Peter Alan Oborne (; born 11 July 1957) is a British journalist and broadcaster. He is the former chief political commentator of The Daily Telegraph, from which he resigned in early 2015. He is author of The Rise of Political Lying, The Triumph of the Political Class, and The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism, and along with Frances Weaver of the pamphlet Guilty Men. He has also authored a number of books about cricket. He writes a political column for Middle East Eye and a diary column for the Byline Times.
He sat as a commissioner for the Citizens Commission on Islam, Participation and Public Life. He won the Press Awards Columnist of the Year in 2012 and again in 2016.
Biography
Early life and career
Oborne was educated at Sherborne School and read history at Christ's College, Cambridge, graduating with a BA degree in 1978. After abandoning work on a doctorate, he joined NM Rothschild's corporate finance division in 1981, and stayed there for three years.
He began working for Robert Maxwell's now closed Financial Weekly magazine in 1985, being taken on by the editor Mihir Bose. In between two spells on the Evening Standard, the second being more extended, he joined The Daily Telegraph in 1987 for what turned out to be five months. During his second period on the Standard, he was sent to Westminster in 1992 as a junior political journalist by Paul Dacre, then the Standards editor. After moving to the Express titles in 1996, where he was taken on by Sue Douglas as a political commentator, he accepted voluntary redundancy in April 2001 at a time when the titles' new proprietor, Richard Desmond, was attempting to reduce losses.
Oborne is the author of a highly critical biography of Tony Blair's former spin doctor Alastair Campbell, published in 1999, and a biography of the cricketer Basil D'Oliveira (whose selection for England to tour South Africa in 1968 caused that country's apartheid regime to cancel the tour). Oborne is also a vocal critic of the late Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, and author of a pamphlet published by the Centre for Policy Studies about the situation in Zimbabwe, A moral duty to act there.
From 2003 to 2006
As a television journalist, Oborne made three polemical documentaries with filmmaker Paul Yule: "Mugabe's Secret Famine" (2003), "Afghanistan – Here's One We Invaded Earlier" (2004), and "Not Cricket – The Basil D'Oliveira Conspiracy" (2004). When the paperback of Oborne's book on the D'Oliveira affair, Basil D'Oliveira, Cricket and Conspiracy: The Untold Story was published in 2005, Owen Slot wrote in a review in The Times, that Oborne "sets it up beautifully: one gentle, conservative Cape Town coloured man versus apartheid at its most rabid, the odds stacked heavily against the former". Robin Marlar in The Sunday Times thought "the positives in this book have it by a mile, the good guys are praised, and the others revealed". The book was written with D'Oliveira's involvement and won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award in 2004.
In an edition of the Channel 4 Dispatches programme in November 2004, "The Dirty Race for the White House", broadcast just before the re-election of George W. Bush, Oborne asserted: "This US presidential election is about using the darkest tools of political persuasion — fear, lies and black propaganda — in order to target an amazingly small but utterly decisive group of largely ignorant voters". The historian Andrew Roberts wrote in The Times that such claims by Oborne as the country's voters being "ignorant beyond belief" was a "staggeringly snobbish, anti-American generalisation" and that "it can hardly be blamed on the candidates that they engage the electorate in the vernacular in which they are best likely to be understood".
In April 2005, Oborne presented the Channel 4 programme in the Election Unspun series, Why Politicians Can't Tell the Truth, that examined how major political parties in Britain allegedly pursue an agenda designed to appeal only to a narrow band of floating voters expected to play a decisive role in the UK general elections of 2005. In a Dispatches broadcast in November 2005, "Iraq — The Reckoning", he commented that the 2003 invasion was "the greatest foreign policy disaster since Munich. And our Government has reacted in precisely the same way: by going into denial. Denial about the role our troops are really playing in Iraq. Denial about the true nature of the emerging Iraqi state. Above all, we're in denial about the fact that the invasion of Iraq, as conceived by President Bush and Tony Blair, has failed."