J ames O’Brien is talking about Brexit. He’s been doing this rather a lot since 23 June 2016 on his morning phone-in show for LBC, where his regular dismantling of Leave supporters’ arguments has proved so compelling that clips from the show have repeatedly gone viral on social media. On the back of their popularity, his audience has soared. He’s just published a new book, How to Be Right... in a World Gone Wrong, and he’s looking relaxed and confident when he steps into a small studio, off air, with a large mug of herbal tea.

“Brexit’s been very good for my career,” he says, “but it has been very bad for my soul. Given the choice, I’d rather still be broadcasting to half a million listeners and not being interviewed by The Independent, not have a book out and there be no Brexit, actually, hand-on-heart, because it is a country my children will grow up in and I’m hoping to be around for a few years yet.”

His listeners will know what happens next. He starts talking about it with a mixture of incredulity and exasperation that starts to heat up into something more volatile. He describes reading an article that said the cabinet was shocked to learn what would happen at our Channel ports in the event of a no-deal Brexit. “I was taking calls from hauliers and people that run companies in Dover about a year ago,” he says. “My listeners have known the facts and the detail for a year about stuff that reportedly shocked the cabinet a fortnight ago.”

Then the buckshot rounds start going off. “I genuinely thought it would turn out that these people do actually know what they’re doing, people like Hannan [the Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan], who’ve spent years insisting that this needs to happen, but they’ve all fallen apart like cheap suits. Every single one of them has ended up either resigning once reality has begun to bite, like Davis or Johnson, or going into self-imposed purdah rather than actually address the problems that they’ve caused, like Liam Fox or Michael Gove.”

Pause. Reload. Andrew Bridgen [the Conservative MP and Leave supporter, who suggested all English people are entitled to Irish passports] and MP Nadine Dorries are picked off as “some of the most profoundly ignorant people ever to disgrace public life”.

Missed one. “No deal is the only way that these people, these Rees-Mogg types, the only way they can avoid admitting that it’s all going to hell in a handcart is by saying, ‘No, it’s absolutely fine, here is another unicorn on the horizon’.”

And then he really starts to get cross, about how “these lying charlatans and these misguided decent people who brought Brexit about, are not yet ready to admit that they’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake and the only question Britain faces now is whether or not they’ll admit it in time to stop it”.

O’Brien: ‘There were occasions when I’d be throwing up with nerves before marching into a room and trying to talk to everybody’ (Urszula Soltys)

He stops, then adds the rhetorical equivalent of blowing smoke from the top of his gun barrel. “Hmmm, I’m not sure they will.”

At 46, O'Brien has been presenting his own show on LBC since 2003, taking calls on everything from Islamic extremism to male depression. How to Be Right..., which features transcripts from some of the more striking calls, takes on Islamophobia, political correctness, the nanny state, LGBT issues and feminism. O’Brien accepts that in some eyes he’s the very model of the media status quo: white, male, middle aged, privately educated, the son of a journalist. He’s fine with it. “My dad, unfortunately, had been made redundant by The Telegraph in my last year at school, so by the time it came for me, trying to get my foot in the door in Fleet Street, his contacts were diminished or dead, so I got my break in journalism by flogging a suit to John Major while I was working in Aquascutum on Regent Street.”

It was a white suit, for an EU summit in Florence. O’Brien rang up the Express and asked if he could do some shifts instead of being paid for the story. They gave him two. Though he’d not trained as a journalist, he’d been steeped in the methods of old-fashioned reporting: “Dad taught me about talking to people; the phone would never stop ringing, he’d be out and about meeting contacts in the pub. The first pint I ever had was bought for me by the head of West Midlands Serious Crime Squad, when I was 14, in a pub around the corner from my dad’s office. Dad was supposed to be taking me home but he had the sniff of a big scoop.”

O’Brien’s first shift involved attending a big showbiz birthday party for Richard Attenborough to get stories and gossip for the diary pages. “I’ll never forget it,” he says. “The lift doors opened on the first floor of the National Theatre and I couldn’t see a face that wasn’t famous… and I just bottled it. I remember the lift doors closing again.”

He went back to the bar and downed two whiskies before trying again, but next day as the editor brought out photo after photo of celebrities at the party and asked, “Did you talk to them?”, he realised that “I’d absolutely ballsed it up”.

James O'Brien's responds to a Brexit Poll which suggests that 58% of leave voters are happy to leave the EU even if it means the NHS has to stock pile medicines

His one shot at redemption was a press reception for British Oscar winners the next day, where it was rumoured that Sean Connery might attend. He did, O’Brien tells me. “As he was for any kid in his twenties who grew up watching James Bond films, Connery was iconic and heroic to me, but… he’s really rude. He turns up, marches past us, completely ignored all the journalists present, and starts stalking down the corridor towards the bit of the party that we weren’t allowed into. Everyone’s calling after him; I had done a bit of research and knew that his son had just made a film of Macbeth, so I shout, ‘Have you seen Jason in Macbeth yet, Mr Connery?’, which I thought was a nice question.

“He doesn’t even turn around, and for reasons I will never know, and I wonder to this day whether or not I would have got into journalism if this hadn’t happened, I called after him, ‘What’s wrong, Mr Connery? Are you a bit jealous that you never got the chance to play the part yourself?’ And he stopped, turned around, all the other journalists suddenly noticed that Connery’s coming back up the corridor, and he comes up to me and he hits me, two fingers, on the end of the nose in a way that actually makes your eyes water. And he goes, ‘I played the part before you were born. Do your f*****g homework, sonny.’ [He does the impression]. And I went, ‘Thank you very much Mr Connery’, and I knew I had a story.”

40 books to read while self-isolating Show all 40 1 /40 40 books to read while self-isolating 40 books to read while self-isolating Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen It is a fact universally acknowledged that every list of great books must include Pride and Prejudice. Don’t be fooled by the bonnets and balls: beneath the sugary surface is a tart exposé of the marriage market in Georgian England. For every lucky Elizabeth, who tames the haughty, handsome Mr. Darcy and learns to know herself in the process, there’s a Charlotte, resigned to life with a driveling buffoon for want of a pretty face. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾, Sue Townsend Read this one when you’re decrepit enough, and chances are you’ll die laughing. No-one has lampooned the self-absorption, delusions of grandeur and sexual frustration of adolescence as brilliantly as Susan Townsend, and no one ever will. Beyond the majestically majestic poetry and the pimples, there’s also a sharp satire of Thatcherist Britain. 40 books to read while self-isolating Catch 22, Joseph Heller It’s not often an idiom coined in a novel becomes a catch-phrase, but Joseph Heller managed it with his madcap, savage and hilarious tour de force. War is the ultimate dead-end for logic, and this novel explores all its absurdities as we follow US bombardier pilot Captain John Yossarian. While Heller drew on his own experience as a WWII pilot, it was the McCarthyism of the fifties that fueled the book’s glorious rage. 40 books to read while self-isolating Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy A good 125 years before #metoo, Thomas Hardy skewered the sexual hypocrisy of the Victorian age in this melodramatic but immensely moving novel. Tess is a naïve girl from a poor family who is raped by a wealthy land-owner. After the death of her baby, she tries to build a new life, but the “shame” of her past casts a long shadow. Read this if you want to understand the rotten culture at the root of victim-blaming. 40 books to read while self-isolating Things fall apart, Chinua Achebe A classic exposé of colonialism, Achebe’s novel explores what happens to a Nigerian village when European missionaries arrive. The main character, warrior-like Okonkwo, embodies the traditional values that are ultimately doomed. By the time Achebe was born in 1930, missionaries had been settled in his village for decades. He wrote in English and took the title of his novel from a Yeats poem, but wove Igbo proverbs throughout this lyrical work. 40 books to read while self-isolating 1984, George Orwell The ultimate piece of dystopian fiction, 1984 was so prescient that it’s become a cliché. But forget TV’s Big Brother or the trite travesty of Room 101: the original has lost none of its furious force. Orwell was interested in the mechanics of totalitarianism, imagining a society that took the paranoid surveillance of the Soviets to chilling conclusions. Our hero, Winston, tries to resist a grey world where a screen watches your every move, but bravery is ultimately futile when the state worms its way inside your mind. 40 books to read while self-isolating To kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee A timeless plea for justice in the setting of America’s racist South during the depression years, Lee’s novel caused a sensation. Her device was simple but incendiary: look at the world through the eyes of a six-year-old, in this case, Jean Louise Finch, whose father is a lawyer defending a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. Lee hoped for nothing but “a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers”: she won the Pulitzer and a place on the curriculum. 40 books to read while self-isolating Great Expectations, Charles Dickens Dickens was the social conscience of the Victorian age, but don’t let that put you off. Great Expectations is the roiling tale of the orphaned Pip, the lovely Estella, and the thwarted Miss Havisham. First written in serial form, you barely have time to recover from one cliffhanger before the next one beckons, all told in Dickens’ luxuriant, humorous, heartfelt prose. 40 books to read while self-isolating The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy Roy won the 1997 Booker Prize with her debut novel, a powerful intergenerational tale of love that crosses caste lines in southern India, and the appalling consequences for those who break the taboos dictating “who should be loved, and how. And how much”. Sex, death, religion, the ambivalent pull of motherhood: it’s all there in this beautiful and haunting book. 40 books to read while self-isolating Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel In an astonishing act of literary ventriloquism, Mantel inhabits a fictionalised version of Thomas Cromwell, a working-class boy who rose through his own fierce intelligence to be a key player in the treacherous world of Tudor politics. Historical fiction so immersive you can smell the fear and ambition. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse If you haven’t read PG Wodehouse in a hot bath with a snifter of whisky and ideally a rubber duck for company, you haven’t lived. Wallow in this sublimely silly tale of the ultimate comic double act: bumbling aristocrat Bertie Wooster and his omniscient butler, Jeeves. A sheer joy to read that also manages to satirise British fascist leader Oswald Mosley as a querulous grump in black shorts. 40 books to read while self-isolating Frankenstein, Mary Shelley Shelley was just 18 when she wrote Frankenstein as part of a challenge with her future husband, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron, to concoct the best horror story. Put down the green face paint: Frankenstein’s monster is a complex creation who yearns for sympathy and companionship. Some 200 years after it was first published, the gothic tale feels more relevant than ever as genetic science pushes the boundaries of what it means to create life. 40 books to read while self-isolating Lord of the Flies, William Golding Anyone who has ever suspected that children are primitive little beasties will nod sagely as they read Golding’s classic. His theory is this: maroon a bunch of schoolboys on an island, and watch how quickly the trappings of decent behaviour fall away. Never has a broken pair of spectacles seemed so sinister, or civilisation so fragile. 40 books to read while self-isolating Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie The protagonist of Rushdie’s most celebrated novel is born at the exact moment India gains independence. He’s also born with superpowers, and he’s not the only one. In an audacious and poetic piece of magical realism, Rushdie tells the story of India’s blood-soaked resurgence via a swathe of children born at midnight with uncanny abilities. 40 books to read while self-isolating Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte You will need a cold, dead heart not to be moved by one of literature’s steeliest heroines. From the institutional cruelty of her boarding school, the “small, plain” Jane Eyre becomes a governess who demands a right to think and feel. Not many love stories take in a mad woman in the attic and a spot of therapeutic disfigurement, but this one somehow carries it off with mythic aplomb 40 books to read while self-isolating Middlemarch, George Eliot This is a richly satisfying slow burn of a novel that follows the lives and loves of the inhabitants of a small town in England through the years 1829–32. The acerbic wit and timeless truth of its observations mark this out as a work of genius; but at the time the author, Mary Anne Evans, had to turn to a male pen name to be taken seriously. 40 books to read while self-isolating Secret History, Donna Tartt Stick another log on the fire and curl up with this dark, peculiar and quite brilliant literary murder tale. A group of classics students become entranced by Greek mythology - and then take it up a level. Remember, kids: never try your own delirious Dionysian ritual at home. 40 books to read while self-isolating Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie A subtle and engrossing look at racial identity, through the story of a charismatic young Nigerian woman who leaves her comfortable Lagos home for a world of struggles in the United States. Capturing both the hard-scrabble life of US immigrants and the brash divisions of a rising Nigeria, Adichie crosses continents with all her usual depth of feeling and lightness of touch. 40 books to read while self-isolating Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons An absolute unadulterated comic joy of a novel. Stella Gibbons neatly pokes fun at sentimental navel-gazing with her zesty heroine Flora, who is more interested in basic hygiene than histrionics. In other words, if you’ve “seen something nasty in the woodshed,” just shut the door. 40 books to read while self-isolating Beloved, Toni Morrison Dedicated to the “Sixty Million and more” Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the slave trade, this is a cultural milestone and a Pulitzer-winning tour de force. Morrison was inspired by the real-life story of an enslaved woman who killed her own daughter rather than see her return to slavery. In her plot, the murdered child returns to haunt a black community, suggesting the inescapable taint of America’s history. 40 books to read while self-isolating Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh Evelyn Waugh bottles the intoxicating vapour of a vanished era in this novel about middle-class Charles Ryder, who meets upper-class Sebastian Flyte at Oxford University in the 1920s. Scrap the wartime prologue, and Charles’s entire relationship with Sebastian’s sister Julia (Dear Evelyn, thank you for your latest manuscript, a few suggested cuts…) and you’re looking at one of the most affecting love affairs in the English language. 40 books to read while self-isolating Dune, Frank Herbert You can almost feel your mouth dry with thirst as you enter the world of Frank Herbert’s Dune and encounter the desert planet of Arrakis, with its giant sandworms and mind-altering spice. It’s the setting for an epic saga of warring feudal houses, but it’s as much eco-parable as thrilling adventure story. Rarely has a fictional world been so completely realised. 40 books to read while self-isolating Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte Will there ever be a novel that burns with more passionate intensity than Wuthering Heights? The forces that bring together its fierce heroine Catherine Earnshaw and cruel hero Heathcliff are violent and untameable, yet rooted in a childhood devotion to one another, when Heathcliff obeyed Cathy’s every command. It’s impossible to imagine this novel ever provoking quiet slumbers; Emily Bronte’s vision of nature blazes with poetry. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald The savage reviews that greeted F Scott Fitzgerald’s third novel – “no more than a glorified anecdote”; “for the season only” – failed to recognise something truly great; a near-perfect distillation of the hope, ambition, cynicism and desire at the heart of the American Dream. Other novels capture the allure of the invented self, from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black to Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, but Fitzgerald’s enigmatic Jay Gatsby casts a shadow that reaches to Mad Men’s Don Draper and beyond. 40 books to read while self-isolating A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess From the moment we meet Alex and his three droogs in the Korova milkbar, drinking moloko with vellocet or synthemesc and wondering whether to chat up the devotchkas at the counter or tolchock some old veck in an alley, it’s clear that normal novelistic conventions do not apply. Anthony Burgess’s slim volume about a violent near-future where aversion therapy is used on feral youth who speak Nadsat and commit rape and murder, is a dystopian masterpiece. 40 books to read while self-isolating Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov Banned from entering the UK in its year of publication, 1955, Vladimir Nabokov’s astonishingly skilful and enduringly controversial work of fiction introduces us to literary professor and self-confessed hebephile Humbert Humbert, the perhaps unreliable narrator of the novel. He marries widow Charlotte Haze only to get access to her daughter, 12-year-old Dolores, nicknamed Lo by her mother, or as Humbert calls her “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” Cloaking his abuse in the allusive language of idealised love does not lessen Humbert’s crimes, but allows Nabokov to skewer him where he hides. 40 books to read while self-isolating Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K Dick Here be Roy Baty, Rick Deckard and Rachael Rosen – the novel that inspired Blade Runner is stranger even than the film it became. Back in an age before artificial intelligence could teach itself to play chess in a few hours better than any grandmaster that ever lived, Philip K Dick was using the concept of android life to explore what it meant to be human, and what it is to be left behind on a compromised planet. That he could do it in 250 pages that set the mind spinning and engage the emotions with every page-turn make this a rare science-fiction indeed. 40 books to read while self-isolating Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad Inspired by Conrad’s own experiences of captaining a trading steamer up the Congo River, Heart of Darkness is part adventure, part psychological voyage into the unknown, as the narrator Marlow relays the story of his journey into the jungle to meet the mysterious ivory trader Mr Kurtz. Although debate continues to rage about whether the novel and its attitude to Africa and colonialism is racist, it’s deeply involving and demands to be read. 40 books to read while self-isolating Dracula, Bram Stoker Whatever passed between Irish theatre manager Bram Stoker and the Hungarian traveller and writer Ármin Vámbéry when they met in London and talked of the Carpathian Mountains, it incubated in the Gothic imagination of Stoker into a work that has had an incalculable influence on Western culture. It’s not hard to read the Count as a shadowy sexual figure surprising straitlaced Victorian England in their beds, but in Stoker’s hands he’s also bloody creepy. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger It only takes one sentence, written in the first person, for Salinger’s Holden Caulfield to announce himself in all his teenage nihilism, sneering at you for wanting to know his biographical details “and all that David Copperfield kind of crap”. The Catcher in the Rye is the quintessential novel of the adolescent experience, captured in deathless prose. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler Dashiel Hammett may have been harder boiled, his plots more intricate but, wow, does Raymond Chandler have style. The push and pull at the start of The Big Sleep between private detective Philip Marlowe, in his powder-blue suit and dark blue shirt, and Miss Carmen Sternwood, with her “little sharp predatory teeth” and lashes that she lowers and raises like a theatre curtain, sets the tone for a story of bad girls and bad men. 40 books to read while self-isolating Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray All the teeming life of 19th century London is here in Thackeray’s masterpiece, right down to the curry houses frequented by Jos Sedley, who has gained a taste for the hot stuff as an officer in the East India Trading Company. But it is Becky Sharp, one of literature’s great characters, who gives this novel its enduring fascination. As a woman on the make, Becky is the perfect blend of wit, cunning and cold-hearted ruthlessness. Try as film and TV might to humanise and make excuses for her, Becky needs victims to thrive! And she’s all the more compelling for that. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath The only novel written by the poet Sylvia Plath is a semi-autobiographical account of a descent into depression that the book’s narrator Esther Greenwood describes as like being trapped under a bell jar – used to create a vacuum in scientific experiments – struggling to breathe. Almost every word is arresting, and the way that Plath captures the vivid life happening around Esther, news events, magazine parties, accentuates the deadening illness that drives her towards suicidal feelings. Plath herself would commit suicide one month after the novel’s publication in 1963. 40 books to read while self-isolating Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl Harry Potter may be more popular, but Willy Wonka is altogether weirder. From the overwhelming poverty experienced by Charlie Bucket and his family, to the spoilt, greedy, brattish children who join Charlie on his trip to Willy Wonka’s phantasmagorical sweet factory there is nothing artificially sweetened in Roald Dahl’s startling work of fantasy. 40 books to read while self-isolating Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy Andrew Davies’s recent TV adaptation of War and Peace reminded those of us who can’t quite face returning to the novel’s monstrous demands just how brilliantly Tolstoy delineates affairs of the heart, even if the war passages will always be a struggle. In Anna Karenina – enormous, too! –the great Russian novelist captures the erotic charge between the married Anna and the bachelor Vronsky, then drags his heroine through society’s scorn as their affair takes shape, without ever suggesting we move from her side. 40 books to read while self-isolating Dangerous Liaisons, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos The most deliciously wicked experience in literature, this epistolary novel introduces us to the Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont, who play cruel games of sexual conquest on their unwitting victims. The Marquise’s justification for her behaviour – “I, who was born to revenge my sex and master yours” – will strike a chord in the #metoo era, but emotions, even love, intrude, to the point where Laclos’s amorality becomes untenable. Sexy but very, very bad. 40 books to read while self-isolating 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez The energy and enchantment of Garcia Marquez’s story of seven generations of the Buendia family in a small town in Colombia continue to enthrall half a century on. Hauntings and premonitions allied to a journalistic eye for detail and a poetic sensibility make Marquez’s magical realism unique. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Trial, Frank Kafka “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K…” So begins Kafka’s nightmarish tale of a man trapped in an unfathomable bureaucratic process after being arrested by two agents from an unidentified office for a crime they’re not allowed to tell him about. Foreshadowing the antisemitism of Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as the methods of the Stasi, KGB, and StB, it’s an unsettling, at times bewildering, tale with chilling resonance. 40 books to read while self-isolating Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier The second Mrs de Winter is the narrator of Du Maurier’s marvellously gothic tale about a young woman who replaces the deceased Rebecca as wife to the wealthy Maxim de Winter and mistress of the Manderley estate. There she meets the housekeeper Mrs Danvers, formerly devoted to Rebecca, who proceeds to torment her. As atmospheric, psychological horror it just gets darker and darker. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Published posthumously in 1958, Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel is set in 19th century Sicily, where revolution is in the air. The imposing Prince Don Fabrizio presides over a town close to Palermo during the last days of an old world in which class stratifications are stable and understood. Garibaldi’s forces have taken the island and a new world will follow. It’s a deep and poetic meditation on political change and the characters that it produces.

O’Brien would eventually become showbiz editor, but he says: “I never overcame that anxiety, and there were occasions when I’d be throwing up with nerves before marching into a room and trying to talk to everybody.”

It was a relief to move into broadcasting. He worked on The Wright Stuff for Channel 5 for its first couple of years after it started in 2000, and briefly had his own talk show in 2001, before he began doing stand-in shifts at LBC, which soon became permanent. He was well placed when the station, originally London-only, began broadcasting nationwide in 2014. Does he ever run into fellow talk show host Nigel Farage in the canteen? “Once.” How was that? “I think we sort of nodded and said hello, and I then went and washed.”

Farage, of course, is a public schoolboy who presents himself as the voice of the people, the voice of reason – does O’Brien feel there is any similarity between what they do? His eyes, which are blue and hard to read, level carefully on mine; he is not in the business of running away from confrontational gambits. “No, I don’t,” he says, “because I tell people the truth and I don’t encourage them to hate their neighbours.”

O’Brien went to Ampleforth – sometimes labelled the “Catholic Eton” – in North Yorkshire. The school has since been the subject of a sexual abuse scandal. Was he aware of the psychological and physical abuse that it later became associated with? “I was not aware at Ampleforth of any of my peers being sexually abused by monks. I was at prep school.” (He went to Winterfold House in Kidderminster). “I was too young to do anything about it, but I knew the teacher, he’s in prison now and I knew what he was doing to my friends.

“At Ampleforth, from 13 to 18, I had no idea whether boys my age were being abused. There were monks with a reputation for being a bit gropey, or oddly affectionate, but I don’t think that’s unique to boarding schools or public schools. One of the monks that ended up being convicted, who’s dead now, was one of my favourite teachers. That was very, very hard to process. And then, of course, all the teachers who weren’t implicated in anything, whether monks or members of the lay staff, the scale of what was going on at Ampleforth pollutes those memories as well, because you think, you must have known. You must have looked the other way.”

There’s a frankness to O’Brien that his audiences will recognise, as well as a willingness to listen. His callers, he says, have taught him a lot. We talk about one conversation in the book where a woman rings to talk about the time that a senior partner at her law firm told her in a lift that he loved the way she filled out her jeans, recalling how much it had upset her.

“They’re the ones that make me stop and think,” he says. “I still struggle to move on from the argument that I’ve had on the radio many times that two identical behaviours from two very different men will be greeted very, very differently by the woman on the receiving end. If someone you fancy says something to you, your reaction to it is profoundly different from your reaction if it’s someone you find disturbing and creepy, though it’s exactly the same words.” Has he ever been accused of sexism? “I’d be astonished if any former colleague or friend of mine ever felt I’d behaved inappropriately,” he says.

He’s a married father of two daughters, who are 12 and 10. Is he looking forward to the day when they tell him: oh dad, you’re such a reactionary? “They could rebel against me by joining Ukip,” he frets. “When I was growing up you could talk about anything – and our dinner table is the same, but at the moment we are talking more about Taylor Swift.”

He sometimes wonders how he might have turned out if he hadn’t been adopted. His Irish mother, he says, “like loads of other people in the early 1970s, would have come over and given birth here and then I was adopted at 28 days old”. “It’s not a massive part of who I am. The love and the warmth in our home, between me and my mum and dad and sister, when we were growing up and now between us, is... it’s immense.” He’s never felt the need to contact his birth mother, he says. His father, Jim O’Brien, died six years ago.

A whole chapter of the book is devoted to Donald Trump. On the show, O’Brien has been known to describe him as “basically a fascist in the White House”. We talk about how people used to be criticised for throwing the word around at all and sundry. Does he really believe Trump is a fascist? “Yes, of course he is. He’s said himself he’s a nationalist, you can add very simply ‘white’ to that word. You look at how he talks about women, how he talks about people of colour. Accusing Barack Obama of not being American is absolute entry-level racism.”

Even knowing how many people died because of fascism? “The people that caused all those deaths were fascists before people started dying,” he insists. Does he really think it’s that serious? “No, because I think that the checks and balances of the American constitution and the efforts of Robert Mueller [the special counsel investigating links between Russia and the Trump campaign] and a functioning media should put the brakes on him. And hopefully will, but I’m not 100 per cent confident.”

O’Brien himself gets plenty of flak. He says there are people on Twitter who have “dedicated years” to trolling him. “Some of the biggest trolls are probably stars of my book, people that have rung the programme, have soiled themselves in front of hundreds and thousands of people and will never forgive me for humiliating them quite so profoundly in public; and that’s fine too, but again it sounds probably disingenuous, but I kind of wish they could find something a bit more fulfilling to do, I really do.”

Does he ever feel a bit like a fairground wrestler: roll-up, roll-up, try your luck against James O’Brien? “On a couple of issues,” he says, “like Brexit, or possibly Trump. When the balloon thing happened, that was like, ‘Come and have a go’. Yes, I do sometimes but not often, because it’s a bit irresponsible and a bit disrespectful.” He loves the verbal ding-dong, he says. “I’m more interested in light than heat, but sometimes heat is very, very entertaining and over the years I’ve become quite good at, if you will, knocking out people who want to climb into the ring with me.”

How to Be Right... in a World Gone Wrong, published by WH Allen, £12.99, is out now