THE Prime Minister loses the election. When he arrives at Buckingham Palace, King Charles III assumes he will do the usual thing: resign, and advise the King to send for the leader of the biggest party in Parliament.

But this is no ordinary Prime Minister. This is Max Moore, charismatic leader of the Britons First Party, and he has no more intention of resigning just because the voters rejected him than Donald Trump did in 2016.

Can Max Moore get away with it? You’ll have to come to the theatre to find out. My play Make England Great Again opens at Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate Village, London, on September 30.  

Max Moore, like most far-right leaders, is vain and ludicrous as well as sinister, and provides much of the comedy in what I hope will be an entertaining night in the theatre. To create the character, I have drawn on Oswald Mosley, on my father who ran Mosley’s propaganda in the 1930s, and on more recent political figures.

I’m convinced that Britain’s unwritten constitution is at least as easy to destroy from within as the US system, or the Hungarian system, or the Israeli system, all of which are proving vulnerable to a determined authoritarian leader. It’s as easy as the Weimar Republic was for Hitler to destroy from within after 1933.

The leader of an extreme right government, once elected, attacks all competing sources of power — courts, Civil Service, media, unions, universities. Are the judges not giving the judgements we wish to have? Change the judges. Is the Civil Service not giving the advice we wish to hear? Change the Civil Service.

Britain is already being softened up for that treatment — hence the chilling Daily Mail headline in November 2016, “Enemies of the people,” when judges obstructed the will of the then-prime minister, Boris Johnson.

The momentum today is with the far right. It has the advantage over the left that it travels ideologically light. So while the left tears itself to pieces over trans rights, screaming “transphobe” and “misogynist” at each other, Donald Trump quietly benefits with the slogan: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” posing as the most unlikely defender of women’s rights in history.

My play asks: can it be stopped? It is no use waiting until after you have elected an authoritarian leader, then relying on the system to protect you.

In my vision of a dystopian world, the left is divided, and ineffective in government. History shows that the totalitarian right comes to power when the left fails.

In Germany in 1932, the poor were paying the price of the 1929 economic crisis, with soaring unemployment and a relentless squeeze on wages. The complacent social democrats failed to protect them, and the sectarian communists refused to work with the social democrats.  

Ninety two years later, the US Democratic Party did nothing about the hand to mouth way America’s poor have to live. They played elegant games of identity politics, and they handled the presidency as though it was the class prize for good behaviour and it was Joe’s turn. Donald Trump became president in January 2025.

There are still four years before the next election. Labour could kill off the threat if it makes a real difference to the lives of the poor, and behaves like the adult in the room on the left.

If it doesn’t, British democracy will probably fall victim to a real-life Max Moore. And my play gives us a taste — but only a taste — of what that might be like.  

Francis Beckett’s new play Make England Great Again opens at Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate Village on September 30. Box office: (020) 8340-3488, upstairsatthegatehouse.com.