Whether you're an aspiring politician, a charity campaigner, a public affairs professional, or simply someone who wants to right a wrong, How to Influence the Government offers a toolkit for turning outrage into action and impact.

Government often feels distant, until some aspect of policy comes crashing into our lives. A child goes hungry when school closes for the holidays; a postmaster is unfairly accused of theft; a young woman is traumatized by explicit deepfakes of her on the internet. These are not abstract policy issues, but real lives – and they all began with the same thing: a failure of the system to protect the people it serves.

Each story in this book began with a private injustice and ended in a public victory. None of the people at the centre of these campaigns were traditional power brokers; they were footballers, parents, nurses, teachers, journalists, pensioners, students and activists – people who discovered that ordinary voices, multiplied and well-aimed, can move the machinery of state.

Across 10 chapters you will discover the tools that work: personal storytelling, data that bites, insider-outsider coalitions, perfectly timed nudges, and stubborn persistence that outlasts news cycles. From Marcus Rashford's campaign for free school meals, to the world's response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, this book draws lessons from successful UK and European campaigns that shaped national policy and shows how the government can be influenced when the stakes are at their highest.

How to Influence the Government will equip you with the insight and tools to replicate these victories. The people who changed the system weren't always loudest, richest, or most connected. But they were strategic and persistent. And above all, they believed that better was possible.