Peter Oborne

Peter Oborne writes for Middle East Eye.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Crying in the wilderness

For 30 years Alastair Crooke was ostensibly a British diplomat working in Northern Ireland, South Africa, Columbia and Pakistan. Ten years ago he became Middle East adviser to Javier Solana, playing an important role in negotiating ceasefires between Israel and Hamas, as well as helping to end the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in May 2002. In the summer of that year an Israeli newspaper named Crooke as an agent for the Secret Intelligence Service, and shortly after he was recalled to London. It has been reported that his sympathy with the Palestine cause caused embarrassment to Tony Blair’s government.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

They were chanting ‘Kill, kill, kill’

There was total silence, apart from birdsong, when we entered the village of Kuru Karama. Every building had been burnt or destroyed. There were no villagers in sight, just two or three soldiers at a guard post dozing in the late afternoon sun. At length we found a group of young men and women. Did they live here? Yes. Had they been here on the day of the massacre? No, they knew nothing. Were they Christian or Muslim? Christian. They bent their heads and one woman placed her hand over her mouth. Finally we came across Abdullah. He took us to a little square and pointed out some of the wells into which the Christian killers had thrown scores of dead bodies, head downwards. Some of the bodies were so decomposed that they could not be removed. The stench of death seeped out of the wells.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Cricket’s foreign legion

Last week a ferocious new talent made his debut for the England cricket team. Craig Kieswetter, a wicketkeeper/batsman, is only 22 years old and is thought likely to be a regular in the England team for years to come. Normally this would be a matter for national celebration. But with the arrival of Kieswetter there is also unease, though it has yet to be articulated. The problem is easy to state: Kieswetter is not British. He was born in Johannesburg and grew up in South Africa, playing cricket for Western Province from the age of 13 to 18. It is less than four years since he played for South Africa in the Under-19s World Cup in Sri Lanka. Kieswetter is one of a growing number of white South Africans who have made themselves available for England over the last few years.

Wednesday

Peter Oborne

Time for a Major re-think

Instead of deriding John Major we should celebrate him, says Peter Oborne. His government was stunningly radical and initiated most of Blair’s so-called reforms Gordon Brown may be in terrible trouble but he and his allies have a defence strategy. However bad things are, they say it was much worse under John Major’s weak, hopeless and sleazy administration. I believe that the time has come to mount a serious challenge to this analysis and make the case for both Major and his government. It is becoming obvious, especially with the benefit of hindsight, that John Major was a formidable leader with substantial achievements to his credit. But the narrative of John Major’s hopelessness was so strong that for many years it was impossible to make the case in his favour.

Peter Oborne

The vile behaviour of the press

This book exposes newspapers to the same merciless, lethal and sometimes unfair scrutiny which the press itself has long shone on politicians, the royal family and numerous other targets. The results are devastating. Nick Davies has amassed an overwhelming weight of evidence that the British media lies, distorts facts and routinely breaks the law. It is hypnotically readable, commands attention right to the end and has troubled me profoundly ever since. No journalist with any sense of decency can read this work without at times feeling anger and personal shame. I have worked for 25 years as a reporter and thought I understood the business fairly well. But again and again Davies provides fresh jaw-dropping evidence that journalism in Britain today is bent.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Cameron is our Disraeli

There is a certain type of bovine political intelligence which hates David Cameron. It cannot forgive the Tory leader his popularity, his beautiful wife, his upper-middle-class ease —  and above all his astonishing success in rebuilding the Conservative party. The core criticism works like this: David Cameron is an empty and opportunistic former PR executive, interested only in power for its own sake, utterly devoid of ideas let alone principles, morally indistinguishable from Tony Blair, and in the pocket of Rupert Murdoch. And it must be acknowledged that this portrait contains some truth. He also lacks that visceral connection with ordinary voters that marked out Margaret Thatcher.

Monday

Peter Oborne

Letter from Zimbabwe

There is only one real subject of discussion at this weekend’s Zanu-PF Congress in Harare: when will Robert Mugabe stand down? The old man — whom party loyalists now refer to as the ‘second son of God’ — will be 86 in February. There is only one real subject of discussion at this weekend’s Zanu-PF Congress in Harare: when will Robert Mugabe stand down? The old man — whom party loyalists now refer to as the ‘second son of God’ — will be 86 in February. It would take a miracle for him to stand in the next presidential elections and if he did, everyone knows that — however much violence he employed — he would lose.

Wednesday

Peter Oborne

A poisoned legacy from which Labour has never quite recovered

Judging only by its electoral performance, the Communist Party of Great Britain was a near-total failure in the 20th century. It only secured a tiny number of MPs at Westminster, while the party membership peaked at just over 60,000 at the height of Soviet popularity during the second world war. But this public lack of success was misleading. The communists exercised considerable secret influence in universities, publishing houses, journalism and even the civil service for decades after 1945. Its greatest power, however, lay inside the Labour party and the trade unions. It was perhaps especially strong in the National Union of Mineworkers and the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. This strength survived long after the catastrophic Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.

Wednesday

Peter Oborne

A new jihad in the Philippines

Very few outsiders ever venture into the Liguasan marshes, the remote inland sea which stretches across hundreds of square miles of the southern Philippine island of Mindanao. These marshes, for the most part approachable only by jungle tracks and navigable by shallow-bottomed boats, form the perfect hiding place for criminal gangs which make a good living by kidnapping businessmen from nearby towns and cities. The Liguasan marshes also provide a base for the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), an insurgency which claims to speak for the native Bangsamoro people who were living in the Philippines long before the Spanish invasion in the 16th century. Despite repeated assaults, which have intensified in recent years, the Bangsamoro have never been conquered.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Diary – 11 July 2009

The shadow chancellor George Osborne has been lunching privately with the textiles magnate Richard Caring, the Labour-supporting businessman who got caught up in the cash for peerages investigation. It is less than a year since Osborne demonstrated a catastrophic failure of judgment by being lured onto a yacht owned by the disreputable Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. After the Deripaska episode Osborne promised to have nothing more to do with political funding. Yet here he is consorting with another party donor. What on earth does the shadow chancellor think he is doing? To Northamptonshire for cricket against my friend William Sitwell. I ask his mother for a guided tour of the house.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Keith Joseph’s lesson to today’s political pygmies

Thirty-five years ago Sir Keith Joseph was the first politician to provide a coherent response to the collapse of the postwar economic settlement. Our ruling elite continued to analyse the financial and social catastrophe of the mid-1970s in traditional terms. But Sir Keith — in an act of quite astonishing courage for a front-rank politician — departed from the orthodox. This meant that he was misrepresented, he was insulted, and in career terms he may have paid a heavy price. In those lonely speeches made in those now far-off times, Sir Keith Joseph invented a revolutionary new political economy. In doing so, he changed British history and saved us from stagnation and disaster.

Wednesday

Peter Oborne

We have a duty to protect Zimbabwe

Ten years ago the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan set out a new international doctrine. Annan declared that the world was looking forward to what he called ‘a new century of human rights’. For the United Nations, declared Annan, this meant an entirely new way of doing things. ‘No government,’ he declared, ‘has the right to hide behind national sovereignty in order to violate the human rights or fundamental freedoms of its peoples. ‘Whether a person belongs to the minority or the majority, that person’s human rights and fundamental freedoms are sacred.’ This statement was revolutionary. Inter-national relations, since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, have been conducted on the basis of formal respect for national boundaries.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Diary – 24 May 2008

The day after my arrival in Harare I attended Evensong at St Mary Magdalene’s Anglican church. The congregation was in a state of shock. Almost every church in Harare had been raided by riot police that morning. In some cases the police blocked worshippers from entering as they arrived, beating up those who tried to object. In other cases the police only made their appearance once the service had already begun. At St Francis Waterfalls the police charged into the church and dragged people from the communion rail as they took the Eucharist, reportedly beating at least one woman senseless. Robert Mugabe accuses the churches of consorting with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. The problem is inflamed by the fact that there are two bishops of Harare.

Wednesday

Peter Oborne

In Zimbabwe, hope has turned to silent terror

On the night after the presidential elections 12 days ago, a British diplomat, Philip Barclay, witnessed the count at the little outpost of Bikisa deep in rural Masvingo. This part of Zimbabwe is Zanu PF heartland. In all five presidential elections since independence in 1981 the people of Bikisa had voted solidly for Robert Mugabe — and there was little expectation of anything different this time. Barclay reports feeling faint with sheer amazement when it became clear that the largest pile of votes was for Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Just 44 people in Bikisa voted for President Mugabe, against an overwhelming 167 for Tsvangirai.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

At the heart of the Labour funding scandal is the moral collapse of a once-great party

‘Get me a Bishop. Get me a f—ing Bishop!’ Peter Mandelson, then Labour’s political strategist, yelled these words across the floor of Labour campaign headquarters at a rare moment of crisis before the 1997 general election. Inquiries were made, soundings taken in ecclesiastical and other circles. With surprising speed, lo and behold! there emerged out of pontifical obscurity the austere figure of Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford. The ecclesiastical potentate obligingly anathemised John Major and his works. Ever since then the Rt Revd Harries has been reliably on hand with spiritual solace for Labour party politicians in times of trouble.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Settling old scores

English cricket was in a desperate state seven years ago. The players had just been booed off the field after defeat at home by New Zealand. Team morale was poor, while there was little organisation and no vision. To the rescue came Duncan Fletcher, a little-known coach from Zimbabwe. He had few connections at the top of the England game, and employed his own methods. Fletcher turned out to have a remarkable knack for spotting the international potential of apparently middling players in the county game: Marcus Trescothik, Andrew Strauss, Michael Vaughan and Simon Jones are some of his personal picks. He had a quiet and inscrutable manner, preferring to guide his players rather than instruct.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

The Establishment is dead. But something worse has replaced it

The Spectator political commentator Henry Fairlie, in his column of 23 September 1955, famously identified the Establishment as the mechanism through which power was exercised in this country. His analysis, though at once recognised as authentic, was written as the British Establishment was about to collapse. Today it enjoys some residual notoriety (manifest through former ruling-class institutions such as White’s Club) but no political significance. Though the eclipse of the Establishment is well-documented, the Political Class which replaced it is so far poorly understood. This is regrettable because the Political Class has come to occupy the same public space that the Establishment was supposed to until the end of the 20th century.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

A dark tale of insider dealing

For the most part political diarists are located on the fringes rather than at the centre of power. The two finest British journals from the 20th century were written by failures — Alan Clark and Chips Channon. Only rarely did they gain the sustained access they craved to the great figures of their day. They were looking in hungrily from outside, yearning for advancement which never came. Both journals gain a great deal of narrative pace and comic structure from this frenetic search for power and status. The reader knows, but the diarist does not, that the quest is doomed. Alastair Campbell, by contrast, was at the centre. His comparatively lowly title of press secretary, enhanced to director of strategy and communications after 2001, gave no hint of his true importance.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

The leading edge

Three out of the last ten prime ministers have been cricket fanatics. The first was Clement Attlee. In the immediate aftermath of the second world war a newswire service was installed in 10 Downing Street. Attlee ignored it except that during the summer months he used what he called his ‘cricket machine’ to keep up to date with the close-of-play scores. Sir Alec Douglas-Home is the only prime minister so far to have played the first-class game, including two matches for Middlesex in the mid-1920s. After retiring as Tory leader, he became president of the MCC. Finally we have John Major, a useful player before a crippling knee injury forced him to abandon the game. When he was at Downing Street, cabinet meetings would be interrupted by the latest scores.

Wednesday

Peter Oborne

Darfur’s terrible export

Peter Oborne reports from the battlefield on the Chad–Sudan border where Janjaweed bandits, armed with AK-47s, grenades and helicopter gunships, are ethnically cleansing local African tribesmen Adre, Chad When we visited the scene of the battle we found that bodies had been shoved hastily into mass graves. An arm stuck out from under one bush, and the flesh had been eaten by wild animals. A human foot obtruded from another grave. Dried pools of blood stained the ground. The stench of human putrefaction was heavy in the air. Bits and pieces of clothing, spent bullets and the protective amulets used by African fighters lay scattered on the ground. One body still lay exposed. The dead man had evidently climbed a tree to escape his attackers, but been shot down from his hiding place.