbers are similar to today, that means roughly 75,000 regulars and 25,000 reservists have been mobilised to defend the islands. While the parlous state of the forces is well known, who knew it was quite that bad? (For context, we needed just 7,500 land forces to retake the islands in 1982.) This culminates in an angry President JD Vance formally recognising the Argentine claim as “punishment” for the fiasco, despite Farage complying with all his demands.

The collapse of Farage’s government is perhaps the most spectacular part. In one of the two endings presented, Farage refuses to vacate Downing Street after losing complete control of the House and failing to get a budget passed. The entire cabinet resigns and the communications director, Dan Jukes, is last seen fleeing the country. If you squint, it parallels stories you might find in QAnon forums. 

Most of the characters mentioned are real people, with some fictionalisations meant to represent ideas, although they appear to act in ways entirely contrary to their real-world counterparts. Mr Chappell has appeared to do enough research to speak convincingly on his subject to the passer-by, but anyone with a modicum of knowledge would be aware that these people would not behave in this manner.

One of the most grievous episodes is the invented character of Dan Sambrook, an “anonymous” contributor to the Pimlico Journal who first appears to us on a BBC panel covering the election. His multi-page rant on the show meanders through all the usual tropes: mentions of “cultural Marxism” and arguing Nigel’s most important task is to “de-Islamify” Britain. This is what a left-winger with no understanding of the arguments being made by right-wingers believes a right-winger sounds like.

The speed at which What If Reform Wins was worked on, and the lack of editing, is evident. We are told about the “‘Human Rights Act 2001” (the correct year is 1998). The Chief of the Defence Staff is referred to as “General” Knighton, though Sir Richard Knighton is an Air Chief Marshal of the RAF. We are also expected to believe that, in a moment in which the newly-resurrected ghost of right-wing governments past Dominic Cummings wishes to exploit a crisis using the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, he must be schooled by a nameless official that this legislation cannot be used to override the Human Rights Act. 

Many of the scenarios display a total failure of imagination. The “Yookay Community”, in this telling, is a collection of anonymous accounts with links to Russia pushing AI slop, rather than normal people documenting the state of the country as it already is, having wisely decided to keep their own names private after decades of cancel culture were waged solely against the right to prevent that kind of thing exactly. He also appears to believe that the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport would still exist. Several Westminster psychodramas — Cummings loses his new job for briefing against the PM – are not extrapolations, but transpositions of the Johnson to Starmer years. We are then treated to a feverish James Orr speech in which fracking magically becomes the foundation stone of restored British Christianity. Our characters are somehow both evil Machiavellian super-geniuses, while at the same time totally inept.

The book seems most geared for “political insiders”. The name-dropping is almost incessant, particularly in the early chapters, and the author has a penchant for the Westminster rigmarole. There is also a classic left-wing sanctimonious element — much is made of the relative youth of Farage’s team, and at one point there is a line that their MPs have been “selected for loyalty rather than their ability to scrutinise legislation”, as if other parties are diligent in quizzing their prospective MPs’ intellects.

Chappell has opted for a nonlinear narrative for this story. While there is an understandable grouping of “themes” in this choice, it makes for confusing reading. Cummings features prominently in one chapter, is fired in the next, and makes a surprise reappearance later on. It has the effect of weakening the narrative and making the book seem more like an anthology of scary stories for children rather than a coherent storyline.

Hysterical speculative fiction is nothing new. Invasion literature, in which authors imagined hypothetical foreign invasions of Britain by marauding (usually German) armies, was wildly popular in the late 19th to early 20th centuries. This book seems to fit into the genre. One could easily write What If the Greens Win, in which the country is subjected to rolling blackouts and mobs of disaffected youths looting helpless M&S shops. In fact, this might be more believable.

While the book has already been rubber-stamped by the “sensible”, anti-Faragist commentators such as Alastair Campbell and Sir Anthony Seldon, any serious reader will obtain a copy more for the comedy than realistic analysis. Anyone who follows politics in a sober way will know that Reform is, at minimum, attempting to professionalise: hiring policy and research staff, building a larger party machine, and preparing itself for government. Those not so plugged-in to the vicissitudes of SW1 will be utterly confused at the names of people they’ve never heard of. It is the imaginings of the most ideological Guardian reader of what a Reform government will look like.

One can only hope that the real people conscripted into Chappell’s fantasy manage to borrow a copy and have a laugh. They might even find some useful suggestions buried in the panic: reducing Civil Service headcount, rolling back Net Zero, and making people pay to use the NHS. They might even want to consider hiring him for their policy team.