Product Description

A personal account of a Labour supporter's miserable eighteen years under a Tory government. A literary debut which combines wit with barbed insight from the author who has been a full time comedy writer since the voters of Battersea sacked him from his previous job as an MP's researcher for the House of Commons.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11488 in Books
• Published on: 1999-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 333 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
"Nothing gets my hackles up more," writes John O'Farrell, "than people who should know better copping out of the political system because they think they are above it." No-one could question O'Farrell's commitment to the political process after reading this hysterical, trenchant and admirably self-aware account of 'eighteen miserable years in the life of a labour supporter'.

Born in Maidenhead to a family so irredeemably middle-class that as a student he found himself carefully punctuating his graffiti ("Jobs, comma, not bombs. Full stop."), O'Farrell maps the unglamorous underbelly of politics--the cold community centres, the estates you can never canvas because the security doors won't let you in, the pleasure to be had in aggressively doorstepping Jehovah's Witnesses. Most impressively, O'Farrell records the psychological cost of it all. "There is," he admits, "something perverse in the fact that the task of making the world a happier place required us to stop having fun." His account of his joyless, sexless, right-on youth will surely have bells jangling in many a balding graduate pate.

Growing up in a world where the Tories had trade-marked common sense, it was inevitable that O'Farrell's primary political release should be writing for Spitting Image. Now that Labour have, at terrible ideological cost, retaken the common ground, O'Farrell has turned that humour on himself. People of all political persuasions will enjoy this book. O'Farrell would hate us saying that--sadly for him, it is true. --Simon Ings

From the Back Cover
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 had been actively involved in helping the Labour party lose elections at every level.

Along the way he slowly came to realize that Michael Foot would never be prime minister, that vegetable quiche was not as tasty as chicken tikka masala and that the nuclear arms race was never going to be stopped by face-painting alone.

About the Author
John O'Farrell
John O'Farrell is the author of the No.1 bestseller Things Can Only Get Better; Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter. His name has flashed past at the end of such productions as Spitting Image, Have I Got News for You, and, more recently, the film Chicken Run. He is a regular guest on Radio 4 for shows such as The News Quiz and writes a weekly column for the Guardian. His first novel is The Best a Man Can Get. He lives in Clapham with his wife and two children.

Customer Reviews

The Longest Love Letter in History
Any Guardian reader will be familiar with O'Farrell's style from his Saturday column, which is quietly intelligent and simply loaded with great gags, almost literally one per sentence. A collection of those, in fact, is avaiable under the compiled title Global Village Idiot (referring I think to the esteemed President). Here, though, he reflects on - well - eighteen miserable years in the life of a Labour supporter from 1979 to 1997.

It's superbly entertaining and also instructive for anyone like me who was born in the early 70s and wasn't much interested in politics until post-Thatcher. Brought up in a home where the only source of political punditry was the Daily Express (now a New Labour cheerleader, but then the paramilitary wing of the Daily Mail), I really believed all those stories about Loony Left Councils and the disasters of the Callaghan government. O'Farrell provides a refreshing alternative view, albeit 20 years too late.

He's not blindly vain for the Labour cause, though, and readily accepts the terrible suicidal state the party found itself in during the early 1980s, and the 1983 manifesto later described as "longest suicide note in history". On the election of Michael Foot as leader, he recalls: "When his ascension was confirmed in a second ballot, my fellow students and I drank a happy toast to this victory for socialism. I looked across to the Tory students on the other side of the university bar and they seemed to be celebrating something too." This has two parallels for today's reader: first it reminds us of the terrible suicidal state that the Conservative party finds itself in today, and secondly in the dismissal of a new leader we recall (as O'Farrell reminds us elsewhere) how Margaret Thatcher was ridiculed by the left when she was elected leader, and how wrong they were to do so. "Tory leaders always seem to come out of nowhere," says O'Farrell.

The most refreshing thing about the book though is that occasionally he pauses the jokes and, more or less involuntarily one suspects, wails about how anyone could possibly consider the Tories a force for good, and reminds us of how all the positive social changes of the 20th century came from the liberal left. This passion for the third way may seem mediocre at times - and he's certainly no radical compared to the Guardian columnist he replaced, Jeremy Hardy, who regularly made me feel like a swivel-eyed fascist bigot - but it's honest and, tempered with his keen wit, it makes me say: John O'Farrell for next Labour Leader but one!

More fun than knocking up
If, like me, you have braved the cold winter nights for the good of 'The Party' and if, like me, you have looked around draughty church halls at ill-attended meetings and wondered if it was all worth it, and if, like me, you remember that glorious night in May 1997 and decided that yes, it was all worth it after all, then you will gain a special sort of pleasure from this book. Laugh out loud funny for anyone with more than a passing interest in grassroots politics.

Things Can Only Get Better
I picked up "Things can only get better" in a shop the other day and after really the first chapter in the shop just had to buy it. So readable was it in the end that I finished it that very same day and can happily report that it was a most entertaining and enjoyable book.

John O'Farrell is a TV comedy writer whose credits include Spitting Image, Have I got News for you, Smith and Jones, Clive Anderson and the list goes on. He has also been a paid up member of the Labour party pretty soon since he left university. Born to a fairly affluent family living in Berkshire, theirs was a slightly unusual family in that both John's mother and father were true socialists just when other families in their areas were looking forward to Mrs Thatcher winning the 1979 General Election. The sub title of the book is "Eighteen miserable years in the life of a Labour Supporter" and that's really what the book is all about.

As I say the book begins with the General Election of 1979 and goes right through the Tony Blair's landslide victory in 1997 and pulls out all the major events in-between, the Greenham, Common protest, the Falklands campaign, the miners' strike, the failures of Neil Kinnock, the eventual sacking of Maggie and John Major's attempts to lead the country.

Although the writing makes no mistake that John is a fervent socialist and Labour party support his style is fairly light and undemanding and although the bias is strongly in favour of Labour he doesn't get bogged down in too much Tory bashing and isn't above taking a great line in humourous self-depreciation and fully details the reasons why Labour's ineffectiveness were as much to blame for the 18 years of Tory rule as were the Tory capitalisation of events like the Falklands and Michael Foot.

Obviously if you are a true blue conservative then you're probably going to throw the book down in exasperation, decrying it for being full of lies and spin, but if you lean slightly to the left or even if you've just got a general interest in politics then I think you'll find it a great entertaining read and more than a little bit funny.