“This is the closest I’ve ever come to being a special forces commander.”
I’m currently sitting in the “command centre” with Oliver Chapman, a wiry 33-year-old special education teacher with short black hair, a gold chain and an effortless smile. Chapman has spent 15 hours prepping for this. He even has a two page strategy document open in front of him, a step-by-step guide with contingency plans for every possible outcome. His mission is simple: to find a way to get wave after wave of his commandos, sporting fake names and disguised identities, into a highly-guarded meeting. From there, they might be able to change the future.
The command centre in question, I should make clear, is a cramped closet-turned-office filled with Chapman’s synthesisers and guitars. The meeting is a Zoom call for the AGM for a tenant management organisation, and the strategy is four different screens, desperately trying to log in.
You might, quite fairly, be wondering what could be worth this storming of the Normandy beaches-style military operation. Well, the flat I’m currently sitting in is on the Loughborough Estate, one of south London’s biggest council estates and home to a very active and bizarre civil war between tenants and the Loughborough Estate Management Board (LEMB), the tenant’s management organisation that is supposed to use millions of pounds of council and resident’s money to look after the estate. It’s a group that for Chapman, and hundreds of other residents, has become the bane of their existence, and this meeting may be their only chance to get rid of them.
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