InPublication: Truth Teller

INTERVIEW
08/13/2024

The life of a mainstream media journalist can involve compromises. Your editor will have a say, sometimes your owner, sometimes even your sales team. Your brilliant story can be cropped, edited or hijacked. Political journalist Peter Oborne felt frustrated by this and went his own way. Ray Snoddy asked him why.

By Ray Snoddy

In a recent Interview with InPublishingFormer Daily Mail editor and current Independent editor Geordie Greig has told how he turned down a job offer at a major US international investment bank to become a junior journalist at the South East London and Kentish Mercury for a fraction of the salary.

For Greig, and many others who went on to have successful careers in the print media industry, only journalism would do.

The early career of political journalist, author and rigorous critic of standards in both politics and journalism, Peter Oborne, could hardly be more different.

There is no trace of journalism in his early employment. After giving up his job to study for a doctorate in history, Oborne became an investment banker at one of the City's most venerable institutions, NM Rothschild.

He worked for three years at Rothschild before joining the now-defunct Financial Weekly magazine. But those years in the City influenced, in surprising ways, his approach to political journalism, from the Daily Express and Evening Standard to the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph, underpinning key decisions and turning points.

Importance of Integrity

“I was a hopeless investment banker, but I worked for a great bank, Rothschild, and I learned a lot of things, including integrity. I was taught that you had to be absolutely scrupulous,” Oborne says.

He worked on IPOs where everything in the prospectus had to be 100% right and accurate.

“If you notice any mistake, they will come down on you like a ton of bricks. One fraudulent prospectus and everyone, the chairman and CEO, could go to jail,” he adds.

In addition to his political journalism, Oborne is well known for his sometimes unconventional books: The Rise of Political Lying, The Assault on Truth, in which he exposed the lies of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, A Dangerous Delusion: Why the Iranian Nuclear Threat Is A Myth (with David Morrison) and The Fate of Abraham, which argued that an existential conflict between the West and Islam “is a dangerous and destructive fantasy.”

Yet if there is one defining period in Peter Oborne’s career, it was 2014–15, when he was chief political commentator for the Daily Telegraph. Oborne had written a story reporting that the HSBC bank accounts of prominent British Muslims had been closed without explanation, but the story was never published. Oborne investigated what was happening and discovered that an article by the newspaper’s banking correspondent, Harry Wilson, claiming there was “a black hole” in the Hong Kong-based bank’s finances had been removed from the Telegraph’s website. He also spotted other examples of articles critical of HSBC that were not published or were downplayed compared to coverage in rival newspapers.

“I was shocked to find that the advertising department had managed to block, in my case, a very interesting story. I thought it was a betrayal of everything journalism and The Daily Telegraph stood for,” said Oborne, who also believed that the lucrative special advertising content from China, since dropped, may have influenced coverage of Hong Kong.

Many journalists faced with such a dilemma would have moaned in the pub and leaked information to Private Eye, but would have continued to receive their salary.

Oborne resigned and made public his complaints against the Telegraph management.

The question of integrity.

“It cost me a fortune,” admits Oborne, who has increasingly lost interest in mainstream media, a reaction largely reciprocated by his critics.

“I'm now persona non grata with the mainstream media. I don't really get invited to the BBC and I don't get articles in the Mail or the Telegraph. It's not really surprising because I got into it and my income has stagnated,” he says.

Brexit ignored

His views on the recent election campaign are, unsurprisingly, rigorous: like many pundits, he believes that major issues such as the economy and the lingering effects of Brexit (“the major social and historical issue of the age”) have been ignored by politicians and much of the media.

Interestingly, Oborne was once an enthusiastic supporter of Brexit, but has since recanted and published lengthy articles explaining how and why he was wrong.

The title of his article on openDemocracy read: “I was a staunch Brexiteer: now we must swallow our pride and reconsider our position.”

Another example of integrity.

Oborne believes there should now be an independent inquiry, a royal commission, into all aspects of Brexit and that Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer should have included it in the Labour manifesto.

With a few exceptions, such as The Guardian and the Financial Times, much of the press has been, he says, “totally discredited” by its unconditional support for Brexit and Boris Johnson, while also supporting Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.

According to him, these newspapers “no longer represent the interests of their readers. They have become jackals in the service of the super-rich.”

Oborne believes the Telegraph has lurched to the far right, or become a vehicle for the far right, a far cry from the traditional conservatism of former owner Lord Hartwell and his legendary editor, Bill Deedes.

At the same time, the Conservative Party “has metamorphosed from a Burkean party (named after the conservative philosopher Edmund Burke) into a party that attacks all the things conservatives have traditionally supported, like the rule of law, and even hates judges,” Oborne says.

The former Telegraph journalist believes the outcome of the auction for the Daily Telegraph and Spectator magazine, which began in July, is crucial because the newspaper could become the battleground for the soul of the Conservative Party in the coming months.

“I absolutely think so,” said Oborne, who believes the Conservatives will have to somehow find common ground with Nigel Farage's Reform Party. He fears that over time it is “quite likely” that Reform will manage to take control of the Conservatives and gain a legitimacy that they would not have been able to achieve otherwise.

The Middle East

Oborne's disillusionment with the British political system and the newspapers that support it has deep roots, going back to Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Iraq War.

“I went through a crisis that was essentially linked to the Iraq war. I was terribly shocked to see that the British government, in my view, had deliberately lied to the British public to justify an illegal war. It made me examine all the assumptions I had made,” Oborne admits.

As a result, someone who describes himself as a churchgoer whose wife Martine is a Church of England vicar in west London, began to look at how Islam was being reported and discovered what he saw as a huge wave of Islamophobia at the time.

“I have written many articles on torture and the war on terror, falsifying information in every British newspaper except the FT,” says Oborne, who has also attacked reporting on the “Trojan Horse affair”, the alleged attempt by Muslims to take over a number of Birmingham schools, which he says has been proven to be nonsense.

This type of reporting has increasingly pushed him away from the mainstream media, but he says he is “old enough” and has no complaints. He can still make his voice heard on what he considers important in outlets such as openDemocracy and Middle East Eye.

“I'm much happier. It's a big relief. It was a negotiation and, in the end, it was heartbreaking,” he said.

In recent months, Oborne has taken a keen interest in the horrors of Gaza and spent time in the West Bank, particularly in the city of Nablus.

“It is clear that the Israeli government has committed a series of atrocities and these are now well documented, as is the terrible genocidal language used by Netanyahu (the Israeli prime minister) that has trickled down to the rank and file. These are issues that need to be addressed by the International Court of Justice, by Netanyahu and by the Hamas leadership,” he said.

In July, Oborne visited Nablus again to see how things had changed since the war.

“I go somewhere without having a position on what I'm going to write about. I finance my trip myself,” says Oborne, who has not yet decided whether or not he will write a book on the subject.

One of his tasks in Nablus is to edit the text of his latest book, due out in April, a comprehensive history of cricket written with Richard Heller, the journalist who was chief of staff to the Labour politician Denis Healey.

Oborne has been playing cricket for 40 years and has taken a team to play in Pakistan and this summer his motley group of friends along with a handful of journalists will be playing cricket in Ireland.

On more serious matters, Oborne says that at the age of 67 he has reached the stage where he is primarily interested in doing good.

“When you die, you want to leave a better world behind. When I write books, I really want to do good,” says Peter Oborne, perhaps still showing integrity.

This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please sign up here.