The Art of the Impossible by Andrew Reid & Simon Carr

Paperback
Biteback
27 July 2023

Nothing like it had ever been done before. In the new year of 2019, the Brexit Party was nothing more than a website name registered on the internet. A hundred and one days later, it stood sixty-nine candidates across ten regions and became the largest single party in the European Parliament.

Along the way, it fought against establishment quangos, the courts, Parliament, the Speaker and the government – hammering the Conservatives so hard it forced the resignation of their Prime Minister – to win nearly twice as many seats as the UK’s next best-performing party and three times as many as Labour.

It was a success beyond anyone’s dreams (or, indeed, anyone’s worst nightmare). And this inside story of how it happened may serve as a manual of how to – and occasionally how not to – do it.

This unique book details the wild ride of a fledgling political party as it heads from triumph in the Euro elections to disaster in the general election six months later. It deals with setting up the entire administrative and political apparatus in an impossibly short time frame; losing key players to enemy action; and facing chaotic scenes created by a cat’s cradle of legal complications – before arriving at the conclusion that politics is much more difficult than it looks.