LBC's James O'Brien: meet the man behind the mic

His eloquent on-air takedowns regularly go viral and his rhetorical flourishes have made James O’Brien the shock jock who liberal Londoners love
Paul Flynn1 November 2018

As the voice of Remain-supporting reason amid the frothing Farages and Ferraris at LBC, James O’Brien has become a radio star.

The 46-year-old’s takedowns of politicians on his weekday morning show regularly go viral and his Twitter dismissals of Brexiteers in particular — he recently called Jacob Rees-Mogg a ‘mewling pencil’ — are masterpieces of the form.

But O’Brien found his metier only after several false starts and setbacks, including a stint of unemployment after losing his first big broadcasting gig, hosting Channel 5’s The Wright Stuff. During the lean times, he would resort to the standard in-joke of the jobless media professional, telling his father Jim O’Brien, a journalist for The Daily Telegraph who with his wife adopted James as a baby, that he was ‘writing a book’. This week, O’Brien publishes his second book, How to be Right... in a World Gone Wrong, a follow-up to 2015’s Loathe Thy Neighbour, and his pleasure in this fact is tempered because Jim passed away before both were published. ‘It was six years ago,’ he says of his father’s death. ‘Feels like 100 years ago, feels like yesterday. That is the only regret about this, that he didn’t get to see it.’

If he has nominally fallen into the category of ‘shock jock’ during his 15 years at LBC, the shock is that his USP is railing against bigotry, in all its forms — the exact opposite of the old James Whale school of incubating petty prejudices on air. In the new book he takes on misogyny, Islamophobia, LGBTQ issues, the Brexit shambles and the age of Trump. In other words, some of his callers’ greatest hits.

‘My two suggestions for making things better in the original draft,’ he says, ‘were to get Paul Dacre out of the editor’s chair at the Daily Mail and to stop treating Alex Jones [the conspiracy theorist behind the controversial Infowars website] as a reputable source. And then within two weeks of me having finished the book, Dacre was stepping down at the Mail and Alex Jones had been taken off social media.’ He smiles. ‘I thought, someone’s hacked my computer. Someone really good.’

At LBC O’Brien has defied marketing logic by using the internet, radio’s greatest competitor, to drive listeners to his daily phone-in show. Video clips of some of his more arresting introductory monologues, recorded in his studio, have become bona fide online hits. The one in which he picks apart an ill-advised speech on immigration by former Home Secretary Amber Rudd has been shared three million times.

‘There was a Kelvin MacKenzie clip about Hillsborough,’ he recalls. ‘People stopped me in the street about it. There was a bloke behind the counter in the comic shop on Berwick Street who was a Scouser and he said: “Can I just say thank you for what you did.” I said: “Do you listen to the show?” And he said: “No, never heard of you before, but it popped up on my Facebook.” That was my first inkling that something different was happening.’

I first met O’Brien 30 years ago, when we were both 16, at the Manchester Youth Theatre. O’Brien told me I was the first gay person he’d ever met, ‘though I was at an all-boys boarding school so there must have been plenty of gay lads there, but they might be married now, still living in the closet because of the combination of religion and culture that I lived in.’ He was certainly the first boarding school boy I’d met. He was in the first year of the sixth form at Ampleforth College, the gold standard of British Catholic education, since tarnished by the disclosure of a series of child sex abuse scandals.

O’Brien has done several confusing trips round the block with religion since then. ‘When you’re raised in a very Catholic way, it’s a big part of who you are,’ he says. ‘In my 20s I was furiously anti-religion. Then I started thinking that I derived a lot of comfort from praying. I used to love going to church with my dad. I loved the consoling process of some passages of scripture. I’m not embarrassed to say this.’ He is starting to reconcile himself to what religion is for. After struggling with the revelations about Ampleforth, of which he saw nothing, he says: ‘I was hating the fact that my school made me turn against religion, when really my problem was with them.’

Eleven years after Manchester Youth Theatre, I bumped into O’Brien again, when we were both working at the Daily Express. He would soon become showbiz editor, a beat on which he’d never intended to find himself: ‘I thought I was going to be a theatre critic or a literary journalist.’ Competition was tough. ‘I was forever at the tyranny of the angry phone call from the night editor asking me why all the other newspapers were full of stories that I hadn’t got a sniff of. There’s a Nokia ring tone that still sends my tummy tumbling.’

He met his wife Lucy McDonald at the paper: ‘My liver was falling to pieces. I somehow managed to marry a woman who was, and still is, far too good for me.’ McDonald encouraged him to make the move from print to broadcasting when the chance to present The Wright Stuff came along, and encouraged him to persevere when he lost the gig. ‘She said, “I really think you’ve got something as a broadcaster.” For all the bombast and the arrogance, I didn’t think I had. She said, “Give yourself a year.”’

He dipped a toe into punditry and found himself in the middle of the live debates on Channel 5 News, hosted by Kirsty Young. When his regular sparring partner David Mellor didn’t turn up one day (‘I think the World Cup was on’) a presenter from LBC suggested he contact the station manager about covering holiday shifts. In 2003 he was given his first show on Sundays at 10pm — the graveyard shift. Within a year he was elevated to mid-morning.

O’Brien is quite the anomaly among the current LBC roster. ‘[Nick] Ferrari and I have very different politics,’ he says, ‘we’re from different generations, but he’s shown me goodness over the years. Whereas I consider [Nigel] Farage to be a profoundly unpleasant individual who has done some terrible things to this country to promote himself.’ One of his first hit clips was a scorching joust with Farage, prior to him joining the station. But just because he doesn’t agree with Farage doesn’t mean O’Brien thinks he should be silenced: ‘He’s got as much right to be here as I have.’

On air, O’Brien is a man of compelling self-confidence, but he says this is only half the story. ‘I’m like everyone else with an overdeveloped look-at-me gene. I’ve got a fat slice of imposter syndrome as well. I keep waiting for the tap on the shoulder. All right, mate, you’ve had your fun. Get back in the box.’

The beauty of LBC, he says, ‘is the freedom they give me. But you have to earn that freedom.’ Because of the viral clips hits, for a time it looked like his TV career might reignite as he stepped into the Newsnight studio to help host the flagship BBC news show. He says that given the current political climate, maintaining a veneer of BBC impartiality was tricky: ‘I think people who are liberal, leftish or pro-Remain hide their position a lot more than people on the other side.’ Complaints were made: ‘If I had been pro-Brexit and relaxed about Donald Trump, I don’t think the avalanche of orchestrated complaints would’ve been piling into the Newsnight editor’s office.’

Did he have to go because of that? ‘No. I could’ve wound my neck in at my other work.’ But toning down his voice at LBC, he decided, was not an option and his compulsion to rail against the times remains undimmed. ‘Perhaps at a different point in British political history I could’ve carried on doing both jobs. But because I have an overwhelming desire to point out these ancient hatreds which are bubbling to the surface in every area of life — from sexual politics to gay rights, race, class, religion — I thought, I cannot be impartial. I cannot say, okay, here’s a massive racist to put forward the other side of the argument.’

O’Brien was born in 1972 to a single teenage mother: he knows her name but has never tried to contact her: ‘I don’t have any curiosity about that.’ Growing up, he felt like an outsider. ‘At school I felt conscious of being less wealthy — when you’re in a classroom with people who’ve got stately homes and titles, that can happen. And then I’d go home and my old mates would think that I’d turned into Little Lord Fauntleroy.’

He can see a little of himself in the fury of the callers on his show. Often, even when he is arguing against them, he sounds like he’s on their side. ‘I’ve always wondered who I would be without the loving family, the material comfort and the platinum-standard education I received. I think I could’ve fallen for a lot of the s*** I see people fall for.’ His adoptive mum listens to his show most days. ‘She’s where I got my political conscience from. She tells me when she thinks I’ve got it wrong,’ he says.

When the first of his two daughters was born 12 years ago, something strange struck O’Brien. ‘I met someone to whom I am biologically related for the first time in my life. I know for a fact that when my mum held me for the first time there was nothing different to when I first held my baby. And yet, from the outside, it’s fascinating and mysterious. I think of that alternative me, who would’ve been poor and potentially oppressed. I’d like to create a society in which he wouldn’t have been.’

James O’Brien is on LBC, weekdays 10am-1pm. His book, ‘How to be Right… In a World Gone Wrong’ (WH Allen, £12.99), is out now

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