Peter Oborne

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown: an almost unmitigated disaster for Britain

The facts of life are Conservative – as Labour’s smartest minds now realise

It is now widely accepted that the years of New Labour government were an almost unalloyed national disaster. Whichever measure you take – moral, social, economic, or the respect in which Britain is held in the world – we went into reverse.

Nevertheless, historians may come to judge that these 13 years of Labour misrule served a vital purpose. In retrospect, the Brown/Blair period may be seen as a prolonged experiment which taught the liberal Left that its ideas cannot work, do not work, and have no chance of ever working.
It takes time to ruin a country. Four years, the average period between elections, was never going… Read More

David Cameron, the Conservative moderniser (Photo: Reuters)

The future belongs to leaders unashamedly shaped by personal beliefs and convictions

British politics has been dominated for more than 20 years by the so-called modernising movement. This first gained traction in Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party of the 1980s, reached its apotheosis under Tony Blair, and was finally copied, out of desperation, by an out-of-power Conservative Party around the turn of the century.

All successful national politicians during this period have described themselves as modernisers. The success of the modernisation project has been so pervasive that it is impossible to understand the nature of British politics without a working grasp of what the concept means and what its practitioners stand for.

Sadly, this has been very difficult, because modernisation is not a political philosophy. It is really about a set of techniques for securing and… Read More

Margaret Thatcher: one of the great Prime Ministers, but not one who brought the country together

Plans to give the former prime minister a state funeral insult many honest, patriotic people

For all the sad picture of Maggie Thatcher in old age portrayed in Meryl Streep’s new film, our former prime minister remains magnificent: brave, impervious, indomitable, the giantess of our time.

Nevertheless, preparations for her death are inevitably afoot. No official announcement has been made, but it is already widely understood that she may be granted the very rare honour (outside the Royal family) of a state funeral, which would probably take place at St Paul’s Cathedral.

The discussions have been held in secret, without public debate, through a series of meeting… Read More

Sir Peter Viggers' duck house, which became the symbol of the MPs' expenses scandal

Even after the expenses scandal, many of our MPs are still putting greed before duty

I have relatively few political heroes, but one is Elizabeth Filkin, who briefly served as parliamentary commissioner for standards a decade ago. She was appointed to her post in the wake of a wave of notorious financial scandals, mainly involving Conservative politicians. Her job was to clean up politics.

Filkin’s mistake was to take her job description literally. She exposed an appalling pattern of bullying, arrogance and greed at the heart of Westminster. MPs were appalled.

However, instead of punishing the malefactors, they turned their fire on Filkin herself, using threats, malicious gossip and a campaign of media vilification in order to rub her out. It was an all-party effort – the Labour, Tory… Read More

Cameron and Merkel in Berlin last month (Photo: Reuters)

The Prime Minister's stand on the single currency is in the national interest, but not necessarily his own

The formative moment in David Cameron’s career dates back to the summer and early autumn of 1992, when he worked at the Treasury as a special adviser to the then chancellor, Norman Lamont. There is famous footage of the future prime minister looking on from the shadows as Lamont announced that Britain was quitting the Exchange Rate Mechanism.

This marked our greatest economic humiliation since the Second World War, and one might have thought that Cameron would have learnt its lesson: currency unions don’t work and attempts to defend them are doomed to failure.

Yet from the moment that the euro crisis gathered momentum earlier this year, he has appeared determined to repeat the mistake… Read More

Osborne is the PM's personal coach (Photo: Andrew Parsons)

The Chancellor is too close to the Prime Minister for Britain’s economic good

It is not properly appreciated, except among Treasury officials and the Downing Street inner circle, that George Osborne is only a part-time Chancellor of the Exchequer. On the one hand, Osborne is in charge of the national finances at a time of the gravest imaginable economic crisis; on the other, he is equally active and energetic as the chief strategist to the Prime Minister.

Here are the facts. On an average day, Osborne will arrive at the Treasury shortly after 8am. There he will convene a very brief meeting with officials before strolling up Whitehall to join the morning strategy meeting at 10 Downing Street. He does not attend the latter in his capacity as finance minister. Rather, he… Read More

Basil D'Oliveira, the South African-born cricketer, in action for England at the Oval (Photo: Getty)

By neglecting the Test match, greedy officials are undermining the essence of the game

Rather more than 2,000 Test matches have been played since Australia defeated a touring England XI by the handsome margin of 45 runs at Melbourne in March 1877. After this first contest, Test cricket very quickly developed into a major art form, in part because the game included so many disparate and sometimes contradictory elements.

On the one hand, there is the raw, elemental and often heroic struggle between the outstanding cricketers of rival nations. But each of these sportsmen is playing not just for his team but for himself – one of the deep fascinations of Test cricket is the tension between the selfish desire to put in a strong personal… Read More

George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer (Photo: Christopher Pledger)

Unless he stands up to the Lib Dems in his Autumn Statement, the economy faces disaster

For all the problems facing the Government – Europe, party management, border controls – only one issue fundamentally counts. The success or failure of George Osborne’s economic plan, unveiled last year, will determine whether the Coalition succeeds or, just as likely, fails.

If the Chancellor gets it right, David Cameron’s Conservative Party will probably command a majority after the next general election. If Osborne gets it wrong, his friend Cameron will go down in history as an Old Etonian version of Gordon Brown: a one-term prime minister who never won a general election.

And this week marks a sombre and very dangerous moment. Eighteen months after David Cameron entered Downing Street, it can be stated with stone… Read More

Home Secretary Theresa May and Brodie Clark, the former head of the UK Border Force (Photo: PA)

The days are long gone when a Cabinet member would take the blame as well as the praise

It is almost 30 years since a British politician last resigned on a matter of honour. That was Lord Carrington, who insisted on taking the responsibility for British unpreparedness ahead of the Argentine invasion of the Falklands.

In truth, Peter Carrington was not even remotely at fault for the capture of this remote British dependency, and everybody knew it. But he understood that the code of ministerial responsibility held that ministers were responsible to Parliament for the failures and successes of the department under their control. Mrs Thatcher tried to change his mind and make him stay, but he refused to do so.

Compare and contrast the exemplary… Read More

The main parties’ cosy alliance is about to be blown apart by Nigel Farage’s Eurosceptics

Nigel Farage's Ukip are riding high in the polls

The modern history of the Conservative Party has been poorly understood, mainly because it has been written by the winner – the modernising faction that undermined the leadership of William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith before seizing control after the 2005 election defeat.

These modernisers like to portray recent Tory history as a victory for change, pragmatism, progress and sanity. But this relentlessly optimistic account ignores the central truth: the Conservative Party formally split in the decade that followed the political assassination of Margaret Thatcher in 1990.

The first manifestation of this split was the creation of the Anti-Federalist League by the distinguished historian Alan Sked… Read More