Thursday 29 September 2011

Oborne's Newsnight triumph

“I will not charm my tongue, I am bound to speak…
‘T will out, ‘t will out; I hold my peace, sir; no;
No, I will speak as liberal as the north;
Let heaven and men and devils, let them all,
All, all, cry shame against me, yet I’ll speak.’’

So spoke Emilia in Othello when she unmasked Iago and it was in similar delightful vein that Peter Oborne let rip on Newsnight last night.

His arena was a Paxman chaired Newsnight discussion on the euro crisis and his targets were ex FT editor and CBI director Sir Richard Lambert and, on a studio screen from Brussels, European Commission spokesman Adameu Altafraj-Tardio.

Mr Altafraj-Tardio said that, as far, as the euro was concerned, there was nothing to see and we should all move along and, anyway, the European Union was a wonderful institution which had kept peace on the continent for 60 years. In fact, of course, Nato and the Warsaw Pact kept the peace for most of that time and today the Greeks might understandably look at the EU and say with Tacitus: “They make a wasteland and call it peace’’.

What little patience Oborne had was soon exhausted by this and he referred to the hapless Mr Altafraj-Tardio as `that idiot in Brussels’ and he did so so frequently that Paxman himself addressed him as “Mr Idiot in Brussels’’. Mr Altafraj-Tardio wasn’t such an idiot that he was going to hang around for that, particularly as Oborne was clearly just getting into his stride, so he stormed out.

Oborne then turned his ire and fire on Sir Richard pointing out that, under his editorship, the FT had been an uncritical admirer of the single currency and, omitting any sort of analysis of benefits/disbenefits, strengths/weaknesses it had urged that the UK should join.

The theme was still Emilia’s:

“You told a lie, an odious damned lie;
Upon my soul, a lie, a wicked lie…’’

Sir Richard mumbled something about the facts having changed since then and that nobody could have predicted that foreigners wouldn’t play by the rules. Well, they could, because they never do (cf Diego Maradona) and one interest rate cannot rule from the Isle of Iona to the Ionian Islands – it couldn’t then and it can’t now and, if Sir Richard couldn’t see that, then he shouldn’t have been holding the positions he held. Now, having been rumbled, he should drop the pretence he knows what he is talking about.

Peter Oborne has written about this at some forensic length in this recent pamphlet Guilty Men which, at this point, he hurled down, like a gauntlet, onto the table between himself and Sir Richard. Here Sir Richard grew positively peevish and appealed to the referee, so Paxman moved the debate on.

In the break before the next bit, Oborne disappeared down the Newsnight trapdoor, to be replaced by some tasty German blonde. Guilty Men had been tactfully removed, doubtless borne away by some BBC lackey, holding it at arms length in a pair of fire tongues.

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