Does James O’Brien ever stop talking? Just two hours ago, the famously opinionated 51-year-old radio host was gabbing over the airwaves in his usual mid-morning LBC slot – interviewing the mayor of London, pillorying Boris Johnson, and butting heads with listeners over the Israel-Gaza protests. Speaking to me now via video from a dimly lit room in his home, he looks as sapped as you might expect. But give him a nudge – mention, for instance, the latest revelations from the Covid inquiry, in which WhatsApp evidence appeared to confirm suspicions about the shambolic nature of Johnson’s pandemic leadership – and like a set of wind-up chattering teeth, O’Brien snaps back into animation.
“I’m not a political journalist,” he says. “I’m not a lobby journalist. I just marvel at the madness of it all.” We’re chatting on the day Johnson’s ex-chief adviser Dominic Cummings is testifying. Messages have come to light in which Cummings claimed Johnson was “melting down” and referred to former deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara as “that c***”, while Johnson was revealed, in a diary entry by Sir Patrick Vallance, to have called Covid “nature’s way of dealing with old people”. Both figures feature prominently in O’Brien’s new book, How They Broke Britain, a laceration of modern British politics. “A central thrust of my book is the tragedy of having these idiots in charge when something awful happened,” O’Brien says. “Any fears I might have had that I exaggerated the awfulness of it, or the idiocy of them, dissipate with every syllable that comes out of Dominic Cummings’s mouth.”
