Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch, claims the veteran commentator Peter Oborne, represent the “conversion” of the Conservative Party to “something like … the neo-Nazi AfD”. I’m going to side-step the necessary but off-topic argument about whether “neo-Nazi” describes the AfD — purely because I know little about them — and ask whether Oborne really thinks Jenrick (married to the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors) and Badenoch (a black woman) have anything in common with neo-Nazis?

Yes, he does. In the case of Jenrick it is because the MP for Newark has said that he would vote for Donald Trump — not a neo-Nazi — and in the case of Badenoch it is because she has defended Douglas Murray — a commentator I have deep disagreements with but who is not, nonetheless, a neo-Nazi. Oborne does not mention any of their actual policy preferences — none of which, you’ll be surprised to hear, have anything to do with racial purity and imperial expansionism.

The hysterical denunciation of Conservatives to his right is nothing new to Oborne. In 2020 he wrote that Boris Johnson was “the inheritor of [Enoch] Powell’s legacy and the modern carrier of the Powellite flame”. Johnson went on to oversee unprecedented levels of immigration. He had as much to do with Powellism as a giraffe has to do with the Antarctic.

Honestly, it’s sad to read Peter Oborne. I want to like his work. I like people who go against the grain. I like conservatives who opposed Blair’s catastrophic wars and who are prepared to criticise Israel. I’m definitely predisposed towards liking cricket fans.

But something peculiar happened in the intellectual life of Mr Oborne in the noughties. He went from being something like a British paleoconservative — a Eurosceptic and a prescient post-9/11 anti-interventionist — to our most prominent defender of political Islam.

I mean he has a strange inclination towards praising and defending Islamists

To describe his opinions as having drifted towards Islamophilia doesn’t quite cut it. I don’t mean that he admires the spiritual and cultural riches of Islam. I mean he has a strange inclination towards praising and defending Islamists. 

That’s the sort of claim that needs evidence. Oborne has defended the theocratic Muslim Brotherhood (“not fanatics or extremists”, unlike Kemi Badenoch presumably). In 2015, he wrote a warm — though not entirely uncritical — profile of the Hizb ut-Tahrir leader Dr Abdul Wahid, which favourably quoted Wahid’s comment that “extremist is the secular word for heretic”. It would have been interesting for Oborne to ask Dr Wahid what he would do with heretics. According to the Telegraph, the Hizb ut-Tahrir leader posted on the day of Salman Rushdie’s 2022 stabbing: “I doubt you will find anyone who loves [Allah] feeling sympathy for someone who insulted him.” This makes Oborne’s earlier praise of the breadth of his reading seem morbidly ironic.

In Oborne’s book A Dangerous Delusion — co-authored with David Morrison, and arguing that there is no meaningful nuclear threat from Iran — he claimed that the Ayatollah Khomeini was “one of the greatest theologians of all time”, whose “teaching contained insights which went far deeper than anything the rationalists and materialists of the United States could imagine”. Would that my rationalist and materialist mind could summon up deep insights along the lines of “please murder a novelist who offended me”. 

In 2015, Oborne was listed among the endorsers of the “Islamophobia Awards” of the Khomeinite Islamic Human Rights Commission (“thee[sic] Islamophobia awards are so very important”). To my knowledge, he did not retract this endorsement when the “winners” turned out to include the murdered staffers of Charlie Hebdo.

Utter a bad word about Islam or Muslims and Oborne will be on your tail. In 2019, he opened an article about Roger Scruton’s writing on Islam by reminding us of “Nazi philosopher Alfred Baeumler [who] legitimised the racist, exterminating ideology of Hitler’s Nazi party through his nightmare interpretation of 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.” (I’m not suggesting that Mr Oborne thinks that Scruton was equivalent to Baeumler but what an example to raise.) After Scruton’s death, in 2020, it took Oborne two days to produce an article which called Scruton — granted, after warmer words — “an ignorant bigot when it came to Islam” who played “[a] malign role in giving comfort to bigots”.  

For Jeremy Corbyn, meanwhile, Oborne had almost nothing but praise. To be clear, I am not suggesting that one must have no praise for Mr Corbyn (a man whose cheerful exile from Keir Starmer’s joyless Labour Party makes him look at least somewhat sympathetic to me). But for Oborne, no modern politician “has been proved right so quickly – or so often”. Corbyn’s re-election as Leader of the Labour Party in 2016, Oborne wrote, “vindicated everything he has ever done and said as a man and a politician”. Everything? On the IRA? On Venezuela? On Hezbollah and Hamas? I’m not sure that even Mr Corbyn’s wife would issue such a sweeping claim.

Oborne is the sort of “conservative” that leftists call something like “the only good Tory”. When you’re in this position, as the right-winger leftists love or the favourite leftist of right-wingers, you should ask yourself why. Is your self-descriptor still applicable? Or are you among friends and allies but with a past that makes you feel nostalgically exotic?

I don’t pretend to understand the strange philosophical world of Peter Oborne, in which Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick represent a frightening lurch towards neo-Nazism but the Muslim Brotherhood are a great bunch of lads and Jeremy Corbyn is a secular saint. In its strangeness and idiosyncratic status, it is almost charming. Right-wing, though — or reasonable, or compelling — it is not.