Maybe you’re a James O’Brien fan (there are a fair few of you in the world) or maybe you, like me, are just looking for something (anything!) to make sense of the world in which we find ourselves. How They Broke Britain helps. A bit.
What you have here are 10 chapters from the opinionated and outspoken newscaster, a proverbial shitlist if ever there was one, of some of the people responsible for the omnishambles in which we find ourselves. Some of the people you will be able to guess (if you’re not an idiot – we always have to be careful about idiots as we make our way about these days don’t we, but there is less chance of stumbling across them in the comments section of the books pages I find, for some reason): we’re talking Boris Johnson, we’re talking Nigel Farage, we’re talking Dominic Cummings and David Cameron (a lot of men, you might rightly say).
You’ll also find Rupert Murdoch here ( a man more interested in money than ideology) and you’ll nod sagely, and Paul Dacre (the mere name of whom is enough to start my blood boiling – I hate Dacre so much I’ve taken to tapping elderly people on the shoulder in supermarkets to enquire whether they wouldn’t rather buy a newspaper than waste money on the overpriced toilet paper that is The Daily Mail). There are names of people who may not be instantly familiar (Matthew Elliott, for instance, who led the illegal Vote Leave campaign) and people here who you might not expect to find here (Jeremy Corbyn), alongside people who, you know, just have to be here (Liz Truss) for being the utter apotheosis of the awfulness.
For the most part, if you are a close reader of reliable news, you’ll be unsurprised by much of what you read (although you might be grateful, as I am, to anyone who collects all of the facts together into a single volume on the off-chance that one of those aforementioned idiots might get stuck overnight in a library composed of only this book). You may be grateful for the occasional signposting towards other books (Peter Oborne’s rather marvellous The Assault on Truth, for instance). You may not agree with all of it (I read the Corbyn chapter wanting to know why he was in the book and whilst I take a lot, more than I expected, of what O’Brien says – Corbyn didn’t come out fighting against Brexit, was arguably as much of a Brexiteer as the very worst Brexiteers – but he was all that a great many of us had to hang on to when the dogwhistles were at their loudest; O’Brien would probably say I was a former cult member) but the central tenet of the book – that our democracy has been undone by crooked politicians, a corrupt media and a phalanx of right wing think tanks – is impossible to argue with.
One final note worth mentioning in the light of the release of that Dorries woman’s attempt to defend the useless lump of excrement that is Johnson by drawing attention to a secret cabal that has been ruling the country for decades (apparently – we’re not actually going to read it). Arguably O’Brien’s book does a similar thing (in that it points to a secret cabal that has been ruling the country for decades). The difference between the two books is the same as that between fantasy and reality: the problem is corrupt politicians, think tanks and the media, not some MI5 impersonating idiot cabal.
Any Cop?: Bung it in your Brexit-voting granny’s Christmas stocking (you know, the one that stands by her decision, not the one that is now denying she ever voted for this shitshow) and enjoy the fireworks.
Bookmunch 