Picture the scene. It’s the morning of June 29 2029. The police presence on Whitehall, awaiting the arrival of the
newly elected prime minister, is the largest in history. The street is packed with furious protesters and jubilant supporters. The outgoing Labour PM – who had replaced Sir Keir Starmer a couple of years earlier – gives a short speech outside 10 Downing Street, and barely two hours later, to an almighty gust of booing and whooping, Nigel Farage stands behind the same lectern.
Is this your dream or your nightmare? Either way, it’s plausible. As the journalist Peter Chappell explains at the outset of his new book, as things stand in 2026, the party has “an army of nearly 300,000 members, an officer class of radical advisers and the support of Britain’s most generous political donors”. It’s consistently
ahead in the polls, with Labour behind and the Conservatives nowhere.
What If Reform Wins, then, offers a speculative account of the near future. It suggests what might happen in three years’ time if Farage converts that lead into victory – and the result, drawing on extensive interviews with real-life political experts, is by turns entertaining and downright terrifying.
First, with that election result comes a parliamentary revolution. “Starmer’s lawyers, journalists and doctors”, Chappell writes, “are trounced by veterans, self-employed accountants, professional landlords, driving instructors, pub landlords, farmers and call-centre managers, as well as financiers and landowners”. Danny Kruger enters the cabinet, and
Robert Jenrick returns to it (despite having attempted an internal coup against Farage in 202
.
Matt Goodwin manages, this time around, to beat his Green Party counterpart, and he enters the Commons too. Reform have an outright majority of 20 seats on a total of 335; Labour trail on 124, the Lib Dems on 70, and the Tories on a mere 23. Female representation drops to 22 per cent. Rishi Sunak loses his seat. Liz Truss hangs around Westminster hoping Farage will give her a job (he doesn’t).
Reform’s successful campaign promised a boycott of Turkish barbers, council-regulated quotas on the number of
vape shops and a pledge to “de-Islamify” Britain. The party is now seen as indistinguishable from its official mouthpiece, GB News. In one of the funniest scenes envisioned by Chappell, a sequin-clad Dame Andrea Jenkyns turns up at the broadcaster to mark her party’s victory
by singing a specially composed anthem: “When Britain first, at heaven’s command / Arose from out the turquoise main…” She goes on and on, and has to have her microphone cut.
A radical manifesto they can’t deliver on
Farage is jubilant, and celebrates with abundant
red wine. The next morning, he uses his first address to Britain to lay out his plans: Reform will withdraw the country from the ECHR, abolish indefinite leave to remain, disapply the Refugee Convention, dramatically expand deportations, boost detention capacity, defund the BBC, scrap net zero, repeal the Human Rights Act, cut disability benefits and “drain the Whitehall swamp”. Within a week, the Ministry of Defence has been renamed the War Office, Defra has become the Department for Water and Food Security, and the existing cabinet secretary has been sacked.
Almost immediately, things start to go wrong.
The SNP declares its intention to hold an immediate independence referendum, leaving Farage facing the prospect, should he lose, of becoming the PM who broke the United Kingdom. Internal tensions among Reform’s cavalier crew break out. Richard Tice, Farage’s chancellor, and Zia Yusuf, the policy unit chief, can’t stand each other.
Dominic Cummings has been hired as an adviser, but that predictably ends in his flouncing out. The PM struggles to get the new British Bill of Rights through the Commons; all the usual behind-the-scenes deals with opposition parties, to avoid getting snarled up in Parliament’s arcane procedures, have fallen by the wayside.
Then, in Kent, at Manston detention centre, riots break out. They culminate in the “Battle of Manston”, in which a Left-wing march to the site leads to chaos erupting, the place catching fire, migrants being beaten by police then escaping into the countryside, and home secretary Lee Anderson resigning. A snap poll in October puts Farage’s ratings at the lowest they’ve been since before his sudden rise in 2025.
Things go from bad to worse. Flash floods in Bristol devastate the city, killing four people. Reform has decimated the Environment Agency, so help isn’t easily forthcoming. The Army, so often Britain’s saviour in such moments, can’t help: its troops are on standby because Farage has accidentally almost started a war in the Falklands over oil drilling. (JD Vance, the US president refuses to back Farage, and in punishment recognises the islands as the Islas Malvinas.) An accident at a fracking project in Kent, green-lit by the government, pollutes its formerly “gin-clear” riverbeds. The Fourth Estate is under siege, too: Comcast Corporation buys ITV and
merges Sky and ITN, and the government turns its fire on the BBC, hounding out the director-general and installing Paul Dacre at the top.
Things come to a dramatic head after 15 months, in October 2030. Four weeks before Tice delivers his second Budget, Farage learns that the government’s decision to withdraw from the ECHR is, in the European Union’s eyes, a violation of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement signed by Boris Johnson in 2020. Without the TCA, the government faces, at long last, a no-deal Brexit. It will mean “tariffs imposed on goods and services, customs checks causing chaos at the border and a sea battle over fishing rights”. European goods look set to disappear from Britain’s supermarkets. House prices are likely to fall. Peace in Northern Ireland seems precarious.
Despite this, Tice presses ahead with his key announcements: a rise of the income tax threshold to £17,000; the abolition of the triple lock; a charge on NHS services. He also reduces Britain’s nuclear deterrent. The markets do not, to put it politely, react well. The whipping operation to get the Budget through the Commons fails dramatically. And at that point, Farage loses a vote of no confidence.
At this juncture, Chappell lays out two scenarios. In the first, Farage’s wife, Laure, tells him it’s time to stop, and he concurs. The PM goes to see the King – who, by this point, is 81 years old and grievously unwell – and tenders his resignation; His Majesty invites Jenrick to form a government, but it’s clear that Reform has irrevocably split, and a new general election has to be called. There, one version of the story ends.
But an alternative scenario, Chappell suggests, is more plausible. He cites one of the many sources on which he has drawn in writing this speculative account: “When asked to imagine Farage listening to someone telling him to stand down, one former Reform insider said: ‘Nobody could do it, Nigel’s an autocrat.’” It’s therefore more likely, Chappell suggests, that Farage would go rogue. “In this scenario, with a radical Right-wing Reform government unable to pass a budget and teetering on the brink of collapse, and Farage… holed up in Downing Street, it’s perfectly possible that he simply refuses to leave office.”
Farage vs the King
Even the pleas of the King, in line with the sovereign’s constitutional function, aren’t enough to sway the PM. Farage instead attempts to cut a deal with the
SNP, in return for a commitment to hold an independence referendum – a deal that risks destroying the UK. It is, in any case, publicly rejected, and with disgust, by the nationalist leader John Swinney. The House of Commons is in disarray; the Speaker won’t take her seat. Even the Chaplain refuses to pray before debates. In desperation, the Speaker’s deputy convenes a plan: Parliament will pass a humble address to the monarch, which will enable the King to demand Farage’s resignation. This is done – yet Farage still refuses to go. With all other options exhausted, an arrest is considered. The military, loyal to the Royal family, will, if needed, be sent into 10 Downing Street.
Laure once again goes into Farage’s study, through the
fug of cigarette smoke, to tell her husband the game is up. And finally, Farage sees reality. He quits and leaves in disgrace. An election is soon called, and after barely a year and a half in office, Reform is swept away. Chappell doesn’t predict which party takes power, but he notes that “it takes a year for the next prime minister to get the smell of cigarettes and the red wine stains out of the carpet”.
Chappell – as you might have gleaned – doesn’t attempt to mask his dislike of Reform. He introduces this book by suggesting that “each chapter is also an act of imagination intended to illustrate the vulnerability of Britain’s unwritten constitution, defunded institutions and fraying political norms to a hostile takeover”. What he illustrates is definitely a worst-case scenario.
But is it plausible, or merely ridiculous? To my mind, it’s a bit of both. Based on what Farage and Reform have promised should they be elected, Chappell’s scenarios have a ring of truth. It’s entirely possible, for instance, that if taken to their logical conclusion, Farage’s promises to crack down on immigration and
withdraw from the ECHR at top speed would result in the political chaos Chappell outlines.
And when you look at some of Reform’s more dubious supporters, it seems possible that with the party in power,
Tommy Robinson might become mainstream, and that there might indeed emerge a sinister figure such as Chappell’s fictional Dan Sambrook, the Reform-ist intellectual who promotes the strategy of “remigration”, or the forced mass deportation of foreign-born residents – a proposal which, to be fair, Chappell imagines the Reform government dismissing out of hand.
As for that government itself, you can only imagine it facing self-inflicted infighting. In the course of working on this piece, for example, the news broke that the property investment company owned by Richard Tice broke the law by failing to pay tens of thousands of pounds in tax. Reform has no experience of government, no institutional knowledge – the things you need simply to make a government work, and that’s when you haven’t also declared hostility to every institution and civil servant around.
Still, would so many things really go so wrong? Would Farage really be so intransigent if given the reins of power, and a chance to enact the policies that he has pushed for so long? In some ways, Chappell’s book reads like Sue Townsend’s 1992 novel
The Queen and I, in which a radical republican government boots the Royal family out of their palaces and sends them to live on a council estate – a scenario which does, indeed, turn out to be a nightmare, but hardly feels like it could plausibly happen by the end of this decade.
Then again, beware: recent global events have shown that it’s wise to take seriously what a radical outsider promises to do if elected. At the very least, it’s worth scrutinising carefully what Farage and Reform are promising, and how likely they seem to deliver it. Chappell has done so, and not by inventing things wholesale, but through weaving a narrative out of many interviews with people in the know: “Reform insiders, past and present, government ministers, civil servants, constitutional academics”, and more.
What If Reform Wins? gives us one version of the future. Maybe it isn’t far from the truth.
