I meet James O’Brien in the LBC offices, straight after his three-hour show on a Thursday morning. It is the day after the UK parliament has voted on its series of Brexit alternatives and said “no” to all of them, and I have a feeling he will have a thing or two to say. Since 2010, really, O’Brien’s has been a voice of reason in an ever-madder pool. While his colleagues at LBC were wondering why we can’t just leave Europe already, and what do young people need houses for anyway, and his erstwhile colleagues at Newsnight were fawning over the far right, O’Brien reminded us who we used to be: passionate yet reasonable, caustic yet kind, apparently genuinely committed to equality and all the Scandi values of tolerance, generosity and respect that went with it. Yet, because the clips of O’Brien that go viral are always the most explosive or playful ones – most recently, it was his skewering of Dominic Raab – his gravity sneaks up on you.
Right now, he is deadly serious. He will not predict what happens with Brexit, he says, not in that jocular media abnegation of responsibility, but because: “You can’t make valid predictions in an environment of such utter madness and hypocrisy. Right up until Christmas, it was almost all predictable. When red lines collided with the Good Friday agreement, the result could only be chaos and denial. But then, when it moves away from the realm of things that you can understand by reading and listening, it becomes impossible to call.”
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2uBfLmK
Comments
Post a Comment