The Book of JO’B

There is no figure in the Western canon who teaches us to distrust our earthly senses and keep the faith like JOB. No fact or crucible or contradiction will shake his commitment to his God, and each new torment that befalls him is met with a renewed determination to plough on towards his predestination. 

I am talking, of course, about James O’Brien.

The life of O’Brien was presumably once not all that bad. Sure, there was the vague menace of the Daily Mail, the Tories and certain disagreeable aspects of capitalism which occasionally snarled from the thickets. But that was no Brexit, and besides, in the noughties, O’Brien was more interested in editing the Showbiz desk at the Daily Express. “I didn’t have pungent political views,” he said of those days, “I just loved culture and art; it was all I ever really wanted to do.” That is another failed artist counterfactual we all have to mull over.

In the opening sentence of his book, How to be Right, the radio pugilist writes: “I am a rare beast.” Being both a liberal and a talk show host, in O’Brien’s estimation, places him in the recherché company of the pygmy three-toed sloth. It also apparently merits a book. Blurbs such as “consistently, forensically brilliant” from other liberal talk show hosts do not appear to have shaken O’Brien’s sense of his own uniqueness. Nor do they seem to have improved his rather dim view of his colleagues. Unlike liberals such as himself, who are “cursed with a desire, even a duty, to understand other points of view” his fellow hosts tend to be “desperate to win every argument” and “invite callers to pay homage at the altar of his ego.” That’s not a throwaway pronoun: “this particular breed of broadcaster is almost always a he.” It is only he, and presumably a handful of “shes”, who are sufficiently unburdened by ego to get at the truth. We might put his consistent inability to find it down to rotten luck.

He is, put simply, a terrible bore; a mid-brow Jeremy Kyle with a knack for deploying abrasive sophistry to fillet his callers

O’Brien is, in fact, an immediately recognisable beast. He is the ruddy-cheeked avatar of a breed of journalist for whom the job — to invert a line from Andrew Marr — has become the professionalisation of incuriosity. He has built a lucrative career from mistaking journalism for exhibitionist incredulity at anything deviating from the liberal consensus. His cod-Socratic inquiries drill into details the public seldom has to hand. One suspects that is precisely why he pursues them: to make people he disagrees with look and feel stupid. The part of his job he finds “enduringly fascinating,” we are told, is when callers are “completely convinced that they’re right and I’m wrong.” The intellectual equivalent, in other words, of masturbating in the mirror. 

He is, put simply, a terrible bore; a mid-brow Jeremy Kyle with a knack for deploying abrasive sophistry to fillet his callers. How to be Right consists almost entirely of the transcripts of these exchanges, displayed on the page like taxidermied quarry. His guests are often addressed as “mate”, sometimes called names at odds with those in the book, and variously described as “profoundly mistaken,” “angry and fearful,” “tragicomic,” “a bit of a plank,” “gullible and at worst dangerous.” In more charitable moments: they are “not bad people”.

“Do you like curry, John?” goes the first exchange, from which O’Brien appears to derive particular satisfaction. “The moments just before he says ‘Yes’ are the ones you come to work for,” he writes, revealing in one line the odour of the entire book. “There’s something in the pause, the catch of breath that, however brief, tells you and almost everybody listening that he does like curry.” John said he was displeased with the preponderance of Pakistanis in his neighbourhood because “they all stink” of curry. The tacit admission that John likes curry is, for O’Brien — the Frost to John from Hounslow’s Nixon — a slam dunk. The smell of curry, he writes, is “clearly not the source of his problem with immigration… it is their existence, or at least their presence in his Hounslow, that offends him.” It was beyond the powers of Queen Elizabeth to make windows into men’s souls, but not, it seems, O’Brien.

When O’Brien isn’t recapitulating his favourite bouts, he is pondering the stupidity or moral failings of his guests. As each chapter concludes, he struggles to find new ways to explain it: people “choose” to believe in the “fundamental badness of others”, they “enjoy being frightened,” the media makes them “angry and fearful,” or, simply, “I’m not sure.” When he’s not doing that, he is dismissing their opinions: that immigrants strain public services, contribute to the housing crisis, drive down wages, and so on. He poses a thought experiment: if the word “immigrant” were replaced by “people” would we not see these outcomes as a failure of the state and employers? He admits he is being “temporarily trite”, and then proceeds as if the matter has been settled. There is, after all, no James O’Brien to take him to task.

O’Brien is clearly rhetorically gifted. But one is left with the impression that his style of journalism has taken a toll on his critical faculties. Take the laughable assertion: “Contrary to what many people claim, you can talk about it [immigration] in this country without being called a racist. I should know, I’ve been doing it for over a decade and nobody’s ever called me one with a straight face.” I’m happy to be corrected here, but I have never heard O’Brien criticise immigration. Not once. Not out of the side of his mouth, with or without a straight face. It should therefore come as no surprise he has not been accused of racism. Yet in the confines of his own book, he rides this unremarkable fact like a JCB digger smashing through a wall of received wisdom.

The book progresses in this vein, while O’Brien is too intoxicated with his own cleverness to survey the rubble. After hopping from the corrupting influence of Donald Trump and Breitbart to Hitler and the “master race,” he begins a new paragraph. “Be in no doubt where this leads.” Mercifully, there is no mention of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It leads, he writes, to Frank, from Birkenhead. Frank’s views on Islam are robust (close the mosques, ban the Koran and “stop them coming in”). But his fears needn’t be the result of Daily Mail-induced false consciousness (which for O’Brien is more or less the omnicause of Britain’s ills). Britain saw book burnings in the 1980s in response to the fatwa on Salman Rushdie. Islamists have killed around one hundred people here since 2005, and Muslim-first parties made significant inroads at the recent by-elections. These facts are not the fever dreams of Paul Dacre. But to accept that his callers arrive at conclusions that differ from his own, unprodded, would presumably shake O’Brien’s paternalistic refusal to believe in the “fundamental badness” of people. One wonders, though, where Dacre gets it from?

Curiously, there is no mention in How to be Right about how, three years before its publication, O’Brien credulously parroted the lies of Carl Beech, the paedophile fantasist who accused high-ranking British public servants of raping and murdering children. O’Brien was one of the loudest megaphones for Beech’s lies, which ruined the lives of innocent people. The wife of the falsely accused Lord Bramall died before learning that her husband had been fully vindicated; while Harvey Proctor was left destitute, living, at one point, out of a shed. O’Brien has to my knowledge never issued an apology. All he could muster, once Beech had been imprisoned in 2019, was the following tweet: 

Hate the Carl Beech story. We gave his allegations against dead politicians a lot of coverage on the show & it turns out he was bullshitting everyone. But from Rotherham to Westminster to the BBC, telling abuse survivors that they’ll be believed still seems the right thing to do.

In other words, “I got it wrong for the right reasons”. This sort of non-apology is a common refrain among liberals of a certain kidney. Jeremy Corbyn may have lost the 2019 election, but famously declared he had won the argument. Rory Stewart confidently called the 2024 US election for Kamala Harris, later admitting he was wrong, but, again, for the right reasons. It is the skeleton key that allows such people to open any door, no matter what disasters lie behind it, before quietly moving on — often to being wrong about something else. The two-tier policing that appeared to deprive Henry Nowak of dignity in his final moments is one such door. Responding to the popular outrage at the handling of the 18-year-old’s death, O’Brien scoffed: “The stupidest headline of all [was] inevitably in the Spectator magazine.” The headline read: “Why can we rage against George Floyd’s death but not Henry Nowak’s?” Why the death of an American man thousands of miles away led to weeks of state-backed hysteria in Britain, yet a murdered British teen was met with relative indifference, is an avenue O’Brien is not minded to explore. “Well, I suppose because he wasn’t murdered by the police,” was his verdict. “What’s the point of explaining this?” he asks. “Because some people are determined not to see the evidence of their own eyes and ears.” Well, quite.

O’Brien, usually attuned to such things, omitted the fact that Britain’s Police Race Action Plan is explicitly racist. It states that “racial equity” does not mean “treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘colour-blind,’ ” and advocates a “racialised” approach to policing. The Minister of Justice, David Lammy, approvingly echoed this guidance verbatim; while Jack Straw, the minister who presided over the sea change in policing post-Macpherson, admitted it’s gone “too far.” That anyone could be dismayed by this, or that it may have contributed to the Hampshire Police’s appalling treatment of Henry Nowak, is, for O’Brien, simply not worthy of consideration. Instead, he performs his usual sleight of hand. “I think,” he says, “and this is something I say carefully, I think what we’re seeing here is an outpouring of rage that the police didn’t turn up at the scene of this crime and presume the brown people were the criminals and the liars, and the white person was the innocent victim. I think it’s that simple.”

When one insists upon being this obtuse, it might seem that simple. But who benefits from this kind of talk? The British people with valid concerns he has maligned? Or the “brown” people, likely angered or frightened by his remarks? Perhaps the only beneficiary is the “altar” of O’Brien’s own ego. The man who’s spent a decade railing against the supposed atavistic tendencies of the Daily Mail has established himself as one of Britain’s most accomplished demagogues; projecting the fashionable bigotries of people convinced of their own rectitude to millions — in their idle, stuck-in-traffic moments — around the country. Like second-hand smoke, we all inhale him at some point.

He is more like a journeyman boxer who’s built a reputation, and career, on sucker punching amateurs

That’s not to say those prejudices don’t deserve a fair hearing, but they are, if anything, discredited more by O’Brien’s infantile epistemology than most of the blows his opponents manage to land. O’Brien is capable of self-reflection. “I wonder whether I was overly aggressive,” he writes about one exchange. But it often seems perfunctory: the thought cannot contend with the prospect of his opponent’s position going “completely unchecked.” O’Brien may feel he has to work overtime because others like him — “the liberal, the truth-teller, the objective journalist” — are a “cowed breed right now, all too conscious that comforting lies deliver more clicks, viewers, listeners and profits than uncomfortable truths.” He seems to view himself as Samson, propping up the temple while others flee. In truth, he is more like a journeyman boxer who’s built a reputation, and career, on sucker punching amateurs. This shtick, also favoured by Ben Shapiro in the US, soon falls apart when he meets an informed adversary. In a 2019 interview during Theresa May’s Brexit negotiations, O’Brien greets Jacob Rees-Mogg with customary sighs and facial contortions, which punctuate a series of wife-beating questions and factually inaccurate assertions that Rees-Mogg answers and corrects with remarkable patience. “So regulatory alignment wasn’t in the Good Friday Agreement?” says O’Brien. “No it isn’t… The Good Friday Agreement wasn’t considering those sorts of issues.” O’Brien insists it is, to which Rees-Mogg responds: “You’re confusing two things, if I may say so…” “Well of course you may say so,” O’Brien tuts, before moving briskly on. O’Brien then suggests the late Lord Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, was a member of the DUP, and erroneously claims the World Trade Organisation sets tariff rates for member states. Each time Rees-Mogg attempts to clean up this dog’s breakfast of basic errors on a topic that, it is fair to say, caused O’Brien enormous psychic damage, the presenter pivots, and renews the attack. O’Brien is never more flexible than when protecting himself, and his listeners, from information that might upset his worldview — which ossified, like his ruddy grimace and pot-bellied slouch, the moment Britain voted to leave the EU.

O’Brien squandered the following decade on daily LBC performances that left him with thousands of pyrrhic victories over complete strangers, but none the wiser as to where things go from here. He preferred to win than to listen. Now he is a man armed with an umbrella against a tsunami of inexplicable data points. History is already sitting in judgement on the liberal, multicultural, high immigration model of Britain he made his name championing. His radio booth is becoming more claustrophobic, and his utterances more palpably absurd. He is becoming an anachronism in real time, clutching onto his umbrella, but his God, the God that failed, is nowhere to be seen.