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John OFarrell - Things Can Only Get Better

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Book:
Things Can Only Get Better
Author:
John OFarrell
Publisher:
Transworld Digital
Genre:
Books / Art
Year:
2010;2015
City:
London
Rating:
5 / 5
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Things Can Only Get Better: summary, description and annotation

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Like bubonic plague and stone cladding, no-one took Margaret Thatcher seriously until it was too late. Her first act as leader was to appear before the cameras and do a V for Victory sign the wrong way round. She was smiling and telling the British people to f*** off at the same time. It was something we would have to get used to.

Things Can Only Get Better is the personal account of a Labour supporter who survived eighteen miserable years of Conservative government. It is the heartbreaking and hilarious confessions of someone who has been actively involved in helping the Labour party lose elections at every level: school candidate: door-to-door canvasser: working for a Labour MP in the House of Commons; standing as a council candidate; and eventually writing jokes for a shadow cabinet minister.

Along the way he slowly came to realise that Michael Foot would never be Prime Minister, that vegetable quiche was not as tasty as chicken tikki masala...

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John OFarrell has been a full-time comedy writer since the voters of Battersea sacked him from his previous job as an MPs researcher in the House of Commons. He was one of the lead writers of Spitting Image for five years before moving on to Have I Got News For You. He also co-writes The Peter Principle, the Head to Heads for Smith & Jones, and has written for Clive Anderson, Nick Hancock, Dawn French, Rory Bremner and the Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown MP. John OFarrell is a regular guest on Radio 4 for shows such as The News Quiz and writes a weekly column for the Guardian. Things Can Only Get Better: Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter was a number one bestseller and his first novel, The Best a Man Can Get, is now available from Black Swan. He lives in Clapham with his wife and two children.

www.booksattransworld.co.uk

Praise for Things Can Only Get Better:

This book intrudes into private grief and my first instinct was to resist it. The 18 years of misery under the Conservatives was my own unique journey of suffering and how could anyone else understand it. Least of all write about it? Alistair Campbell, Tony Blairs Press Secretary, had a similar initial reaction to Nick Hornbys Fever Pitch, a book that did for football what this book, in its way, will do for politics... OFarrell gently persuades us that what we felt is what he felt... The book is very funny, constantly using a hard wit to puncture the pretensions of a Labour Party that was always about to win. And he positions himself adroitly as an outsider, approaching every political situation with a mixture of unease and clumsiness that always endears

Philip Gould, The Times

His quirky memoir transcends its subject matter, while pinpointing with self-deprecating honesty how it felt to be young, middle-class and left-wing under Thatcher. Its also very funny he has Alan Bennetts eye for the hilarity lurking behind bourgeois pretence

Mail on Sunday

Excellent... Whatever your politics Things Can Only Get Better will make you laugh out loud

Angus Deayton

With all the lunacy of Labour politics in the Eighties and early Nineties, its a must-read for those who cast their first votes after 3 May 1979; twentysomethings may chuckle at the clever, funny absurdity of their near-elders. But in this post-ironic age, fortyplussomethings might be forgiven for seeing not an apologia, but a me a culpa for the inanities of young, middle-class Labour supporters who delayed the jubilation of 1997 by nearly two decades

Observer

Full of humour often at his own and his comrades expense

Morning Star

Very funny and much better than anything he ever wrote for me

Griff Rhys Jones

Very funny book... about the pity and the misery and the sheer boredom of being a devoted Labour supporter

Simon Hoggart, Guardian

Very well-written. And very funny

The Big Issue

This book evokes many of the words not normally associated with political memoir. Charming, self-aware, humble, witty and downright funny. I read it at one sitting

Nick Hancock

Hilarious

Gerald Kaufman, Daily Telegraph

Things Can Only Get Better is really about growing up, but growing up in the Labour Party at a time when it was going through convulsive change. It is a hilarious read... a very funny account of OFarrells odyssey from left-wing innocence to a mature acceptance of New Labour

The Mirror

The whingeing memoirs of a snivelling leftie. The man should be shot

Jack Dee

Political activists will have their own recollections of those wasted, mean years, but few will achieve the wit of this candid personal tale of hacking through Thatcherism... wickedly funny

Gary Kent, Tribune

The funniest book I have read for two and a half years

Arthur Smith

THINGS CAN
ONLY GET BETTER

Eighteen Miserable Years
in the Life of a Labour Supporter
19791997

John OFarrell

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Epub ISBN: 9781409020776

Version 1.0

www.randomhouse.co.uk

THINGS CAN ONLY GET BETTER

A BLACK SWAN BOOK : 0 552 99803 6

Originally published in Great Britain by Doubleday, a division of Transworld Publishers

PRINTING HISTORY

Doubleday edition published 1998

Black Swan edition published 1999

11 13 15 17 19 20 18 16 14 12

The right of John OFarrell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Condition of Sale

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Set in 11/13pt Melior by

Phoenix Typesetting, Ilkley, West Yorkshire.

Black Swan Books are published by Transworld Publishers, 6163 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA, a division of The Random House Group Ltd, in Australia by Random House Australia (Pty) Ltd, 20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney, NSW 2061, Australia, in New Zealand by Random House New Zealand Ltd, 18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand and in South Africa by Random House (Pty) Ltd, Endulini, 5a Jubilee Road, Parktown 2193, South Africa.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire.

To my mother and father

Acknowledgements

With thanks to the mainstay of Queenstown ward Labour Party during my years there, especially Phil Green, Eileen Hogan, Libby Ridgeway and Liz Tomlinson, and to all the people at Battersea Labour Party, especially Alf Dubs, Ann Creighton, Fiona Mactaggart and Martin Linton. I would also very much like to thank Georgia Garrett, Bill Scott-Kerr, Mark Burton, Pete Sinclair, Pat OFarrell and, most of all, my wife Jackie.

Authors note

I have tried to be as accurate as possible in this book and have checked facts wherever I could, but I apologise now if I have overlooked any mistakes. On the key points I am sure my memory serves me correctly:

1) Mrs Thatcher was in power during the 1980s.

2) I did not like her very much.

J. OF

Where there is discord...

General Election 3 May 1979

Maidenhead. The slag heaps and the dirt. The rattle of the giant wheel at the pit head. The faces of the coalminers as they trudged up the cobbled streets back from Cookham colliery, their white teeth and eyes gleaming as the noises of the brass band echoed through the Thames Valley. My father was a pit deputy at Littlewick Green colliery, and led the famous picket at Henley-on-Thames coke works back in the strike of 72. The Labour Party was in my blood. They didnt count the Labour votes in Maidenhead, they weighed them.

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