Things Can Only Get Better (Paperback)

Read John O'Farrell's choice of election reads on the Waterstones Blog

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 heart-breaking 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.

Now reissued in advance of his sequel Things Can Only Get Worse, this portrait of Labour in its ‘dog years’ – those near two-decades of their unelectable misery under the Tories – reads, if anything, even funnier and browbeaten now than the day it was published.

A journalist, scriptwriter and novelist John O'Farrell’s first book, Things Can Only Get Better, was a number one bestseller and was dramatized for BBC Radio 4. His other work includes: The Best a Man Can Get, May Contain Nuts, An Utterly Impartial History of Britain and An Utterly Exasperated History of Modern Britain.