Not a lot of laughs here

James O’Brien, the highly successful LBC radio presenter, has been described as “the conscience of liberal Britain”. I know this because it says so on the cover of his new book. If true, this conscience is arrogant, hectoring and utterly humourless. O’Brien’s thesis is introduced early. Recent years have not been kind to the United Kingdom. The country has lurched from crisis to crisis – many of them self-inflicted – and been saddled with political leadership of unprecedented uselessness and duplicity.

O’Brien is here to name the guilty men (and one woman). So all the usual suspects are present: Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre, David Cameron, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and Liz Truss. Andrew Neil, more surprisingly, and Matthew Elliott, the comparatively unknown chief executive of the Vote Leave campaign, make up the numbers, along with Jeremy Corbyn.

“It is essential,” O’Brien huffs, “to identify the people and organisations which, sometimes by accident and sometimes quite deliberately, set the United Kingdom on a course of unnecessary domestic decline and international diminishment”. It is not enough that these people were mistaken; they had to know they were wrong.

“The proof is everywhere,” he writes. “We have become so conditioned by the parameters of the ecosystem we inhabit that we rarely notice how completely ridiculous our political reality – and our country – has become.”

And, for sure, few people would dispute the contention that these have not been happy years. But O’Brien goes much further than that. “There are no consequences for appalling personal or political failure. There is no semblance of public morality. There is no longer any consensual threshold for career-ending conduct. Simple truth has become negotiable and proven liars have flourished as never before.”

There is some truth in this, though rather less than O’Brien thinks. Johnson was forced from office precisely because of the behaviour O’Brien complains about. The “system” might have erred in making Truss prime minister but she too was required to pay a price for her misjudgments. Equally, the growing number of MPs subject to, and sanctioned by, recall petitions suggests that, actually, there is a “consensual threshold” for “career-ending conduct”.

In their different ways, Cameron and Corbyn also paid a significant price for their shortcomings and failures though not, you might accept, before the damage had been done. Nor are matters aided by O’Brien’s myopia. Deploring the tone and content of British discussions of immigration is one thing; ignoring the reality that similar – and often more extreme – views might frequently be discovered in almost every other western European country quite another. Acknowledging that – and the electoral success of right-wing parties from the Baltic to the Mediterranean – would require O’Brien to accept that British attitudes are neither unusual nor exceptional.

Indeed, O’Brien’s entire thesis is the mirror of the British exceptionalism he argues spawned Brexit and all the other things he deplores. His Britain is exceptional too, only exceptionally awful. Puddings must be over-egged. Our intrepid truth-teller claims that “the explicit racism of Enoch Powell, once so violently rejected by his party, is today in the very heart of the Conservative Party”. Maybe so, though it seems worth observing, first, that Rishi Sunak is prime minister, second, that Kemi Badenoch is probably the most popular cabinet minister among Conservative activists, third, that the current government has presided over an immigration regime that is remarkably liberal, not restrictive, and, perhaps most significantly, fourth, that O’Brien asks us to take seriously the implication that the United Kingdom is a more racist society in 2024 than it was 50 years previously. Well, again, maybe.

Nor does O’Brien satisfactorily explain why, as newspaper circulations fall, the baleful influence of the Murdoch and Rothermere papers somehow grows ever greater. I disclose an interest here: I write for The Times and The Sunday Times and for many years contributed to The Spectator. If that makes me an interested party, it also allows me to say with some authority that Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator for the past 15 years, is not “hapless” and to assert, with confidence, that Andrew Neil is not “hard right”.

O’Brien complains that there is a too cosy nexus between “hideously right-wing” newspapers, think tanks and the Conservative Party. Again, maybe, though in the case of The Spectator, these are longstanding, and think tanks fundamentally exist to introduce new ideas or ways of thinking into the political mainstream.

Here, however, ideas promulgated by the Adam Smith Institute or the Institute of Economic Affairs are axiomatically mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Nothing is to be judged on its merits. O’Brien presents himself as a rationalist but this is an angry and often irrational book. Given the choice between man and ball, O’Brien will always play the former. Nor is there any discussion – none – of the things that really ail Britain. This is a book about personalities, not policy. The housing market, economic growth, the ratcheting pressure on the budgets for health and welfare, the never-ending saga of Britain’s poor productivity, and much else besides scarcely feature here. O’Brien does not claim to have solutions to these but neither does he even have thoughts.

It is hard to avoid the thought that in O’Brien’s world people might just about be at liberty to be wrong but they should never presume the right to be so sorely mistaken in public. In this fashion, O’Brien is the pious liberal’s sanctimoniously illiberal cheerleader. Of course, O’Brien scores plenty of hits. Given this target-right material, how could he not? But he also contradicts himself. Having asserted that his targets “deliberately” set Britain on a course of decline, he then, just a handful of pages later, accepts that “obviously there was no real plan or secret conspiracy to break Britain”. Well, quite.