How James O'Brien became the most polarising voice on the radio

Telegraph

4 days ago

The perpetually exasperated LBC talk radio host James O'Brien seems to provoke irritation and inspire admiration in equal measure.
During the weekday show he has hosted since 2004, he's become famed as much for his sneering derision for callers on subjects from Brexit to Donald Trump as he has for eloquently dissecting the news of the day.
But this week, the 53-year-old's polarising approach slipped into something more sinister when he repeated the anti-Semitic testimony of a man who made ludicrous claims about his Jewish wife 's 'anti-Arab' indoctrination.
Speaking to his audience of hundreds of thousands, the former Newsnight host read out a message that said: 'My wife was brought up Jewish and at Shabbat school, in a leafy Hertfordshire town, she was taught that one Jewish life is worth thousands of Arab lives and that Arabs are cockroaches to be crushed. Whilst young children are taught such hatred and dehumanisation – undoubtedly on both sides – then they will always be able to justify death and cruelty.'
'Unacceptable and highly offensive'
O'Brien's apparent readiness to accept the veracity of the inflammatory account led to calls for his suspension from LBC. For critics, it marked the most extreme example yet of his perceived arrogance.
Indeed, O'Brien prefaced what he read out on Tuesday with the words: 'I'm fascinated by objectivity', as if – rather than being a highly questionable set of claims – this was a provably factual account that his audience desperately needed to be made aware of.
Others, however, were quick to take issue with his behaviour. Critics included the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who called O'Brien's decision 'unacceptable and highly offensive'.
The backlash has led him to issue an apology, and footage of the incident has now been removed from LBC's social media platforms.
'As with all the texts and messages that I read out on the programme, I did so in good faith,' said O'Brien. 'But the message has understandably upset a lot of people, and I regret taking those unsubstantiated claims at face value and am genuinely sorry for that.'
Of course, being a talk show host necessitates heated debate and disagreement. But this appeared to be O'Brien indulging shock jock tactics, airing the type of conspiracy that he would typically rail against.
Political ambiguity
For all his divisiveness, O'Brien's own politics are somewhat undefined. He has described himself as liberal (not Lib Dem) and he is far from being a Left-wing firebrand or Corbynista (last week he said he couldn't defend Diane Abbott after she recanted her comments about Jews not being subject to racism equivalent to people of colour – describing Abbott's remarks as 'objectively stupid').
His adoptive father was a journalist who once worked for The Telegraph, and O'Brien's own career spanned stints at The Daily Mail, The Express, The Spectator and BBC's Newsnight.
His technique on LBC is to position himself as someone who wants to uncover the truth or say the unsayable – to challenge the mainstream media, whether that be Conservative-leaning newspapers or the BBC. It is his job to provoke reactions from his listeners, but it's as much his manner as his content that divides opinion.
Brexit's loudest critic
O'Brien is best known as a standard bearer for Remainers over Brexit, and one of the most persistent and polarising voices on the fall-out from Britain's decision to leave the EU. The prominence of Brexit, especially from 2019 onwards, coincided with his and LBC's ability to exploit social media. O'Brien's confrontational soliloquies or exchanges with callers regularly go viral, expanding his reach beyond his weekly audience of 1.5 million.
This statement from his show from May this year is typical: 'I've enjoyed nothing more over the last few years than explaining to you the reality that has been either completely ignored or misunderstood by almost every other corner of the UK media, including many beloved colleagues on this station, some of whom asked you to stop talking about Brexit, which is a demonstration of ignorance visible from space.'
His style – sometimes characterised as patronising – has been parodied most effectively by the impressionist Tony Lapidus, who manages to convey both O'Brien's over-familiarity and ability to verbally outmanoeuvre callers.
'At 10 o'clock he eases himself into his very own Star Chamber, wig in place, and casts a practised eye over the miscreants he has lined up for his daily exercise,' wrote Michael Henderson in The Critic magazine in 2022. 'Nobody is quite as clever as he, nor as public-spirited. His rebukes are coated with sarcasm and exasperation but as he falls short of top-notch intelligence, and has a limited vocabulary, his barbs rarely wound as he would like.'
O'Brien has long been cited as a spokesman for 'Centrist Dads'. His interventions are often anti-Trump and anti-Reform, as well as continuing to attack Brexit. He castigates anyone who strays from centrist orthodoxies as ignorant or ill-intentioned.
In August last year, he called the riots following the Southport murders 'The Farage Riots' in reference to the Reform leader. (His labelling of the unrest attracted numerous complaints. Ofcom did not uphold them.) Farage said in response: 'At no point in the past 30 years have I ever encouraged violence or the use of undemocratic means… and yet we have LBC presenters like James O'Brien calling them 'The Farage Riots''.
O'Brien wrote a virtual Centrist Dad manifesto in the form of his book trilogy How To Be Right, How Not To Be Wrong and How They Broke Britain, the titles of which only further irritated his detractors. He said of How They Broke Britain: 'I hope this book becomes some sort of Rosetta Stone, or at least a compass to navigate the oceans of bullshit.'
This is not O'Brien's first self-induced crisis
O'Brien is often seen in the studio rubbing his head with frustration, as if the combined obligations of listening to the views of the public and having to set them straight is about to break him at any moment. It is, however, a very effective media persona. His mid-morning show, broadcast after that of Right-leaning Nick Ferrari's At Breakfast, is the most popular on LBC.
Asked about O'Brien's approach, Matt Deegan, a radio industry expert and host of The Media Club podcast, says: 'It's always been fun to put down callers and let them fall into traps. There is a good apocryphal quote from the New York radio legend Howard Stern, which is something like 'People who hate me listen longer than the people who like me'. Sometimes people tune in to be offended.'
Before this week, O'Brien has mostly managed to tread the line between leaning into disagreement and becoming embroiled in scandal. But this isn't the first time that he has found himself in a self-induced crisis.
From 2014, O'Brien was a vocal supporter of the later convicted paedophile and fraudster Carl Beech, who made unfounded claims of sexual abuse against numerous politicians and public figures, including the former Conservative MP Harvey Proctor and former Home Secretary Leon Brittan. Especially damning was the prominent support his show gave to Mark Watts, editor of the now defunct Exaro news organisation, who was at the time leading the campaign supporting the accusations made by Beech, many of which did huge personal damage to the falsely accused and their families.
In 2015, O'Brien commented: 'Words like 'cover-up' spring to mind. Words like 'conspiracy' spring to mind.' In a series of exchanges with Watts at the time, he cast doubt over the commitment of the 'mainstream media' and Britain's political establishment to address Beech's alleged revelations.
Four years later, in September 2019, Beech was jailed for 18 years on 12 counts of perverting the course of justice, one of fraud, and for several child sexual offences. There is no suggestion O'Brien knew of Beech's crimes while he was defending him – far from it – but Beech's eventual conviction still cast a shadow over someone whose career is based on being 'right'.
O'Brien would later say on X: 'Hate the Carl Beech story. We gave his allegations against dead politicians a lot of coverage on the show & it turns out he was bulls---ing everyone. But from Rotherham to Westminster to the BBC, telling abuse survivors that they'll be believed still seems the right thing to do.
'There will always be accusations of bias over a long period of time if you do a show every day on subjects people feel very passionate about,' says Deegan. 'Hosting a three-hour live show means you have to keep things interesting and express a lot of opinions.'
Selective firepower
Certainly, O'Brien doesn't seem short of opinions or a willingness to air them. But while he is adept at taking down callers whose arguments he sees as flimsy or foolish, he seems less interested in the knotty business of offering coherent alternatives.
In stark contrast to the Brexit debate, he has been far less strident on trans issues, for example, saying in 2023: 'If someone believes that they were born in the wrong body, I don't want to call them a liar. And if somebody believes that their personal security is threatened by that person using the same amenities that they use, I don't want to call them a liar either.'
It is his apparent self-righteousness, whether he chooses to come down firmly on one side or not, that perhaps alienates his opponents above all.
'There are lots of opportunities for us to dedicate ourselves to evidence and fact, while the age seems to be dedicated to promoting idiots and falsehood and disinformation,' O'Brien said in May this year.