How They Broke Britain

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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.” Further still, If you read the book, you can see he is dressing himself up as a changed man, compassionate and appreciative of the poor and being a good father figure to his daughter, as well as never forgetting or disrespecting his parents in his perfect family entity. It is all so contrived and I don't believe a bit of it. It is almost bizarre when he describes himself as a war like alpha male and suggests he had to change to be the compassionate person he is – again he is trying to dress himself up – parading to the crowd*AGAIN* – it is PATHETIC.

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.Clive James on (election) TV". The Independent. 30 May 2001 . Retrieved 25 April 2009. [ dead link] 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.

In 2015, O'Brien presented a chat show for ITV called O'Brien, which aired for ten episodes. [36] Podcast [ edit ] From 2000 to 2002, O'Brien was a panellist on the Channel 5 programme The Wright Stuff. In early 2001, he presented A Knight with O'Brien, [14] a talk show on Anglia Television. 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.” 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.”O'Brien was born to a teenaged single mother and was adopted, at the age of 28 days, by Jim O'Brien, later a journalist for The Daily Telegraph, and his wife. [3] [4] At the time of James's birth, Jim was working on the Doncaster Evening News. [5] He was educated at the Catholic independent Ampleforth College, and later read Philosophy & Economics at the London School of Economics. [6] Journalism [ edit ] The same with trans issues, which I think he makes honest and important points, that from the perspective of someone outside the direct issue, there is honest confusion which needs to be allowed to be expressed and questions asked before any possibility of understanding and acceptance can happen. a b "Frank Lampard's call to LBC: The full transcript". The Independent. 24 April 2009 . Retrieved 25 April 2009. 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.” I don't want to sound like a biggot in talking about snowflakes articles and saying books that cover their subjects are guttural, but I just want to criticise publications that use them and *do not properly analyse it*, otherwise it just creates mis-information – It's no news then that a media veteran creates mis-information...

O'Brien review, ITV: 'disappointing' ". Daily Telegraph. 30 March 2015 . Retrieved 8 February 2018. Sony Radio Academy Awards 2010 – Best Interview Nominations". Radio Academy. Archived from the original on 14 September 2010.O'Brien has stated that he voted for Boris Johnson in the 2008 London mayoral election, though he now regrets his vote. [41] I am giving this book 2 stars rather than 1 because I feel it would comfort a ‘remain’ voter and dinner party guests in leafy areas of London. It certainly would be a conversation for those who agree with his views. Lynskey, Dorian (3 February 2017). "How James O'Brien became the conscience of liberal Britain". New Statesman . Retrieved 3 February 2017. a b "James O'Brien: "On radio, people still talk like no one is listening" ". The Guardian. 8 January 2017 . Retrieved 8 February 2018.

O'Brien was an anti-Brexit campaigner and was part of the People's Vote campaign for a second Brexit referendum. He gave a speech at a People's Vote March "Put It to the People" on 23 March 2019 and at the People's Vote rally on 9 April 2019. [42] Personal life [ edit ] O'Brien has claimed to be politically homeless, being against the British Left such as the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn, but enjoys support from the liberal media of British politics e.g. the New Statesman and The Guardian. [26] [27] He enjoys the freedom that LBC gives him to express his views. [28] O'Brien frequently discusses Brexit with callers who voted to leave the EU in the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, [29] often claiming Leave voters had been deceived by the pro-Brexit campaigns to vote against their own interests. [30] Television [ edit ] a b Dorian Lynskey (3 February 2017). "How James O'Brien became the conscience of liberal Britain". New Statesman . Retrieved 22 September 2019. This book should be a mandatory for all sixteen-year-old children to give them an understanding of the modern political landscape before they become legal voters. It might perhaps explain why they enter adulthood in very uncertain times. O’Brien’s interview with Nigel Farage (above) was a masterclass in how to dismantle a phony personality. Photograph: Sébastien Bozon/AFP/Getty ImagesMedia Monkey's Diary: TV writers, Eddie Mair, Gardeners' Question Time". The Guardian. 3 August 2014 . Retrieved 6 August 2014. James Edward O'Brien (born 1972) [1] is a British radio presenter, podcaster, author, and former tabloid journalist and television presenter. Since 2004, he has been a presenter for talk station LBC, [2] on weekdays between 10 am and 1 pm, hosting a phone-in discussion of current affairs, views and real-life experiences. Between October 2017 and November 2018, he hosted a weekly interview series with JOE titled Unfiltered with James O'Brien. He has occasionally presented BBC's Newsnight. On any subject, people need to be able to make mistakes, ask and probably say the wrong thing, before people can be come to the realisation that we can be wrong. Often about things we feel very stongly and passionately about. We need to be open to having these conversations, with ourselves, with our friends, our families, our communities and society. I’ve read his other books and this part of the trilogy is very much a copy of those. He would of done a lot better to write about ‘How they broke Europe’.