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Peter Hitchens
Hitchens participating in a debate (2015)
Born	Peter Jonathan Hitchens (1951-10-28) 28 October 1951 (age 73) Sliema, Crown Colony of Malta
Nationality	British
Education	The Leys School, Cambridge
Alma mater	University of York
Occupation(s)	Journalist, author
Political party	International Socialists (1969–75) Labour Party (1977–83) Conservative Party (1997–2003)
Spouse	Eve Ross ​(m. 1983)​
Children	3, including Dan Hitchens
Relatives	Christopher Hitchens (brother)
Awards	The Orwell Prize (2010)
Website	hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk

Peter Jonathan Hitchens (born 28 October 1951) is an English journalist and author. Hitchens writes for The Mail on Sunday and is a former foreign correspondent in Moscow and Washington. He has contributed to The Spectator, The American Conservative magazines, The Guardian, Prospect, and the New Statesman.

Hitchens began his political career as a revolutionary socialist but now describes himself as a Burkean conservative. His confrontational and opinionated debating style often makes him a controversial figure.

He is deeply critical of the modern UK Conservative Party and has opposed many of their policies, including the party's handling of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Hitchens has published nine books, including The Abolition of Britain, The Rage Against God, and The War We Never Fought. His latest book is The Phoney Victory.

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, 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. His mother, Yvonne Jean Hitchens (née Hickman; 1921–1973), committed suicide in Athens in a pact with her lover, a defrocked clergyman named Timothy Bryan. 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 before being accepted at the University of York, where he studied Philosophy and Politics and was a member of Alcuin College, graduating in 1973.

He married Eve Ross, the daughter of journalist David Ross, in 1983. They have a daughter and two sons. Their elder son, Dan, is deputy editor of the Catholic Herald, a London-based Roman Catholic newspaper.

Relationship with his brother

Hitchens' only sibling was the journalist and author Christopher Hitchens, who was two years older. Christopher said in 2005 that the main difference between the two was belief in the existence of God.

Peter was a member of the International Socialists (forerunners of the modern Socialist Workers' Party) 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. After the birth of Hitchens' third child, the two brothers reconciled.

Peter's review of his brother's book God Is Not Great led to a public argument between the brothers but no renewed estrangement. In the review, Peter wrote that 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. In 2008, in the US, they debated the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the existence of God. In 2010 at the Pew Forum, the pair debated the nature of God in civilisation.

Christopher died in 2011; at a memorial service held for him in New York, Peter read a passage from St Paul's Epistle to the Philippians which Christopher had read at their father's funeral.

Journalism

He joined the Labour Party in 1977 but left shortly after campaigning for Ken Livingstone in 1979, thinking it was wrong to carry a party card when directly reporting politics, and coinciding with a culmination of growing personal disillusionment with the Labour movement.

Hitchens began his journalistic career on the local press in Swindon and then at the Coventry Evening Telegraph. 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. 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 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. He then became the Daily Express Washington correspondent. Returning to Britain in 1995, he became a commentator and columnist.

In 2000, Hitchens left the Daily Express after its acquisition by Richard Desmond, stated that working for him would have represented a moral conflict of interest. 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 and 2009, Hitchens won the Orwell Prize in political journalism in 2010. 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."

A regular on British radio and television, Hitchens has been on Question Time, Any Questions?, This Week, The Daily Politics and The Big Questions. He has authored and presented several documentaries on Channel 4, including critical examinations of Nelson Mandela and David Cameron. In the late 1990s, Hitchens co-presented a programme on Talk Radio UK with Derek Draper and Austin Mitchell.

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." 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."

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 US, 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 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"), 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"), China, and North Korea.

Views

Political views

Hitchens describes himself as a Burkean conservative, and social democrat. 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."

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. Hitchens is a critic of political correctness and 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, and he was the only British journalist to attend and write about the execution of British-born Nicholas Ingram in America in 1995.

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. Despite this, he did not vote to leave in the Brexit referendum, which he deplored. He has also described Brexit as a "constitutional crisis" due to the pro-EU makeup of Parliament and has stated that he believed it would take ten years for Britain to leave the European Union completely. He had 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. 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.

Hitchens takes a critical stance on many wars. He was opposed to the Kosovo and 2003 Iraq War, on the grounds that neither was in the interests of either Britain or the United States, and opposes the war in Afghanistan. He believes that the UK should never have joined in World War I and is very critical of the view that World War II was 'The Good War'. His view on World War II is laid out in his book The Phoney Victory, in which he deconstructs the many fables which have become associated with the narrative of 'The Good War'. He argues that while the allies were, indeed, fighting a radical evil, they sometimes used immoral methods, such as the allies’ carpet bombing of German civilians. He believes that Britain's entry into World War II led to its rapid decline after the war. This was because, among other things, it could not finance the war and was not prepared. As a result, it had to surrender much of its wealth and power to avoid bankruptcy. However, Hitchens is not anti-war since he believes that this position often leaves countries unprotected and defenceless in times of war. Instead, he argues that military power and the threat of war can be necessary deterrents against war.

He is opposed to the privatisation of railways.

Views on the COVID-19 pandemic

External videos
'If the pubs open, I'll go tomorrow' | Peter Hitchens coronavirus interview 2020, YouTube

Peter Hitchens argues that the COVID-19 virus is not as serious to the general population as is widely believed. He has been very critical of the UK government’s response to the pandemic, arguing against restrictions on the public from a socially Libertarian position.

Initially, when the virus was starting to arrive in the UK, Hitchens supported a soft approach of keeping shops and public spaces open as the Swedish government was doing. It was, however, when the UK government decided to implement full Lockdown restrictions on 24 March 2020 that Hitchens began to voice his strongest criticism.

He has referred to the UK government's coronavirus lock down policy after 24 March 2020 as "the Great Panic" and was shocked by the enthusiastic embrace of it by the British public. He joined other high profile critics such as Lord Sumption and Toby Young in arguing that the full restrictive lock down after this date would have serious negative consequences as a result of restricting civil liberties, locking down a healthy population, and stalling a healthy economy. He argues that the government should have carried on like Sweden because, “the evidence from Stockholm, which has so far pursued a rational, proportionate, limited policy, still suggests that Sweden will emerge from this less damaged by far than we will.”

He cited examples of what he saw as questionable advice and information that the UK government had taken in the final decision to go into full lock down on 24 March. There were many "dubious statistics”, especially those from Imperial College London given by Neil Ferguson who claimed that there could be up to 500,000 COVID-19 deaths if the government did not impose a full lock down. In his Mail on Sunday blog, Hitchens identified Ferguson as being “one of those largely responsible for the original panic”.

Another example of a "dubious statistic” he points out is the difference between whether it is recorded that someone died “of” the virus or “with” it. He argues that the statistics about how deadly the virus is could be skewed by not making the distinction between those who die as a direct result of the virus, and those who caught it but would have died anyway, or whose death was related to it but not directly caused by it.

He has been against the wearing of face masks during the pandemic. This was especially when the UK government decided to make mask use compulsory in shops and indoor public spaces from July 24 2020. This is because he argues that the scientific evidence for wearing face masks to reduces infection rates is lacking and is “more superstition than science”. He refers to masks as “face muzzles” because he believes that the government forcing people to wear face coverings is oppressive. His views and reasoning for his opposition to the lockdown has been the subject of debate and criticism among many.

Views on drugs

Hitchens advocates harsher penalties properly enforced for possession and illegal use of cannabis, stating that "cannabis has been mis-sold as a soft and harmless substance when in fact it's potentially extremely dangerous." 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 hard-line policy on drugs.

Religious views

Hitchens is an Anglican Christian and a member of the Church of England. He used to be an atheist but now believes that atheism, along with social liberalism, are the causes of the systematic undermining of 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 has written. He also believes that the First World War and the devolution of marriage is the cause of the demise of Christianity in Europe.

Views on Gun rights

Hitchens philosophically supports gun rights such as those in the USA and has argued for the return of such rights in the UK. In his book The Abolition of Liberty, he spoke about his disdain for the firearms regulations in the UK especially since the 1920 Firearms act. Hitchens argues that gun control arguments give the government and criminals too much power and force over citizens. Rather, he argues that a properly trained citizenship would produce a better, safer situation with firearms. However, Hitchens is somewhat dismissive about this argument, because he believes peoples minds are too closed on the subject and as a result, he rarely publicly discusses it.

Other views

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". He has proposed the abolition of BST entirely, favouring GMT all year round.

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. He has argued that the Church of England convicted him in what he described as a kangaroo court, and stated his wish that allegations are not treated as proven facts.

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."

Hitchens is a critic of Misplaced Pages, especially his own entry.

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.

In June 2014, Hitchens published his first e-book, Short Breaks in Mordor, a compendium of foreign reports.

The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion was published in August 2018 by I.B. Tauris. 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".

Bibliography

External videos
Debate with Christopher and Peter Hitchens on The Abolition of Britain, October 14, 1999, C-SPAN
Booknotes interview with Hitchens on The Abolition of Britain, December 31, 2000, C-SPAN

• The Abolition of Britain (1999)
• Monday Morning Blues (2000)
• A Brief History of Crime (2003), updated in softcover as The Abolition of Liberty: The Decline of Order and Justice in England (2004)
• The Broken Compass (2009), updated in softcover as The Cameron Delusion (2010)
• The Rage Against God (2010)
• The War We Never Fought (2012)
• Short Breaks in Mordor (2014)
• The Phoney Victory (2018) ISBN 9781788313292

See also

• Christian right
• Traditionalist conservatism

References

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External links

• Peter Hitchens on Twitter
• Peter Hitchens at IMDb
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Hitchens, Peter (January 2005). "City New Year Service, The Parish Church" (PDF) (address). St. Michael's Cornhill, London. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 October 2008.
• Hitchens, Peter. "Articles". American Conservative (archive).
• Hitchens, Peter. "Drug Culture". Institute of Art and Ideas. Retrieved 3 January 2014.

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