Things Can Only Get Better - Softcover

O'Farrell, John

4.03

1,295 ratings by Goodreads

9780552998031: Things Can Only Get Better

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0552998036 ISBN 13: 9780552998031

Publisher: Black Swan, 1999

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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 and that the nuclear arms race was never going to be stopped by face painting alone.

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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

Review:

"'The funniest book I have read for two and a half years'" (Arthur Smith)

"'The whingeing memoirs of a snivelling leftie. The man should be shot'" (Jack Dee)

"'Very funny'" (Mail on Sunday)

"'Excellent...Whatever your politics Things Can Only Get Better will make you laugh out loud'" (Angus Deayton)

"'Very funny'" (The Times)

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