How they Broke Britain by James O’Brien, WH Allen, 2023
And so we reach the end of James O’Brien’s brilliant, epic excoriation, of which one reader joked that he kept his copy in the fridge for safety reasons and another said that he had had to stop listening to the audiobook version whilst driving because it was making him so angry.
The penultimate chapter is all about who else but Boris Johnson. This is pretty recent history and we scarcely need reminding of the innumerable awfulnesses of this man. There is no point my simply repeating it all again but there is a good summary here:
Boris Johnson’s 50 worst lies, gaffes and scandals as Prime Minister finally resigns – Mirror Online
What O’Brien does is to follow the trail of the rest of his book to this very point. Britain was already broken by the protagonists of the previous chapters, it was they who paved the way for the possibility of Boris. “Cometh the hour, cometh the man.”
It does seem worth repeating his consecutive variety of Partygate denials:
“First, there were no parties. Then, there had been parties but he was unaware of them. Then, there had been parties and he had been aware of them but he definitely did not attend any. Finally, there had been parties, and he had been aware of them, and he had in fact attended some of them, but he had not realised at the time that they were parties.”
There are a couple of great examples in this chapter too of what I am now thinking of as O’Brienesque short, killer characterisations: Jacob Rees-Mogg, “a penny-farthing in human form”, and Nadine Dorries, “a poster girl for the promotion of the supremely unqualified.”
Finally a necessarily short chapter about the least self-aware of any of O’Brien’s villains, Liz Truss. But she was not, he explains, an aberration, but an inevitable culmination of everything that had gone before, causing an estimated damage to the economy of £30 billion.
I have already mentioned the recently announced general election but since then new depths of depravity and moral turpitude (that strange concept which travellers to the United States still have to deny they are guilty of on those strange green forms we have to fill in*) have been plumbed.
*Has anyone ever stopped and thought, hang on, moral turpitude, well there was that time back in 1973, I suppose I had better declare it and so ensure that I will be straight back home on the next flight?
The stench of Tory desperation is very high now. The great sadness is that there seems not to be an alternative for anyone actually to feel good or hopeful about.
The use of the word ‘bold’ continues to proliferate absurdly. And the Tories have announced a return to National Service, mandatory or not (it is very unclear) for all eighteen-year-olds. I have watched two car crash interviews with James Cleverly on the subject. It is “a plan … a bold decision” (I kid you not). Young people live in ‘bubbles’ he says at least twice, “for want of a better word.” Well you’re the Home Secretary, think of one. It is so obviously a plan dreamt up in a moment, a result of sheer panic, and yet the pretence is that it has been in their minds and in the making for a long time. The National Citizen Service, an earlier, entirely voluntary version, was a failure, not least because Rishi Sunak cut its budget by two-thirds. This though, Cleverly says, will be different and better, “everyone will be involved”, bringing together a mix of religions, the wealthy and the not so wealthy … He even uses the Gaza protests as a sign of societal fragmentation and then says “plan” a lot again. Parents, he says, are “very, very keen”. Not this one. Unless he wants to do it, my son will be enlisted, press-ganged, conscripted, over my dead body. They don’t even seem to have a clue how they will enforce it. Will they be locking up conscientious objectors? Apparently not – people will be able to do unpaid work at weekends instead. So what will the sanctions be for refusing to do either? Clearly they haven’t thought that up yet, nor how they intend to fund this … I can’t even find the words … despicable, jingoistic, hypocritical perfidy. Cleverly says that he loved his time as an army reservist. Bully for him. What has that got do with anything at all? One interviewer asks him how this sits with traditional Conservative liberal values of individual freedom. “We force people to do things all the time,” answers Cleverly, weirdly.
I found myself lost in disbelief, aghast at the prospect of the enforced militarisation of the flower of our youth, until I could watch no more.
The Rwanda flights will not happen before the election but “immediately after”. What, the next day? Many of the poor detainees are already out on bail and may be hard to round up a second time. “Labour will turn it off,” says Cleverly. Yes, because it is morally repugnant.
One almost last word from me having read this book, one addendum, about Natalie Elphicke, the already tarnished Tory MP who has crossed the floor to Labour. I absolutely genuinely don’t understand how this is allowed to happen without her seat being contested again, from scratch. Her constituents, presumably, voted for an individual representing, broadly at least, the beliefs and manifesto of a particular political party, which, presumably she no longer does. How is it that she does not have to resign immediately and start again now that her political alignment and allegiances have been inverted, overnight, no doubt as the result not of obscene self-interest but a Damascene moment on the road to Westminster, a sea-change in the “core values” these people are always going on about? That must be the case, otherwise her move would be merely and patently opportunistic.
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