Keir Starmer joins the Tories in appeasing the radical right

Lowdown interview with Peter Oborne

Keir Starmer runs across the floor of the House of Commons to josh with Nigel Farage

Peter Oborne is one of the UK’s most interesting and controversial journalists. Once, he was almost a caricature Tory. Raised in Hampshire, he was educated at private school and Cambridge (Sherborne and Christ’s College). He worked at NM Rothschild and then went on to collect jobs in the Tory press as if they were numbers on a bingo card: the Telegraph, the Mail, the Express, the Standard and the Spectator. He loathed Tony Blair, as a good Tory should, and wrote an excellent book – The Rise of Political Lying – taking apart the politics of spin.

Leaving everything else aside, Oborne looked like a Tory ought to look. You could almost catch the smell of tweed and fine claret at 100 paces.

But then he began to move away from the right. It had become vicious, Islamophobic and dominated by the concerns of plutocrats rather than of the British middle class, he said.

Conservatives responded in kind and excommunicated him by bell, book and candle. A recent effort in the Critic, written in that oleaginous tone of more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger, upbraided Peter for being soft on Islamists and Jeremy Corbyn.

As it happens, I do not have much time for the friends of the Muslim Brotherhood and other reactionary religious organisations.

But I don’t believe in talking only to people I agree with, and Peter gives as good as he gets.

You can hear our interview in full on Apple below

Spotify here

And every other podcast app via this link.

Two highlights

On Keir Starmer’s willingness to appease the radical right

I didn't like the way the Prime Minister stood up and went and greeted Farage, and shook his hand in the House of Commons when he arrived there. He didn’t do that for other new MPs.

I personally blame Morgan McSweeney, who is his chief strategist. You cannot put your political strategist into the heart of power, because then all decisions become about [McSweeney’s obsession] with attracting right-wing voters.

On the change to the Tories

We used to believe in the rule of law. If judges gave decisions we didn’t like, we would take it on the chin. We had a natural understanding of Britain, particularly of England, and we were for the middling type of people. And what {the Tory party} has abandoned is exactly those people. It doesn't represent them anymore. It has now been purchased, lock, stock and barrel by the hedge funds and property developers.

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Brexit, Trump and the rise of the radical right are great themes of our time. Below are pieces from me trying to explain why the world is changing and why that change is for the worse.

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