Peter Hitchens
Peter Jonathan Hitchens (born 28 October 1951) is an English conservative author, broadcaster, journalist, and commentator. He writes for The Mail on Sunday and was a foreign correspondent reporting from both Moscow and Washington, D.C. Peter Hitchens has contributed to The Spectator, The American Conservative, The Guardian, First Things, Prospect, and the New Statesman. His books include The Abolition of Britain, The Rage Against God, The War We Never Fought and The Phoney Victory.
Peter Hitchens
British
- Journalist
- author
- International Socialists (1969–1975)
- Labour (1977–1983)
- Conservative (1997–2003)
3, including Dan Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens (brother)
Orwell Prize (2010)
Previously a socialist and supporter of the Labour Party, Hitchens became more conservative during the 1990s. He joined the Conservative Party in 1997 and left in 2003, and has since been deeply critical of the party, which he views as the biggest obstacle to true conservatism in the UK. Hitchens describes himself as a Burkean conservative, social democrat, and Anglo Gaullist.[1][2][3] His conservative Christian political views, such as his opposition to same-sex marriage and support of stricter recreational drug policies, have been met with criticism and debate in the United Kingdom.[4][5][6]
Hitchens criticised the UK's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, especially lockdowns and mandates that the public wear face masks.
Background[edit]
Early life and family[edit]
Peter Hitchens was born in Malta, where his father, Eric Ernest Hitchens (1909–1987), a naval officer,[7] was stationed as part of the then Mediterranean Fleet of the Royal Navy. His mother, Yvonne Jean Hitchens (née Hickman; 1921–1973), had met Eric while serving in the Women's Royal Naval Service (Wrens) during the Second World War.[8]
As a youth, Hitchens wanted to be an officer in the Royal Navy, following his father. However, when he was 10, he learned he had a lazy eye that could not be corrected, thereby barring him from serving in the Royal Navy.[8][9]
Hitchens attended Mount House School, Tavistock, The Leys School, and the Oxford College of Further Education[10] before being accepted at the University of York, where he studied Philosophy and Politics and was a member of Alcuin College, graduating in 1973.[11]
Hitchens married Eve Ross[12] in 1983. They have a daughter and two sons.[11] Their elder son, Dan,[13] was editor of the Catholic Herald, a London-based Roman Catholic newspaper.[14] Hitchens lives in Oxford.[15][16]
Religion[edit]
Hitchens was brought up in the Christian faith and attended Christian boarding schools but became an atheist, beginning to leave his faith at 15. He returned to church later in life, and is now an Anglican and a member of the Church of England.[17][18][19]
Hitchens has Jewish descent via his maternal grandmother, a daughter of Polish Jewish migrants. His grandmother revealed this fact upon meeting his wife Eve Ross. Though his brother Christopher was quick to embrace his Jewish identity following the principle of matrilineal descent, Peter noted that they were only one-32nd Jewish by descent and has not identified as Jewish himself.[20]
Journalism[edit]
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,[31] and coinciding with a culmination of growing personal disillusionment with the Labour movement.[32]
Hitchens began his journalistic career on the local press in Swindon and then at the Coventry Evening Telegraph.[33] 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.[31] 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[34] 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.[35] He then became the Daily Express Washington correspondent.[36] Returning to Britain in 1995, he became a commentator and columnist.
Hitchens reported from Somalia at the time of the United Nations intervention in the Somali Civil War.[37]
In 2000, Hitchens left the Daily Express after its acquisition by Richard Desmond,[38] stating that working for him would have represented a moral conflict of interest.[39] 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[40] and 2009,[41] Hitchens won the Orwell Prize in political journalism in 2010.[42] 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."[43]
A regular on British radio and television, Hitchens has been on Question Time,[44] Any Questions?, This Week,[45] The Daily Politics and The Big Questions.[46] He has authored and presented four documentaries;[47] one on the BBC about Euroscepticism, and three on Channel 4, including one on the surveillance state, and critical examinations of Nelson Mandela[48] and David Cameron.[49] In the late 1990s, Hitchens co-presented a programme on Talk Radio UK with Derek Draper and Austin Mitchell.[50]
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."[51] 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."[52]
Writings and thought[edit]
War and terrorism[edit]
He was opposed to the NATO intervention in Kosovo and 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, arguing that neither was in the interests of either Britain or the United States,[76] and opposed the war in Afghanistan.[77]
He believes that the UK should never have participated 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 argues that the UK entered World War II too early, and that the UK overly glorifies World War II.[78][79][80] He argues that while the allies were fighting a radical evil, they sometimes used immoral methods, such as the carpet bombing of German civilians.[81] 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 for it. As a result, it had to surrender much of its wealth and power to avoid bankruptcy.[82] Hitchens' views on the UK in World War II have been met with criticism by historians, with Richard J. Evans describing his book The Phoney Victory as 'riddled with errors'.[78][80]
Hitchens is not anti-war, since he believes that this position often leaves countries defenceless in times of war. Instead, he argues that military power and the threat of war can be deterrents against war.[83] Hitchens wrote about his concern of the use of security (anti-terrorism) legislation and increased police powers under New Labour, and how it has been used to suppress civil liberties. In Channel 4's Dispatches, Hitchens said the result of this legislation was that Britain ended up "sleepwalking into a Big Brother state".[84]
Publications[edit]
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.[127]
In June 2014, Hitchens published his first e-book, Short Breaks in Mordor, a compendium of foreign reports.[128] The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion was published in August 2018 by I.B. Tauris.[129] 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".<ref name=":8"/
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