Peter Oborne writes for Middle East Eye.
The prospect of war now eclipses everything at Westminster. To use the narrow, though reassuring, boundaries of the English racing calendar, hostilities are unlikely to break out before the final day of the Cheltenham Festival on 13 March. But they will probably have ceased, at any rate as far as the initial stage of the
There are many symptoms of contemporary decline from the healthy and robust democratic politics of the mid-20th century. They include the death of public oratory, the rise of the leadership cult and the use of mass-advertising techniques to manipulate voters. But most telling of all is the rise of a narrow, exclusive, metropolitan elite of
There is a moment in the Uncle Remus stories when Brer Rabbit is finally cornered by Brer Fox, who genially informs his victim ‘I’m going to barbecue you today, for sure.’ Then Brer Rabbit started talking mighty humble. ‘I don’t care what you do with me, Brer Fox,’ says he. ‘Just so you don’t fling
In the aftermath of September 11 we all instinctively felt that the world had utterly changed. In Britain at any rate that turned out not to be the case. After the initial shock, things carried on to some extent as before. But the return to normality was illusory and short-lived. September 11 indeed created new
The announcement that Michael Trend, Tory MP for Windsor and formerly chief leader-writer of the Daily Telegraph, is to step down was slipped out late on Tuesday afternoon. The news made no more than a couple of paragraphs in one or two of the morning papers. Trend seems set to sink without trace. But before
War with Iraq, previously a nebulous prospect, has come sharply into focus in the first two weeks of this year. Much has been resolved. In Washington Donald Rumsfeld has lost the argument. His original idea that a light and fast raiding party would, with the aid of an uprising from grateful Kurds and Shiites, be
THERE has been a row during the last fortnight about whether the government should ban the English cricket team from travelling to Zimbabwe for next month’s World Cup. But the cricket has obscured the real issue. And that is whether Britain and the world community will intervene to stop Robert Mugabe from torturing, terrorising and
THERE is something eerie, and a little sinister, about the rise of the Campbell-Millars, as Alastair Campbell and his longstanding partner, Fiona Millar, are known in north London. Their rise started in the 1980s when they were young, unknown and ambitious. They ingratiated themselves with Neil and Glenys Kinnock: helping with the shopping and being
Few issues have highlighted the more shameful qualities of the Blair government quite as starkly as hunting: its moral turpitude, instinctive mendacity, fundamental gutlessness, endless dithering, ugly populism and blind conformity to suburban prejudice. Labour MPs who favour a ban feel understandable resentment that after six years no Bill has reached the statute book. Tony
The origins of government mishandling of the firefighters’ strike are to be found in the immediate aftermath of the general election in June last year, when Tony Blair failed to sack John Prescott. The Deputy Prime Minister had proved a strikingly incompetent transport secretary during the 1997-2001 Parliament. Commuters are suffering the consequences today. Prescott
No British prime minister has dominated the landscape so obviously, with so little obvious effort or for so long, as Tony Blair. You can check through the lists fruitlessly as far back as they go to find a comparable example. Maybe Palmerston, who attained power only in ripe old age, enjoyed a comparable period of
To turn this week to the Conservative party, rather than deal with matters of consequence. On Wednesday morning George Jones, political editor of the Daily Telegraph, reported a ‘sharp slump in morale’ in the Tory party at Westminster. He stated that plotters are taking soundings to discover whether they can secure the necessary 25 signatures
Tony Blair has been a lucky Prime Minister. Never in his first six years in office has he had to confront the co-ordinated industrial unrest which bedevilled Harold Wilson and destroyed Jim Callaghan. When he entered No. 10 in 1997, Blair found the unions in a state of cowed irrelevance: one of the many legacies
The new season kicked off with an unwelcome pill for political reporters. As Parliament reassembled after its three months’ recess, lobby correspondents hiked across St James’s Park to the Foreign Press Association at 11 Carlton House Terrace. This fine Nash establishment, hard by the Turf Club, has been the disconcertingly grand London base for a
The memoirs of Joe Haines, now being serialised by the Mail on Sunday, are certain to rank among the most revelatory and important of the 20th century. Joe Haines was Harold Wilson’s press secretary, but in truth – as with Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair – he was far more than that. Wilson told Haines
on the day of last week’s debate on Iraq, senior Tories and business supporters gathered at the Dorchester Hotel for the annual Carlton Club fund-raising dinner. The turnout was impressive, with well over 200 present and more than £100,000 raised for the party. The guests wore black tie, though shadow Cabinet members, conscious of the
One of the most important political developments of the last ten years has been the abject failure of the Labour Left. Though never remarked upon, the absence of a strong and coherent left-wing voice has been of great moment. Ever since its birth, the Labour movement has been defined as much by a romantic tradition
Peter Oborne exposes the interested parties who failed to march on Sunday ONE of the most remarkable things about Sunday’s magnificent Countryside March was the superhuman effort shown by many people to get to London. This does not merely apply to the folk from Scotland and the north of England who rose hideously early in
Peter Oborne talks to Charles Kennedy about his plans to put the Lib Dems ahead of the Tories NO politician has the opportunity that Charles Kennedy has today: he just might reconfigure the political landscape. With the Conservative party in a weak and semi-moribund state, uncertain of its own identity and still struggling to come
Political reporters always overstate the power of personality in politics. Meanwhile, we understate or entirely overlook other factors. We are gripped by surface phenomena and captivated by the gaudy and the transient. The causes we ascribe to great events are hopelessly short-term, inadequate and trivial. We attribute something like mystic powers to the ability of