Neil O’Brien is a pugilist. His innocent gaze, consensual manner and fondness for publishing evidence-rich policy papers have tended to obscure this characteristic.
But as a senior minister this week told ConHome:
“Neil is someone who pursues the logic of what he considers to be right. Lots of people tend to aim off – to season their attacks with honey – he tends not to do that.”
The same minister observed that O’Brien “marshals and deploys his facts like bullets”. Consider his recent Substack essay in which he demonstrated, with a wealth of data about the university and social care sectors, that government policy has caused the surge to record levels of low-skilled and low-paid migration, and concluded:
“Rishi Sunak shows far too little urgency in fixing this, and Keir Starmer certainly wouldn’t.
“I’m not surprised voters are unhappy.”
The Times picked up this piece and earlier this week published a slightly shorter version (the original carried the warning it would take 18 minutes to read) under the headline “Visa policy scandal that lets poorest migrants stay in the UK: Universities have opened the door to those taking low-paid and low-status jobs in the gig economy, the MP Neil O’Brien writes.”
It would be an exaggeration to say that O’Brien awoke and found himself famous. One may nevertheless detect, in this 45-year-old policy wonk long esteemed by colleagues, the stirrings of a wider reputation.
Only under the pressure of events do politicians become fully formed, revealing what they have to offer to the nation and developing the persona by which (if at all) they will be remembered.
For Margaret Thatcher to develop into the Iron Lady, it was first necessary for Edward Heath to have failed, and for Labour under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan to fail too.
It is possible (to put it mildly) that the Conservatives under Rishi Sunak will find themselves rejected by voters at the next election, and that Labour under Sir Keir Starmer will prove no more successful at mastering the nation’s problems.
So already within the Conservative Party we see a debate about how to proceed. In the 1980s, it was common to hear Conservatives declare themselves “dry” on economic policy but “liberal” on social issues.
O’Brien is symptomatic of a trend in the opposite direction. Like Danny Kruger, he has no qualms about supporting an almost Heseltinian industrial policy, but is tough on crime and migration, and contends that the benefits of marriage (see one of his many pieces for ConHome) should be reaped by the poor as well as the rich.
The pugilistic qualities of O’Brien were demonstrated, to general amazement, during lockdown, when on Twitter and then on a specially created website he set out to disprove the assertions made by various scientists and journalists who were lockdown sceptics.
O’Brien and his colleagues collated and quoted erroneous statements by, among others, Ross Clark, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Peter Hitchens, Allison Pearson and Toby Young.
As Paul Goodman noted on ConHome, “Those columnists’ reaction to O’Brien is best captured by the old Dad’s Army catchphrase: ‘they don’t like it up ’em’.”
O’Brien himself wrote a piece for The Observer in which he recounted the response of some of the journalists to his tweets:
“Because they are still dangerous, I have pointed out the mistakes of some Covid-sceptics on Twitter. They regard this as outrageous. An MP shouldn’t be getting involved in this. I ‘must not have any constituents who’re struggling’, says Hartley-Brewer.
“Young deleted all his tweets from last year and, in a joint podcast with alt-right conspiracy theorist James Delingpole, I was accused of being ‘a wrong un’, a ‘fascist’, and compared to Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrenti Beria. (I didn’t know you could be a Nazi and a Commie.) I’ve touched a nerve, it seems. Politicians are used to accountability. The guilty people within the media are not.
“The truth is, the Covid-sceptics aren’t really sceptics at all. They engage in motivated reasoning; they make stuff up and double down on disproved claims. They are powerful figures, not used to being questioned. But the truth is that they have a hell of lot to answer for.”
O’Brien’s critics accused him of taking orders from Downing Street. A colleague of O’Brien says it was actually his wife, a GP by profession, who influenced his approach, and described O’Brien as “brave, fearless and hyper-intelligent”.
Danny Finkelstein, columnist for The Times, said that “for a Conservative MP to be as critical as he was of The Daily Telegraph is pretty bold,” and “certainly resolved the question of whether he was somebody who was willing to speak out for what he thought was the right thing.”
One of O’Brien’s parents was from Glasgow, but he was born and brought up in Huddersfield, and educated at All Saints High School (a Catholic school, but he is himself an atheist) and at Greenhead College, from which he won a place to read medicine at Christ Church, Oxford.
After one term he yielded to the lure of politics and switched to PPE, in which he took a First. On leaving Oxford he was soon involved, as were Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings, in the campaign to save the pound, an experience on which he touched in a piece for ConHome written in January 2021, just after the storming of the Capitol in Washington, which he blamed in part on the radicalisation of the “ragtag army of wannabe revolutionaries” by “a whole ecosystem of shock jocks, social media cranks and conspiracy theories”.
Unlike many people who in early adulthood adopt an orthodoxy and then close their eyes to later developments, O’Brien stresses the enormous difference made by social media:
“In my first job in politics, working for Business for Sterling in 2000, I used to fax a press summary each morning to about 20 people. At the time, there was a well-written Eurosceptic newsletter called Eurofacts, which was photocopied and posted around to about 1,000 people once a month.
“Until the next month, that was your hit of single-currency-scepticism. You had to go off and think about something else. Sure, some newspapers campaigned hard on both sides of the euro question. But reading the papers, even daily, just couldn’t absorb your attention in the way social media does.
“Looking back, those were the mild-ale days of political communication. These days, people can become hooked on the crack cocaine of issue-driven social media.”
O’Brien’s gifts were quickly spotted. From 2005-08 he was Director of Open Europe, from 2008-12 Director of Policy Exchange, from 2012-16 Special Adviser to George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, with particular responsibility for the Northern Powerhouse, and from 2016 an adviser to Theresa May, the new Prime Minister.
He played no part in the 2016 EU Referendum campaign, but according to a friend he voted Leave.
In 2017 he entered the Commons as MP for the in normal times safe Conservative seat of Harborough, in south-east Leicestershire, since renamed Harborough, Oadby and Wigston. The following year, with Will Tanner and Nick Faith, he founded the think tank Onward, chaired by Finkelstein.
When asked by The New Statesman how they would know whether Onward had succeeded, O’Brien said the aim was to “come up with some brilliant ideas, get them adopted and have them work really well”.
O’Brien was also one of the founders of the China Research Group, and in 2021 received the accolade of being sanctioned by the Chinese regime, along with Iain Duncan Smith and Tom Tugendhat.
Boris Johnson called O’Brien into Downing Street to advise on levelling up, and from September 2021 sent him to become Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Levelling Up. Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, told ConHome:
“He was an excellent junior minister who got Levelling Up fully – everything from the importance of devolution within England to using all the arms of Government to make the North and the Midlands more attractive for private investment.”
On Wednesday 6th July 2022, along with four other members of the 2017 intake, Kemi Badenoch, Alex Burghart, Lee Rowley and Julia Lopez, O’Brien resigned from the stricken Johnson Government, and the following morning Johnson himself resigned.
O’Brien was soon back in office as Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Department of Health and Social Care, but on 13th November 2023, during the reshuffle then being carried out, resigned from that post, saying he wished “to focus 100% on constituency work”, and “to see more of our two small children”.
One of O’Brien’s ministerial colleagues told ConHome:
“He’s a remarkably thoughtful and intelligent individual who is constantly coming up with ideas. He just got frustrated that Number 10 wouldn’t take them up.
“He’s constantly imaginative about how the system of government works. Given that we have a barely functioning bureaucracy, a bit of radicalism wouldn’t go amiss.”
Sunak’s caution frustrates many of his colleagues, and to O’Brien had become intolerable.
It is generally assumed that whoever becomes the next Conservative leader will wish to use O’Brien’s gifts to help develop a winning programme for government. He is good friends with Badenoch, but not a member of her team.
One may note from O’Brien’s record so far that he wishes to achieve things, not just talk about them. A Conservative who has known him for many years told ConHome:
“Because he has a condition with his feet, he wears boots rather than shoes, not elegant boots, but boots like a workman’s boots.
“He tends to go in feet first. He’s not in anybody’s camp. He does what he thinks is right.”