The significance of Peter Oborne's grandfather

I've always admired Peter Oborne, and his article yesterday about his resignation from the Daily Telegraph is powerful and heartening.

It is important, and not just for the Telegraph, but it is the allegations that they have suppressed criticism of HSBC in an effort to woo them back as advertisers that are most explosive.  It is also an explosive critique of HSBC - and explains, quite rightly, that there would have been more political pressure to deal with this kind of abuse if the Telegraph had not stayed silent.

But I just wanted to comment on one part of the article that may get less attention:

"My grandfather, Lt Col Tom Oborne DSO, had been a Telegraph reader. He was also a churchwarden and played a role in the Petersfield Conservative Association. He had a special rack on the breakfast table and would read the paper carefully over his bacon and eggs, devoting special attention to the leaders. I often thought about my grandfather when I wrote my Telegraph columns."

I very much appreciated that thought.  My grandfather, also a retired lieutenant-colonel, also read the Telegraph at breakfast.  And it was that beleagured and side-lined small C conservatism which the Telegraph represented, and which has been so often blown aside by a force which is not conservative at all, but which purports to be - a transatlantic, turbo-capitalist, corporate apologia for the richest and most powerful.  

The kind of approach which Oborne describes as abolishing the post of editor at the Telegraph and replacing it with a series of 'Heads of Content'.

I'm not a Conservative.  I'm a Liberal.  But that kind of conservatism, so much part of the fabric of the nation that I'm not sure we would be recognisable without it, is being swept away - first from the House of Commons and then from public life.

That conservatism was never the preserve of the Conservative Party, but they are largely responsible for its demise.  It was a shift that was symbolised when a new Conservative prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who had very little idea of what to do with the role, was captured by Howe and Lawson and convinced that she had somehow led the revolution herself.  

Mrs Thatcher was not quite what she seemed, but that is by the way and for future historians to revisit.  See more in my book Broke.

The point is that this extreme free market ideology - where everything is for sale, including the content of the Telegraph - is not a conservatism that would have been recognised by either Peter Oborne's grandfather or mine.

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