Who James O’Brien is depends rather dramatically on who you ask. To those who share the LBC presenter’s views, he is the “conscience of liberal Britain”: a voice of reason in a bad-faith, post-truth age; sharp-minded, forensic and verbally agile, with a wealth of facts at his fingertips and a near-miraculous ability to summon exactly the right one to dismantle the argument of whichever phone-in listener happens to be sparring with him over the topic du jour.
To those who don’t, he is a woke, smug provocateur – and those are among the kinder descriptions one might find in the corners of the internet which, in his own words, “hate my guts”.
Either way, there is a thread that runs through the public persona: opinionated, combative, feisty. But does that feel an accurate description to O’Brien himself?
Shorts
“I’ve changed in the past 10 years more than I thought possible,” he says. “Those were all accurate descriptions, but part of the reason I started therapy was that I would be off air a bit like I was on air.”
