When I meet James O’Brien it’s just a few weeks before his new book, How They Broke Britain, comes out. It’s a damning account of how the country ended up in the current mess, and the cast of characters he holds most responsible – Rupert Murdoch, Jeremy Corbyn and Andrew Neil are among those given their own chapters. As is Liz Truss, whose lettuce-spanning, economy-wrecking premiership is held as the inevitable conclusion to having had our political and media ecosystems polluted with lies and corruption for years.
It’s a neat ending, but O’Brien worries he might have jumped the gun. It’s the Conservative party conference when we speak, and, given some of the frankly barmy news coming out of it – will Nigel Farage re-join the Conservatives? Could Liz Truss be Tory leader again? – he’s wondering if we’ve yet to reach the nadir of this bleak political period. Should he still be writing it?
“There’s 50% of me that thinks I should because this stuff drives straight into the heart of it,” he says. “But the other bit of me thinks this is perfect, because I explore themes like the ‘Farageification’ of the Tory party, and up pops Farage dancing with Priti Patel. I couldn’t really ask for more compelling proof of my thesis.”
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.
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.”
It could be the espresso that perks O’Brien up today, but I sense it’s the switching on of my dictaphone. He loves to talk and he’s incredibly good at it – he can be incisive, exploratory, damning, quick-witted, empathetic and comforting all in the space of an hour of his show. He can also be, less positively, a bit smug and pompous at times, especially a few years ago when he would take great joy in endlessly dismantling the flimsy arguments of members of the public who called into his show. This is a man who once wrote a book, published with his face on the cover, called How to Be Right.
Certainly, O’Brien is not without his critics. From the right, the likes of Dominic Raab make out that he is a dangerously leftwing firebrand. Some on the left view him as nothing more than a Tory in leftist clothing. In reality, he sits fairly centrally, a Starmer-praising “grownup” loved by the remain-voting #FBPE (FollowBackProEU) crowd, described by a friend of mine as “the ultimate centrist dad”. He leans left on many issues, but tends to equivocate when things get knotty – shortly after our interview, the situation in Gaza erupts and O’Brien wonders on air whether or not Israel should have to follow international law.
O’Brien might inspire ire, but these days he is less combative – the result, he says, of having therapy for the anger he carried around with him (“It helped me to understand why I’d lived my life with my fists up”). He listens more than fights, and as a result has learned more about the experience of people who admit to having “fallen” for the false promises of the Tory party. “When they’re gracious enough to tell you that you’ve helped change their mind, you feel almost a kind of responsibility to try to explain the stuff that’s happening not in plain sight,” he says of his book.
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.
“It was important to get it down on paper as soon as possible because the speed with which things are glossed over and forgotten is supersonic,” says O’Brien. “There will be lots of people who, on every other page, will go ‘Oh, blimey. I kind of half knew that, but didn’t know that at all.’”
These are the people at whom the book is primarily aimed – not Westminster anoraks but the politically curious who realise something has gone badly wrong in this country but haven’t fully joined the dots. “Something’s broken in Britain, and what it is is the fundamental relationship with objective truth,” says O’Brien. “So I hope this book becomes some sort of Rosetta Stone, or at least a compass to navigate the oceans of bullshit.”
Of course, reliving the whole sorry mess can be pretty depressing. Like O’Brien’s show if you listen too often (“You can’t listen too often!” he protests), it can leave you feeling incensed but impotent. “Well, it’s not a solution. It’s not a prescription,” he accepts. But he hopes that if people see how the corruption works behind the scenes then the anger might be easier to deal with. “You can be angry about a disgusting pronouncement from a home secretary about refugees. But if you see it as the culmination of a process, I think anger dissipates. The more comprehension there is, ideally, the less incoherent anger there will be.”
There are critics of O’Brien who have no time for his anger, though. They point out that when Jeremy Corbyn came along, a politician offering radical change and a set of policies very much aligned with O’Brien’s own, he swiftly declared him unelectable. O’Brien thinks the criticism is overstated. The vast majority of his radio shows were based around the “awfulness of Boris Johnson”, he says. Plus, he actually voted for Corbyn’s Labour party in both 2017 and 2019, albeit mainly because he liked his own constituency MP (Brentford and Isleworth’s Ruth Cadbury) and hoped the likes of Keir Starmer – then shadow secretary for exiting the EU – could help prevent a cataclysmic Brexit. “But, by 2019, I knew it was a lost cause, due largely to [Corbyn’s] personal defects and to his track record. And also because I’m a phone-in host, and I had people ringing me up every day to tell me what they think about politics. I was probably the least surprised person in Britain when research suggested he was the main reason people didn’t vote for Labour.”
It’s a little frustrating reading O’Brien’s chapter on Murdoch’s pernicious influence – in which he bemoans how even Tony Blair and Gordon Brown felt they had to placate the media mogul. Surely Corbyn was the first mainstream party leader to shun the Murdoch press and attempt to speak to voters via other platforms?
“Well, you have to take Murdoch on,” he says. “They didn’t pick fights with anyone. They just sat around congratulating each other on the purity of their ideology. They could have gone after the Mail. Ed Miliband did!”
Well, yes, and we all know what happened there.
O’Brien himself has been on what you might call a political journey. Born to a teenage single mother, he was adopted at 28 days old and raised by loving parents in Kidderminster. He didn’t enjoy school – he was beaten by one former headteacher and developed the gift of the gab in order to avoid fights with other kids – and says by the time he enrolled at the London School of Economics he simply wasn’t very politically engaged at all. When he ended up on the radio, he could be found espousing views that he cringes at now. “I’d have argued that we needed stricter teachers. I was horrible about obesity, very stupid about stuff like that.”
In 2008, O’Brien voted for Boris Johnson to become the Conservative mayor of London. “I just wasn’t paying attention,” he admits. He liked the proposal of an amnesty for illegal immigrants. “Ken Livingstone seemed to be going a little bit off the deep end, and Johnson seemed to be an affable, bouncy character.”
Plus, he says, “no one had done what I’ve now done in a book at that point in history”. While it may be true that there were no books dedicated to Johnson’s failings at that time (unlike the ones that litter the shelves of bookshops now), there was more than enough documented evidence that he was not fit for office. Even back in 2008 many of us were as incredulous at the thought of voting for Johnson as he was at the idea of voting for Brexit. How did it happen?
“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.”
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.
“I don’t think it is doomed yet,” he says. “But I’m probably closer to thinking that than I was at the time. Looking at it now through the lens of what I’ve just written, it was never going to happen, was it? But I was young and naive in 2018 – and now I’m wizened and cynical.”
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?
“Yeah. I mean, you have to, don’t you? Up to a point. He’s electable, at least.” He points out the way Sadiq Khan has introduced policies of “some heft within his quite limited purview”, such as free school meals for every primary school child in London and the Ulez expansions. “But I don’t think Starmer’s going to come out of the blocks at 100 miles an hour. And I think he may continue to be too scared of spooking the horses.” If he turns out to be a disappointment, then O’Brien says he will “have the enormous privilege of pointing that out on a daily basis and giving him just as much of a kicking as I would give to somebody from anywhere else in British politics who let us down in that way”.
Like Starmer, O’Brien is not a stranger to equivocating. For all his fiery rhetoric around equality, I’m surprised that he has stayed on the fence on the issue of trans rights. “I just don’t want to call anybody a liar,” he says. “So if someone believes that they were born in the wrong body, I don’t want to call them a liar. And if somebody believes that their personal security is threatened by that person using the same amenities that they use, I don’t want to call them a liar either.”
It’s a kind of logic he might not apply to homophobia or racism, which can be equally driven by fear.
“You’re trying to trick me into saying something that’s going to really upset other people,” he says. I’m actually not – if anything I’m attempting to unpick his logic in the way he does to so many of his callers. I offer an example of someone being afraid to send their child to a class with a gay teacher – it’s a genuine fear, but a baseless one. But O’Brien says there are no parallels. I get a little lost in his reasoning, but he seems to be saying that he can argue people out of a fear of gay people or immigrants using logic, but not transgender people.
“Yes. Intellectually, I think I can talk them round,” he says.
But you don’t think you can talk them round on this?
“I don’t think I can.”
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.
Are these questions unfair?
“Oh, perfectly fair, no outrage archaeology,” he says sarcastically, referring to the practice of finding things from someone’s past in order to make them look bad in the present.
Isn’t it good to have an opportunity to set the record straight on some of these things?
“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 …”
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.
Perhaps this is the burden that comes with being the “ultimate centrist dad” – you plough on through the centre ground, pointing out what seem to be blazingly obvious political truths, and, all the while, people from both sides of the political spectrum throw brickbats at you. O’Brien is used to it by now. As he says, bringing things back to the polarised politics of our time: “It was all a scam if you’re a Corbyn fan, and it was all a witch hunt if you’re a Johnson fan. And I’m afraid they are identical positions.” Then he adds, in a phrase that might be described as pure, distilled O’Brien: “Both sides will find it very hard to forgive me for being right.”
How They Broke Britain by James O’Brien (Ebury Publishing, £20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
