‘How They Broke Britain’: a review

How They Broke Britain is a compendium of people in power behaving badly. The author, James O’Brien, is a prominent broadcaster (most mornings on LBC radio) who has been observing these individuals for decades.

He reports what they said when, especially in media interviews, and comments savagely exactly where they lied. “They set the United Kingdom on a course of unnecessary domestic decline and international diminishment.” In the story of how they broke Britain, this book turns the spotlight on 10 prominent individuals with a chapter on each:

Rupert Murdoch
Paul Dacre
Andrew Neil
Matthew Elliott
Nigel Farage
David Cameron
Jeremy Corbyn
Dominic Cummings
Boris Johnson
Liz Truss

Phone hacking

The first chapter begins in the middle of the phone hacking scandal, which eventually caused Murdoch to close down the News of the World. This type of presentation continues in each chapter, with the choice of a few telling incidents or quotations that illustrate the character facets under scrutiny. But it is sometimes a little too dense, for readers who are not journalists following closely who’s who in the profession, or for people like me, who were abroad in these times so not so aware of the ins and outs of the British press.

Nonetheless, this method picks up gems of character analysis from close colleagues or witnesses of the behaviour under scrutiny. For Murdoch, the most poignant assessment is of the character dissonance between the journalist and the plutocrat. His instincts are that of someone born into media, whose life has been spent with journalists, who loves a good story, and who knows that journalists must keep their distance from authority. But, in fact, as his media empire expanded, he cosied up to the people in power.

There are three ways in which Murdoch enabled the media ecosystem which caused the breaking of Britain: firstly, his media staff became the communications directors in the government of the day, so a revolving door of patronage; secondly, “commodified cruelty” for example in Jeremy Clarkson’s remarks on Meghan Markle; thirdly, abandoning facts altogether in pursuit of stories, for example, misstating polls of young Muslim opinion. By his capture of governments and demolition of journalistic morals, Murdoch takes first place in this book about how Britain was broken.

Commoditisation of hate

Next up is Paul Dacre, long-time editor of the Daily Mail. “In the lucrative business of the commoditisation of hate”, he is both a major driver and an exemplar of the prejudices and falsehoods at the hub of our national tragedy. Under his editorship, so many false stories were published that Wikipedia declined to accept the Daily Mail as a reliable source (p89). Dacre, and the Daily Mail, are obsessed with stories about immigration, for example on the front page on 17 of the 23 days run-up to the Brexit referendum. A notorious example of how Daily Mail headlines undermine British values and institutions is from 4 November 2016 which labelled certain judges as ‘Enemies of the People’, causing some to seek police protection. Thus “the most influential newspaperman of his generation thought nothing of attacking judges, journalists, academics and elected politicians”. (O’Brien)

GB News

Then follows a chapter on Andrew Neil from his conservative politics at Glasgow University, through his time as editor of the Spectator, as editor of the Sunday Times, as BBC politics presenter 1998-2022, to his contract worth £4mn as chief presenter at GB News, ”packed with right-wing views and ‘anti-woke’ presenters”.

Strategic influence

Matthew Elliot, chief executive of Vote Leave, was largely unknown until the facts about expenditure on digital advertising before the referendum (Cambridge Analytica’s contract) came to light. But, in fact, he had spent the preceding years in the shady covens of 55 Tufton Street from which several right-wing organisations with intellectual pretensions successfully influence the minds of the British public, via their links to the media. The Tuesday meetings of the staffers in these inter-related organisations spawned successful right-wing projects and careers.

Skilful manipulation

Chapter 5 is devoted to Nigel Farage. Here James O’Brien utilises his professional skill as a radio interviewer to quote and dissect exactly how Farage twists and evades the truth under interview.

Austerity

David Cameron’s career is then traced, from his days at Eton to how he became leader of the Conservative Party, and then prime minister in 2010. O’Brien has harsh words for the policy of austerity justified by the lie that Gordon Brown’s government had left a financial mess.

Internal Labour tensions

Next up is Jeremy Corbyn, who became the surprise leader of Labour in 2015. This chapter is full of details that will be familiar to members of the Labour Party, but were new to me and useful even today in shedding light on some of the tensions within that party. The main reason for including Corbyn in this gallery of rogues is that if he had not been the leader of Labour in these crucial times, Labour might have exerted a different type of pull in the politics of the referendum and post-Brexit.

Powerful communications advisor

Then follows a chapter on Dominic Cummings, a leader in Vote Leave and also communications advisor to Boris Johnson (that revolving door!). Again in this chapter, O’Brien displays his media competence in collecting the crucial quotations and interviewee’s words to illustrate the points about the character that they reveal.

From charmer to disgrace

The chapter on Boris Johnson starts with Cumming’s evidence about him, “a picture of almost criminal negligence”. Although this book rarely follows events in chronological order, this chapter does trace the characteristics of the moral exceptionalism back to Johnson’s school days, “free of the networks of obligation that bind everyone else” (school report) through episodes at Oxford with the notorious Bullingdon club, and then to his early career as a journalist, first being sacked for lies by The Times and then finding a lucrative career churning out lies about the EU from Brussels. O’Brien who first encountered Johnson personally when he was Mayor of London admits to his personal charm, but is appalled by his moral unsuitability for high office. This chapter proceeds methodically to uncover the shifting lies of Johnson as PM fixing Brexit until “the most disgraceful and disgraced Prime Minister in British history” took his exit, and almost predictably went back to journalism, with a regular column in Dacre’s Daily Mail.

Conservative party dynamics

The last (brief) chapter on these 10 influential individuals is on Liz Truss. “Without understanding the extent of the right-wing media/Tory party/think-tank ecosystem, it is, I think, impossible to understand how (Truss and Kwarteng) … could have pressed ahead” ( with crashing the economy and costing the UK £30bn).

There is then a brief afterword about Rishi Sunak, where O’Brien has harsh words about his appointment of Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch. He also shows the incompetence of Laura Trott, a Treasury official, during an interview about government debt. As an example of the poor quality of MPs who rise through the Conservatives, he quotes the views of Lee Anderson MP, on foodbanks and the fact that he was eventually expelled because of asserting “Islamists have got control of London”. He had already been taken on as a presenter at GB News.

Key forces

On the penultimate page, O’Brien lists the myriad forces that broke Britain: “an entirely corrupted media, a Conservative Party detached from observable reality, an incestuous network of secret funded lobby groups dedicated only to advancing the interests of epic wealth.” The only force missing from this list is secretive Russian influence, but that has been covered by other investigative journalists.

This book is not an easy read. O’Brien writes in long sentences. His chapters are often digressive, going into great detail of incidents and interviews that illustrate the points being made, but his moral spotlight never wavers. We need to know what went wrong and so, for that, this book is a useful compendium.