How They Broke Britain

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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. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{

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.” 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”.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.

Tishani Doshi shares work from her recent collection A God at the Door alongside conversation with… 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. 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.

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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. 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.

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’. The former Sex Pistol John Lydon once said that anger was an energy. James O’Brien has enough to light up the national grid. 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.In his forthcoming book, ‘How They Broke Britain’, LBC’s James O’Brien discusses the shady network of influence that has created a broken Britain of strikes, shortages and scandals. He maps the web connecting dark think tanks to Downing Street, the journalists complicit in selling it to the public and the media bosses pushing their own agendas. 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.

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? 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.” How They Broke Britain thrives on inference and the merging of often unrelated things. O’Brien repeatedly invokes the Russian spectre, dwelling on Cummings’s stint in Moscow and Matthew Elliot’s co-founding of Conservative Friends of Russia – yet it leaves such allusions vague. Perhaps because there has never been a shred of credible evidence that Russian interference impacted the Brexit outcome, the links are necessarily tenuous.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.