Peter Hitchens
Peter Jonathan Hitchens (born 28 October 1951) is an English conservative journalist and author. Hitchens writes for The Mail on Sunday and is a former foreign correspondent in Moscow and Washington. He has published eight books, including The Abolition of Britain, The Rage Against God, and The War We Never Fought.
Early life and family
Peter Hitchens was born in the Crown Colony of Malta, where his father, Eric Ernest Hitchens (1909–1987), a career naval officer,[1] was stationed as part of the then Mediterranean Fleet of the Royal Navy. Hitchens had hoped to become a naval officer himself, but an eye defect prevented him from doing so.[2] His mother, Yvonne Jean Hitchens (née Hickman; 1921–1973), committed suicide in Athens[3] in a pact with her lover, a defrocked clergyman named Timothy Bryan.[4] The pair overdosed on sleeping pills in adjoining hotel rooms, and Bryan slashed his wrists in the bathtub.
Hitchens attended Mount House School, Tavistock, the Leys School, and the City of Oxford College[5] before being accepted at the University of York, where he studied Philosophy and Politics and was a member of Alcuin College, graduating in 1973.[6]
He married Eve Ross, the daughter of journalist David Ross, in 1983.[7] They have a daughter and two sons.[6] Their elder son, Dan, is Deputy Editor of the Catholic Herald, a London-based Roman Catholic magazine.[8]
Relationship with his brother
Peter's only sibling was the journalist and author Christopher Hitchens, who was two years older. Christopher said in 2005 the main difference between the two is belief in the existence of God.[9]
Peter was a member of the International Socialists (forerunners of the modern Socialist Workers' Party)[10] from 1968 to 1975 (beginning at age 17) after Christopher introduced him to them.
The brothers fell out after Peter wrote a 2001 article in The Spectator which allegedly characterised Christopher as a Stalinist.[11][9] After the birth of Peter's third child, the two brothers reconciled.[12]
Peter's review of God Is Not Great led to a public argument between the brothers but no renewed estrangement.[13] In the review, Peter claimed his brother's book made a number of incorrect assertions.
In 2007, the brothers appeared as panelists on BBC TV's Question Time, where they clashed on a number of issues.[14] In 2008, in the US, they debated the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the existence of God.[15] In 2010 at the Pew Forum, the pair debated the nature of God in civilization.[16]
Christopher Hitchens died in 2011; at a memorial service held for him in New York, Peter Hitchens read a passage from St Paul's Epistle to the Philippians which Christopher himself had read at their father's funeral.[17]
Journalism
He joined the Labour Party in 1977 but left shortly after campaigning for Ken Livingstone in 1979, thinking it wrong to carry a party card when directly reporting politics,[18] and coinciding with a culmination of growing personal disillusionment with the Labour movement.[19]
Hitchens began his journalistic career on the local press in Swindon and then at the Coventry Evening Telegraph.[20] He then worked for the Daily Express between 1977 and 2000, initially as a reporter specialising in education and industrial and labour affairs, then as a political reporter, and subsequently as deputy political editor.[18] Leaving parliamentary journalism to cover defence and diplomatic affairs, he reported on the decline and collapse of communist regimes in several Warsaw Pact countries, which culminated in a stint as Moscow correspondent and reporting on life there[21] during the final months of the Soviet Union and the early years of the Russian Federation in 1990–92. He took part in reporting the UK 1992 general election, closely following Neil Kinnock.[22] He then became the Daily Express Washington correspondent.[23] Returning to Britain in 1995, he became a commentator and columnist.
In 2000, Hitchens left the Daily Express after its acquisition by Richard Desmond,[24] stated that working for him would have represented a moral conflict of interest.[25] Hitchens joined The Mail on Sunday, where he has a weekly column and weblog in which he debates directly with readers. Hitchens has also written for The Spectator and The American Conservative magazines, and occasionally for The Guardian, Prospect, and the New Statesman.
After being shortlisted in 2007[26] and 2009,[27] Hitchens won the Orwell Prize in political journalism in 2010.[28] Peter Kellner, one of the Orwell Prize judges, described Hitchens's writing as being "as firm, polished and potentially lethal as a Guardsman's boot."[29]
A regular on British radio and television, Hitchens has been on Question Time,[30] Any Questions?, This Week,[31] The Daily Politics and The Big Questions.[32] He has authored and presented several documentaries on Channel 4, including critical examinations of Nelson Mandela[33] and David Cameron.[34] In the late 1990s, Hitchens co-presented a programme on Talk Radio UK with Derek Draper and Austin Mitchell.[35]
In 2010, Hitchens was described by Edward Lucas in The Economist as "a forceful, tenacious, eloquent and brave journalist. He lambasts woolly thinking and crooked behaviour at home and abroad."[36] In 2009, Anthony Howard wrote of Hitchens, "the old revolutionary socialist has lost nothing of his passion and indignation as the years have passed us all by. It is merely the convictions that have changed, not the fervour and fanaticism with which they continue to be held."[37]
Foreign reporting
Hitchens first worked as a foreign reporter in the 1980s, mainly reporting from the Eastern Bloc, with his first such assignment to Poland during the Solidarity crisis in November 1980. He travelled to Japan and Germany during his time as an industrial reporter and reported from several other countries, including the USA, Japan, and South Korea as part of the group of reporters accompanying Margaret Thatcher. After witnessing the Velvet Revolution and the Romanian Revolution, he became the Daily Express resident Moscow Correspondent in June 1990. He left Moscow (via the Bering Strait) in October 1992, and was briefly based in London during which time he reported from South Africa during the last days of apartheid, and from Somalia[38] at the time of the United Nations intervention in the Somali Civil War.
In September 1993 he became the Daily Express resident Washington correspondent and, during the next two years, he reported from many of the 50 states, as well as from Canada, Haiti and Cuba. He continued his foreign reporting after joining The Mail on Sunday, for which he has written reports from all over the globe, including Russia, Ukraine (described by Edward Lucas as a "dismaying lapse"[36]), Turkey, Gaza, a visit to Iraq in the wake of the 2003 invasion, an undercover report from Iran (described by Iain Dale as "quite brilliant"[39]), China, and North Korea.
Views
He is a critic of political correctness and describes himself as an Anglican Christian and Burkean conservative,[40] as well as a social democrat[41] and is opposed to the privatisation of railways.[40] In 2010, Michael Gove, writing in The Times, asserted that, for Hitchens, what is more important than the split between the Left and the Right is "the deeper gulf between the restless progressive and the Christian pessimist."[42]
Hitchens is an outspoken opponent of British Summer Time and describes the practice as "fanatical and dictatorial" and says the system amounts to "lying about the time".[43][44] He has proposed the abolition of BST entirely, favouring GMT all year round.
Peter Hitchens is a critic of Wikipedia, especially his own entry.[45][46]
Political views
Hitchens joined the Conservative Party in 1997 and left in 2003. He challenged Michael Portillo for the Conservative nomination in the Kensington and Chelsea seat in 1999.[47] Hitchens advocates a society governed by conscience and the rule of law, which he sees as the best guarantee of liberty. He believes that capital punishment is an element of a strong justice system,[48][49] and he was the only British journalist to attend and write about the execution of British-born Nicholas Ingram in America in 1995.[50]
While commenting on the Channel 4 show Queer as Folk, he objected to the depiction of homosexual behaviour. He described the show as being "some form of cultural propaganda, designed to make us think that something that isn't true, is, that is, that homosexuality is normal behaviour."[51]
Hitchens advocates harsher penalties properly enforced for possession and illegal use of cannabis,[52] stating that "cannabis has been mis-sold as a soft and harmless substance when in fact it's potentially extremely dangerous."[52] He is opposed to the decriminalisation of recreational drugs in general. In 2012, Hitchens gave evidence to the Parliamentary Home Affairs Select Committee as part of its inquiry into drugs policy, and called for the British government to introduce a more hardline policy on drugs
Hitchens has been a prominent member of the campaign to clear the name of the late Bishop of Chichester, George Bell from allegations of child sexual abuse.[54] He has demanded justice for Bell.[55] Hitchens has said that the Church of England convicted him in what he described as a kangaroo court,[56] and stated his wish that allegations are not treated as proven facts.[57]
Hitchens opposed the Kosovo and 2003 Iraq War, on the grounds that neither was in the interests of either Britain or the United States,[58] and opposes the war in Afghanistan.[59]
Hitchens has been consistently dismissive of the modern Conservative Party, and expressed support for a more socially conservative alternative to the Conservatives to occur post-Brexit.[60] Despite this, he did not vote to leave in the Brexit referendum, which he deplored.[61] He has also described Brexit as a "constitutional crisis" due to the pro-EU makeup of Parliament and has stated that he believes it would take ten years for Britain to leave the European Union completely. He has endorsed the Flexcit model proposed by Richard North and Christopher Booker as the most sensible and moderate way to leave the EU while remaining in the European Economic Area to preserve the economic benefits of EU membership.[61] Hitchens was also critical of the New Labour government, viewing a number of policies proposed by that government as attacks on liberty and as facets of a constitutional revolution.[62]
Religious views
While Peter Hitchens used to be an atheist,[63] he became a Christian later in his life. He became a member of the Church of England. He argues that social liberalism has systematically undermined Christianity. "The left's real interests are moral, cultural, sexual and social. They lead to a powerful state. This is not because they actively set out to achieve one," Hitchens wrote.[64] He also believes that the First World War and the devolution of marriage is the cause of the demise of Christianity in Europe.[65][66]
Publications
Hitchens is the author of The Abolition of Britain (1999) and A Brief History of Crime (2003), both critical of changes in British society since the 1960s. A compendium of his Daily Express columns was published as Monday Morning Blues in 2000. A Brief History of Crime was reissued as The Abolition of Liberty in April 2004, with an additional chapter on identity cards ("Your papers, please"), and with two chapters – on gun control ("Out of the barrel of a gun") and capital punishment ("Cruel and unusual") – removed.
The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost its Way was published in May 2009, and The Rage Against God was published in Britain in March 2010, and in the US in May.
Hitchens's book The War We Never Fought: The British Establishment's Surrender to Drugs, about what he sees as the non-existence of the war on drugs, was published by Bloomsbury in the autumn of 2012.[67]
In June 2014, Hitchens published his first e-book, Short Breaks in Mordor, a compendium of foreign reports.[68]
The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion was published in August 2018 by I.B. Tauris.[69] It addresses what Hitchens views as the national myth of the Second World War, which he believes did long-term damage to Britain and its position in the world. It was negatively reviewed by the historian Richard Evans in the New Statesman, who described the book as "riddled with errors".[70]
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