The Tory that (some) lefties love

There is a section of the left that seems to love it when an avowed right-winger backs their cause. The Morning Star recently quoted, with approval, Henry Kissinger in support of their line that Ukraine should capitulate to Putin.

But for a significant section of the left, the journalist Peter Oborne is the right-winger of choice. This can be explained by Oborne’s political evolution from being (in his own words) a “conventional Conservative” working for right-wing publications like the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph, to being transformed by the Iraq war into someone who (again, in his own words) “suddenly found myself agreeing with the Stop the War Coalition about quite a lot of things.”

No wonder Stop the War has posted several of his articles and theMorning Star has quoted him approvingly. In essence, he represents the intersection of right-wing isolationism and left-wing “anti-imperialism” (meaning support for any force, however reactionary, set against the USA and the “West”). He is viscerally anti-American and highly suspicious of Israel (stances that go beyond just the healthy dislike of their governments which we can all share).

Oborne seems to be a person of some integrity and has resigned from several well paid journalistic jobs on principled grounds. He has denounced the political dishonesty of Blair’s New Labour and Johnson’s Tories in excoriating terms.

But his Iraq war epiphany has taken him to some strange places — as an uncritical champion of Islam in virtually all its forms, including the most reactionary, for instance. Oborne is a practising Anglican, but like a lot of Christians seems to admire Islam — perhaps envying its political assertiveness. He also admires Islamic regimes and in his book A Dangerous Delusion: Why the West Is Wrong About Nuclear Iran (co-authored with one David Morrison, who is on record as a denier of the Srebrenica massacre) he described Ayatollah Khomeini as: “one of the greatest theologians of all time [whose] teaching contained insights which went far deeper than anything the rationalists and materialists of the United States could imagine”.

In a piece for the Daily Telegraph (24 February 2011) he wrote that “the election of a Hamas government in Gaza ... should have been a hopeful moment for the Middle East peace process: the election of a government with the legitimacy and power to end violence. But America refused to engage with Hamas, just as it has refused to deal with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or to acknowledge the well-founded regional aspirations of Iran.”

Following the World Cup he has written (Middle East Eye, 20 December 2022) that “the western media subjected ... Qatar to a campaign of ferocious and disproportionate criticism. Journalists painted the country as a cartoonishly barbaric dystopia ... Western coverage of the World Cup has laid bare the cultural arrogance of many journalists.”

Nowhere in Oborne’s writings on Islam or Islamic states will you find (unless I’ve missed something) any mention of the treatment of women, religious dissenters or democracy campaigners. Even an otherwise gushingly enthusiastic review (by former MP Chris Mullin inMiddle East Eye, June 2022) of his book The Fate Of Abraham — Why the West is Wrong about Islam notes that “he tends to imply that the blame for the present sad state of affairs can be laid almost entirely at the door of the West ... but how can one explain the ferocious cycle of sectarian violence or the tit-for-tat slaughter in northern Nigeria? All the great religions contain the virus of extremism ... there are aspects of Muslim culture that need to be challenged. The treatment of women and girls, for example”.

There is plenty more I’d like to say about Oborne and why some on the left like him so much: his repeated claim that the Birmingham schools “Trojan Horse” affair was simply a “hoax”, that the Al Jazeera documentaries The Lobby and The Labour Files are devastating pieces of investigative journalism being deliberately ignored by the British media, and his dramatically inconsistent attitude towards Jeremy Corbyn and antisemitism. But space doesn’t allow. I will continue in a future column.