Does anyone know what planet (or drug) Peter Oborne is on?

[non sociopath skin]

"So the Conservatives have won the intellectual battle. This means that even if (as the polls suggest) David Cameron is thrown out of power in 2015 he will still leave a massive legacy, even if it is administered by Labour. This only rarely happens in British politics. After 1951 the incoming Conservative prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill, basically left unchanged the achievements of Clem Attlee’s great reforming administration of 1945-51. After 1997 Tony Blair did not seek to challenge the Thatcher revolution. Even if Ed Miliband wins in 2015, he will administer the great reforms of the Cameron/Clegg government."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10541766/David-Cameron-the-great-reformer.html

This has to be taking the art of damage limitation to new and unexpected heights....

The Skin

[Enthusiast]

1. Media around the world is in decline.

Look at the US as a pathetic example.

[brucefan]

2. Conservative

And Intellectual do not belong in the same sentence.

[nxylas]

3. Dunno, but it must have short days and nights

Due to the amount of spin.

[LeftishBrit]

5. One of the best comments ever!

[LeftishBrit]

4. The Torygraph drug/planet!

And the scary thought is that Oborne is actually probably one of the more reasonable Torygraph commentators: this sounds impossible, I know, but when you compare him to Ed West, Peter Mullen, Cristina Odone, James Delingpole, Tim Stanley, etc. etc....

[nxylas]

6. Odone never struck me as *that* nutty

Mind you, I haven't read any of her stuff in years, she may have got more wingnutty as she got older. Same with Mullen.

[LeftishBrit]

7. Maybe more vicious than nutty

She occasionally gets something right (e.g. is pro-vaccination); but she tends to be so personally spiteful that her articles leave a bad taste in my mouth, whether I agree with them or not.

She is a political pro-lifer of the worst sort, spewing hatred at individuals, some of them with severe and terminal illnesses (e.g. Terry Pratchett), who support right-to-die legislation. (Disagreement is one thing, but her level of hatred is another). She was one of the main people who labelled my former MP as 'Dr Death' and helped to get him smeared by local nutters and defeated by a Tory; and later used this enthusiastically as an example of how 'people with consciences' should campaign to defeat people who vote for abortion rights. Excuse me, if I wanted to live in an American Red State, I'd move to one! Fuck off, Cristina! Call in Pest Control services, someone!

Can one get worse than that? Yes, one can get worse than that ! And she has! She has proposed that the NHS should triage patients not according to need but to deservingness, and that people who have lifestyle-related illnesses (she is particularly preoccupied with the undeservingness of fat people) such as Type 2 diabetes should be put to the back of the queue. In fact in her moral crusade, she overlooks the obvious fact that not all people with Type 2 diabetes are overweight; not all with lung cancer are smokers, etc. At any rate, to blame people for their illnesses and smugly deny them treatment and feel holy and righteous about it is just the worst of the worst as far as I'm concerned! Related to all this, she is a strong supporter of Iain Duncan-Smith and his (anti-) welfare crusades, and has described the disabled people and disability charities who oppose her as 'disability bullies'. She has also given the former Archbishop of Canterbury a good ticking-off for being too soft on welfare, and too hard on her idol, Iain Duncan-Smith.

Ugh, how I hate her!

As for Mullen, he really is plain nuts. ,In one of his recent Torygraph articles, he wrote, 'From the four horsemen of the culture of death – the NHS, state education, abortion and euthanasia – Good Lord deliver us.' Despite his religious righteousness, he was himself kicked out of one job as vicar, because he committed adultery with a parishioner. IIRC, he was fanatically in favour of the war in Iraq.

Yes, yes, I know, I shouldn't read the Torygraph!

ETA: I wonder if maybe you're thinking here of former Labour MP and diarist Chris Mullen, who is a very different person, and definitely not a nutter?

[nxylas]

10. Mullen used to be quite liberal

Mind you, as you say, that was back when he was busy playing hide the salami with one of his parishioners, so he had a motivation for saying that the church needed to loosen up on sexual morality.

[non sociopath skin]

8. This sounds more like it.

http://www.greenbenchesuk.com/2013/12/the-cost-of-cameron-100-worst-failures.html?m=1

The Skin

[T_i_B]

9. Oborne's a funny one...

He veers wildly from toadying to slating the whole British establishment. One day he portrays the government as the best thing since sliced bread, the next he portrays the whole lot of them as corrupt.

I would strongly recommend some of his books though.