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How They Broke Britain

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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. 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’.

Towards the end, he assesses how Johnson was priming himself for a return to Number 10 in the wake of Liz Truss’s disastrous stint as PM, entirely confident he’d have his party’s full support despite – well, despite everything. “The detachment from reality was complete.”

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

The former Sex Pistol John Lydon once said that anger was an energy. James O’Brien has enough to light up the national grid. 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. 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.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. 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 …”

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

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. 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 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”. O’Brien: ‘Both sides will find it very hard to forgive me for being right.’ Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian Our economy has tanked, our freedoms are shrinking, and social divisions are growing. Our politicians seem most interested in their own careers, and much of the media only make things worse. We are living in a country almost unrecognisable from the one that existed a decade ago. But whose fault is it really? Who broke Britain and how did they do it?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.

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