How They Broke Britain

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You can’t have your face on the cover of your book and not be a brand, and his requires him to be firmly on one side – the other side – when he must know that aspects of the current politics of the left are just as muddled, fractious and potentially dangerous as those of the right. A man can’t fall out with everyone! Personally, I’m as suspicious as he is of the Mail’s newfound support for freedom of speech on university campuses. But this doesn’t mean that free speech isn’t a real problem, or that some liberal-left men haven’t abdicated all responsibility for asking questions about it, particularly as it pertains to women’s rights, the better to have an easier, more saintly seeming life.

The more comprehension there is, ideally, the less incoherent anger there will be’ … O’Brien at LBC. Dominic Cummings is also present and incorrect, while Liz Truss is the sole woman to make the grade, though Nadine Dorries and Suella Braverman receive honourable mentions. Together, he says, their accomplishments are monumental: Brexit, financial crises, the mishandling of Covid, blatant xenophobia. It wasn’t like I went into that voting booth going, ‘Yay, Boris!’” he says. “I went into that voting booth, probably 52/48, and went the wrong way.” He flashes a smile at this – an unbelievably impish one. “So, again, it’s an odd thing to drag up 15 years later.” Everyone here is “awful” or “stupid”. Jeremy Corbyn is “pitiful”, Liz Truss merely “over-promoted”. Intriguingly, he seems almost fond of Dominic Cummings. “He’s clearly mad as a box of frogs, but I think he is driven by demons rather than defined by them.”Each baddie gets a chapter: Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre and Andrew Neil represent the press; Nigel Farage, David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss are his politicians; Matthew Elliott and Dominic Cummings of Vote Leave bring up the rear (like a pantomime horse). All 10 more than deserve his ire, and ours; there seems little point in my going over their entitlement and casual destruction here. But in the end, even as O’Brien worries about divisiveness and polarisation in Britain, he also engenders it to a degree, for hasn’t he signed up wholesale to what I’m going to call, for reasons of concision, a woke agenda? At first glance, Dorries and O’Brien seem to be writing on two sides of the same coin. Their titles both have an air of conspiracy theory, and they both seek to blame one quarter for most of the country’s political decline. There are, however, two essential differences between them. O’Brien, of course, doesn’t want to work at the BBC. He values his “voice” too much for that, which is why he opted not to continue presenting Newsnight – though to my mind, his job at LBC, where he spends his time dismantling the opinions of the people who call in, wastes what talent he has. Surely he would be able to do more good, journalistically speaking, at the BBC than at LBC – a station where one of the presenters, Rachel Johnson, the sister of our former prime minister, once interviewed her father, Stanley, about the state of Britain’s rivers. But perhaps doing good isn’t the point for him. One of the other problems with How They Broke Britain is that however forensically it catalogues the misdemeanours of various politicians, journalists and strategists, it is just that: a catalogue. What needs to be done? Will things be different under a Labour government? Are we all doomed? O’Brien only (inadvertently) answers the last question.

Wearing a baseball cap and trainers, O’Brien is quiet and looks a little dazed as we wait for pre-interview coffee. He has come straight from his show, three hours of frenetic talk radio on LBC, which “can be tiring”, he admits. Somewhat incredibly, he has been doing this now for almost 20 years, although many listeners only started paying attention in the lead-up to Brexit, which is when O’Brien became a household name. Perhaps surprisingly for someone who enjoys a bit of a row, O’Brien appears a little irked by my questions, even if therapy has taught him to be calmer in response. “If you’d asked me unfair questions 10 years ago, I would have responded to you in a much more aggressive fashion,” he says. James O’Brien: ‘relies almost entirely for his text on the hard labour – the investigations, and the thinking – of others’. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian Given O’Brien has written a book on how Britain is broken, I wonder if he has any idea how it might be fixed again. Does he believe in Starmer’s ability to sort it?O’Brien’s interview with Nigel Farage (above) was a masterclass in how to dismantle a phony personality. Photograph: Sébastien Bozon/AFP/Getty Images First is that fact that O’Brien uses verifiable evidence to support all of his claims, whereas Dorries relies cryptically on a sort of ‘insider knowledge’, and refers to the key puppet-masters only by pseudonyms like ‘Dr No’. During that tumultuous time his show became an oasis of sanity for many on the remain-voting left – here was someone, often with his head in his hands, pointing out the damage we were about to inflict on ourselves, in a way that other media outlets seemed bizarrely afraid to do. His forensic 2014 interview with a clearly unprepared Farage was a masterclass in how to dismantle a phony persona in under 20 minutes. “I get thanked out and about, and people can get emotional,” O’Brien says. “Sometimes they say, ‘Your show was the only place where what I could see as reality was being accurately described.’ And that’s what I’ve tried to do in the book.” Have you heard of James O’Brien? He’d be very hurt if not. But if you fall into that category, you might wonder what qualifies him to write a state-of-the-nation book: is he a former prime minister, a great academic, an archbishop? Alas, no.

I feel a bit bad for O’Brien – his chapter on Andrew Neil and the ushering into the public sphere of shady, opaque groups such as the Institute of Economic Affairs (whose output Neil published while editor of the Sunday Times) was fascinating, not least his explanation of just how intertwined groups such as the Tax Payers’ Alliance and the Adam Smith Institute became – and how easily their spokespeople have been allowed to appear on the BBC and in the press. Could we have spent more time talking about his book? The truth is that, while I enjoyed it, I found it hard to disagree with the many chapters suggesting Johnson, Paul Dacre, Dominic Cummings et al have been malign influences on the country. What interests me more are the conflicts between O’Brien’s radio persona – “the conscience of liberal Britain” – and his actual desire for status-quo-shaking change. To be fair, O’Brien mentions it himself a lot (even in the new book). It’s a tool he uses to connect with the people who voted for Brexit – he was conned once, too! And it’s an effective one. The fact that he has changed his politics should really be seen as a positive thing. I’m surprised to hear he is even coming round to thinking that his pet project – a campaign for a second referendum on leaving the EU – might have been a bad idea. Then there is Dorries’ underlying assumption that everyone was in it together, that the coup against Johnson was perfectly coordinated and agreed on by everyone involved. O’Brien suffers from no such persecution mania. He has the sense to see that it was not one grand master conspiracy, but that Britain was broken “sometimes by design” and “sometimes by incompetence”.Tishani Doshi shares work from her recent collection A God at the Door alongside conversation with… O’Brien, a man of the Left, is not a one-note pigeon, and he lays into Jeremy Corbyn as fiercely as into any one of the right-wing conspirators. And, even aside from the ten people who get their own chapters, the smaller fry is not spared either, whether political bullies like Dominic Raab or hatemongers like Douglas Murray. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Yeah, no, of course it is,” he says. “I just thought somehow we might talk about how brilliant my book is for an hour.” Another impish smile. “Are you not interested in the thinktank stuff? I thought Guardian readers might want to know a bit more about that …”

How They Broke Britain makes no secret of being about personalities, but its biggest flaw is never reaching beyond them. Nowhere does O’Brien begin to contemplate the reasons behind the surge of populism he so despises, beyond “shady think tanks”, “racist tabloids” and “lying politicians”. Anyone concerned about high migration is cast as either irrational or bigoted. Yet the personality that looms largest in this book, and perhaps the source of its greatest issues, is his own. The journalists, think-tankers and politicians who broke Britain have all delegated the blame for it onto the “wokerati”. To these people – all of them right-wing, and most of them Tory – I would put only one question. O’Brien does not specifically ask it. Nonetheless it is an important one to raise. The question is: Given that wokery came about on the Tory Party’s watch, how can they seriously fight an election on an anti-woke platform? I once asked this of a Conservative MP who was giving a talk at my college. He couldn’t give an answer. The saddest thing about this story of national decline is that none of the right people will ever read it. There will remain those who believe that austerity was the right decision after Labour “maxed out our credit card”; who continue to harp on about Brexit benefits; and who say Liz Truss really had the right ideas but was brought down by the “left-wing establishment”.Taking this conversation on tour, one of the UK’s most popular talk radio hosts will discuss how a select few have conspired – sometimes by incompetence, sometimes by design – to bring Britain to its knees. O’Brien: ‘Both sides will find it very hard to forgive me for being right.’ Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian Today, in the wake of Brexit, Britain is once again broken – so argues commentator James O’Brien in his new book, How They Broke Britain. Given the endless crises and scandals that have occurred over the past half-decade or so, it’s easy to forget some of the squalid behaviour that went on. How They Broke Britain, then, feels like a useful document to have – O’Brien’s scathing voice provides a thorough record of the self-serving actions and pronouncements of those who have held power in Britain.