No, Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick are not ‘far right’

Remember when Peter Oborne was sane? Regrettably, it seems the former Daily Telegraph man and long-time conservative sage is continuing to suffer from a nasty, late-onset case of Tory Derangement Syndrome.

Last week, Oborne told Talk radio that Tory leadership candidates Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick represent a ‘lurch to the far right’. They will convert the Conservative Party into ‘something like the neo-Nazi AfD’, he said.

His reasoning for placing Badenoch (the daughter of Nigerian parents) and Jenrick (married to the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors) in the neo-Nazi category is unconvincing, to put it kindly. He cites as proof of Badenoch’s fascistic turn a tweet in defence of right-wing commentator Douglas Murray, following a cancellation campaign against Murray during the riots. Oborne’s evidence of Jenrick’s ‘far right’ sympathies boils down to the fact that he has expressed support for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Such desperate guilt-by-association might be more convincing if the people Oborne was trying to associate Badenoch and Jenrick with were themselves neo-Nazis. But of course they aren’t. It all ended up sounding like a bad, on-the-nose parody of a Guardian op-ed.

What makes Oborne’s risible take more shocking is that it is coming from a nominally right-leaning journalist. Incredible as it may seem listening to him today, he was once very much a creature of the Tory establishment. He journeyed effortlessly upwards from boarding school, through to the University of Cambridge, then on to a sojourn in the City, before enjoying long stints at the Telegraph and Evening Standard, plus a contributing editorship at the Spectator.

Even more unbelievably, he used to be a writer of some genuine insight, whether or not you always agreed with his politics. During the New Labour years, he turned his ire on the spin-obsessed administrations of Tony Blair, slamming their mendacity and abandonment of public duty.

But something happened to Oborne, something that caused his degeneration from a decent journalist, small-c conservative and Eurosceptic into a tedious anti-Tory, anti-Brexit hysteric. What that something was is not at all clear. For one thing, Oborne actually voted for Brexit in 2016 and continued to support it right up until he didn’t. It wasn’t even Boris Johnson that sent Oborne loopy, at least at first. He praised Johnson as a man of ‘principle’ in 2018.

And yet, around the fag-end of Theresa May’s Tory leadership and the beginning of Boris Johnson’s tenure in 2019, something changed. Oborne became an implacable opponent of Brexit. Only economic devastation could follow from it, he argued. He suddenly loathed Johnson, too – damning the new PM as ‘a man without values’ and his supporters as ‘bigots’. It was as if he suddenly decided to swim with the elite-Remainer tide rather than against it.

From that point on, Oborne has continued to churn out tiresome, apocalyptic jeremiads against Brexit and the Tories, sounding increasingly like James O’Brien, only more unhinged. Which is really saying something.

Oborne hasn’t abandoned everything he once believed in, mind. His hatred for Israel and his occasional forays into Islamist apologism have remained depressingly constant. He was the brains behind 2009’s conspiratorial Channel 4 Dispatches episode, ‘Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby’. He has also been known to defend the Muslim Brotherhood, the theocratic movement that birthed the genocidal anti-Semites of Hamas. ‘I’ve talked to a lot of Brotherhood leaders. They are not fanatics or extremists – and they really love Britain’, he once told Novara Media. Since the eruption of the Israel-Hamas war, his anti-Israel animus has only intensified.

Perhaps Peter Oborne, the increasingly deranged conservative scribe, wasn’t all that insightful to begin with.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.