For some years now, mainstream British politics has revolved increasingly obsessively around the question of how to stop Nigel Farage. What started a decade ago with Brexit may yet end in a general election that boils down to one question: do you 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 might mean in practice.

Of course, it might never happen. But if it did, what exactly would Farage do with a majority that enabled him to fulfil his wildest dreams? And how well would an unwritten British constitution, still heavily reliant on good chaps voluntarily being good chaps, cope with full-fat populism?

This is terrifically rich territory for a book, but what makes Times reporter Peter Chappell’s take so readable is its boldness. Though based on conversations with civil servants, Reform insiders and others, it’s pitched not as a piece of conventional analysis but as a story: a lively and often witty political thriller that both is and isn’t fiction, sketching the imagined arc of a Reform government from triumph to disaster.

It’s a high risk approach that requires an author to back his hunches, not least about how the world might look at the next general election (by which time Chappell assumes Keir Starmer will have been  replaced, and Donald Trump succeeded on health grounds by JD Vance). Though some of his bolder bets – that the head of MI5 would just delete embarrassing bits of Farage’s file so as not to upset the new PM, or that Peter Kyle would end up acting Labour leader after a defeat – seem rather far-fetched to me, others are carefully grounded in events from the recent past. Meanwhile there’s enough gossipy detail about the coffee stains on Downing Street carpets, the weird way a particular character dresses, or personality clashes within Reform to lend it the smack of authenticity.

Given the party’s plans for vast areas of British national life remain at best hazy, the drama focuses on three issues where its ambitions are clear: immigration, scrapping net zero and cutting taxes. What follows is a tale of irresistible force hitting immovable objects that makes the Liz Truss era look positively well organised, with an unexpected role for (no spoilers) an old enemy returning in a new guise.

His semi-fictional Farage’s first act is to withdraw from the European convention on human rights and disapply the 1951 refugee convention, clearing the path for mass deportations, abolishing indefinite leave to remain and sending navy gunboats into the channel to turn back small boats. From there he moves on to war with the BBC. Events unfold at a zippy pace, with drier factual material about, say, what powers parliament has to contain him woven into the narrative.

Though the focus is firmly on power struggles in Whitehall rather than on the human consequences for vulnerable people, this is at heart a moral fable in the sense that it’s constructed to convey a warning: chiefly, that the British system concentrates startling amounts of power in the hands of a prime minister with a majority and no squeamishness about using it. A future Prime Minister Farage could legally go to war without consulting parliament, fire civil servants who block him, and potentially wield sweeping emergency powers if he chose to invoke the civil contingencies act (for example, in response to mass protests). The biggest constraint on his ambitions might come not from parliament or from the streets, but simply from logistics, or the tendency for ideological wishlists written on the back of fag packets to collapse on contact with reality.

Without giving too much away, the fault lines it identifies within Reform – including the risk of infiltration by extremists, represented here by a strictly imaginary character who nonetheless strongly reminds me of a real person hovering somewhere near its fringes – are realistic enough. As a “nonfiction thriller”, it’s convincing. As an analysis of Reform in power, my only worry is that Chappell may be too optimistic about the speed with which things fall apart. Let’s hope he’s a better forecaster than me.

‘One of my Hinge prompts is: ‘What’s the best book you read this year?’ and I swipe left on anyone who says a book I don’t like,” says 29-year-old Ayo*. “Someone once replied with a book by Jordan Peterson, which was a massive ick.”

It’s a blunt approach to romance, but Ayo is far from alone. Books have long functioned as cultural shorthand for personality – signals of taste and worldview – but dating apps have accelerated and intensified that process. In an attention economy that rewards speed, these signifiers have to be legible at a glance.

“I prefer contemporary literary fiction or interesting classics in the broadest sense,” Ayo says. “Authors such as Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, Annie Ernaux – if someone mentions one of those, I’ll be impressed and intrigued. And if it’s a Fitzcarraldo, I’m more likely to match regardless of whether I’ve read it or not.”

The modern dating profile is something of a compressed CV. Saying you love romance might hint at emotional openness; fantasy or sci-fi might suggest nerdiness; poetry gestures at sensitivity; modernism at seriousness (or at least the desire to appear serious). Plus, the thrill of spotting someone who loves the same novel as you can feel like fate.

Platform data shared with the Guardian suggests daters are increasingly leaning on book-based signals. In the last year, mentions of reading in Tinder bios in the UK are up 29% overall and 41% among women. On dating app Feeld, about 7% of UK profiles explicitly mention reading; users who connect with other readers are almost 10% more likely to report a “meaningful connection”. On Hinge, “book” is one of the most frequent words that daters around the world share in their responses to the prompt “My simple pleasures”.

Data from freelancer platform 99designs released this month showed that 42% of Americans want a partner who reads regularly, and 38% find profiles that mention books more attractive. The message is clear: books are doing some very heavy lifting in the dating economy.

“It’s not hard to see the appeal,” says Luke Brunning, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Leeds and co-director of its Centre for Love, Sex and Relationships. “The excitement of seeing someone who enjoys the niche book you love can be real, abiding and tell us something about their taste and character.”

Erinne Paisley, a researcher studying digital intimacy at the University of Copenhagen, agrees. “We live in an age of anxiety and some of this can be a connection to safety – we want to get a full picture of someone because the version of ourselves on dating apps is fragmented,” she says.

These signals are increasingly sorted into the language of “green flags” and “red flags” – a discourse turbocharged by social media, where certain titles or genres are treated as instant proxies for someone’s values, politics or emotional availability.

The paradox is that books are now both a badge of authenticity and a performance. That tension – between actual taste and strategic signalling – maps on to the “performative men” discourse: the suspicion that some men curate feminist politics or literary taste as a dating strategy rather than them being their authentically held beliefs and preferences.

Caitlin, 25, has seen both sides of this. “At university I was in a life-shattering ‘situationship’ with a guy who ran a Ulysses book group,” she says. “Even at the time, when I really liked him, I thought it was a bit of an ick. I’ve still never read it because of that dating experience.” Dating someone a few years later, she was initially thrilled to see Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own on a man’s bookshelf alongside a host of books by women – a green flag, she thought, proof of feminist sensibilities. “And then he just turned out to be terrible, too.”

Others also describe the letdown when the performance collapses in real life. “I had a Ben Lerner Hinge prompt up for six months in the hopes that one day someone would reply, and they’d be the one,” says Ella*. The prompt did eventually get her a date: “Unfortunately, he wasn’t it – just a lawyer who lectured me on Tarkovsky.” Harry’s* worst date was with someone whose profile said she was writing a book, only for her to admit over drinks that she had completed an English literature degree without reading a single book and couldn’t name one she enjoyed.

But dating shortcuts can also risk flattening people into types, and can sometimes invite bias. A love of airport novels doesn’t preclude emotional or intellectual depth, just as a shelf of modernist doorstoppers doesn’t guarantee it.

“Classism is the major risk,” Brunning says. “There can be many reasons why some people cannot read, read less than us, read different material to us, or are hesitant to disclose their reading habits. We should be careful not to let our prejudices exclude these people as potential partners.”

Paisley also worries that there is a risk of turning dating into a consumer exercise, where people are discarded for minor mismatches in taste rather than engaged with as complex, evolving individuals.

“Red flag discourse can be helpful when referring to dangerous or harmful behaviour, but it also can be harmful in that it encourages us to find a partner who ticks every box, who we have an initial spark with, and with whom that spark never wavers,” she says. “This isn’t how relationships always work. Think about friendships – there will be times of growth and negotiation.” If books have become dating shorthand, then perhaps they should be taken as a rough translation at best.

*Some names have been changed

Elijah Wood has said that his salary for The Lord of the Rings movies was “not massive” and that appearing in the films was “a real gamble”.

According to a report in Business Insider, which carried quotes from the star at the Texas film awards in March, Wood said the fact that the actors had to sign up for all three films at the start meant that their fees were not related to the film’s financial success. “Because we weren’t making one movie and then renegotiating a contract for the next, it wasn’t the sort of lucrative scenario that you could sort of rest easy for the rest of your life.”

Wood, who played Frodo Baggins in the trilogy of films directed by Peter Jackson and adapted from the epic novels by JRR Tolkien, said the actors understood the significance of the project. “The benefit of that was that we were also signing up for something that was going to be a part of our lives for ever.”

It has been previously suggested that Wood earned about $250,000 (£190,000) for the first film, but the actor told Business Insider that this figure was not accurate and that “it doesn’t matter”.

The size of the fees paid to the cast of The Lord of the Rings compared to stars of other Hollywood movies has often been noted, with Cate Blanchett, who played the elf Galadriel in the series, saying on the Watch What Happens Live talk show in 2024 that she “basically got free sandwiches” and “no one got paid anything”. Orlando Bloom, who played Legolas, said in 2019 that he had been paid $175,000 for all three films, while Sean Astin (Samwise Gamgee) said he got $250,000.

Released between 2001 and 2003, Jackson’s three-film series grossed $2.96bn at the worldwide box office, with a reported budget of $281m.