I
It is a cool smoky morning in January outside Taylors deli on St Giles. Peter Hitchens padlocks his bicycle to a lamppost and accompanies me indoors, where we sit down with a Portuguese tart and a pile of his books on the table between us. We begin to talk. He is polite, knowledgeable, and articulate, but having been a journalist for over fifty years and reported from as many countries, the weariness has set in. “I used to think that if you wrote intelligently, you spoke intelligently, you argued intelligently, you came up with sensible ideas, and were civilised in discourse, then people would think, ‘Oh, gosh, here is someone who has something to say’, but actually all I got were insults.” When I comment on this pessimism, he replies, with a good-humoured flutter of the eyelids, “Pessimism is what keeps me cheerful.”
He was first on the Socialist Worker in 1972 as a student radical, and then, following three years on the Swindon Evening Advertiser, worked briefly for the Coventry Evening Telegraph, from which he was almost fired for refusing to write an article denouncing the activities of former left-wing comrades of his. Having broken with Trotskyism he joined the Daily Express in 1977. Stints followed as an industrial, a parliamentary, and a foreign correspondent. In the latter role he witnessed first-hand the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the USSR. “They were fascinating, gripping, exhilarating months… My Russian was pitiful, my knowledge of Soviet politics sketchy, I didn’t have any Kremlin contacts, but by an enormous stroke of providence, the day that the KGB mounted its putsch against Gorbachev in 1991, I was in Moscow, and all the brilliant guys from the New York Times, The Washington Post, etc., were on holiday. And I was there!” He chuckles slightly. “Just goes to show how much use all those bloody ‘contacts’ are.”
“I was in Crimea, in Yalta, doing a feature on the small palaces which the Soviet leaders built for themselves down there. I and my brilliant translator Igor Monichev drove out to the coast road where Gorbachev’s dacha was; he was there then, where the putsch would happen just a couple of days later. It was very heavily guarded by the KGB, so we couldn’t stop. When I got back to the hotel I was listening to the BBC World Service – a very useful service for foreign correspondents in those days, when it was good – and they quoted Alexander Yakovlev, Gorbachev’s great friend and ally, saying he thought there was about to be putsch. So, I got on the next plane to Moscow, arrived on the Sunday night, woke up on the Monday morning, and boom, there was a squadron of tanks coming down my street!
“The putsch was extremely badly organised and many of its progenitors were drunk and it fell apart very quickly. At that point it was clear that the Communist Party was finished. In the streets of Moscow – and I’ve never seen this reported by anyone else – I noticed that there was smoke coming out of the litter-bins. They were full of Communist Party membership cards which people had thrown and set fire to, because all serious people knew that Soviet Communism was finished.
“The other thing I saw a few months later – Crimea again – was when I went in with a group of other Western journalists to one of the chief places of the old Soviet navy. All the inlets and creeks surrounding it were full of scuttled ships, a lot of them sunk or half-sunk. This was the symbolic end of Soviet global power. It was all over. If everybody in the West had seen this firsthand, they’d understand that Russia is not the Soviet Union; it’s a different place, it doesn’t have a Communist Party, it doesn’t have a global reach, you have to judge it in a different way. But I can’t get people to take it in.”
Having witnessed the fall of Soviet Communism, one of the key ideas of Hitchens’s corpus is Eurocommunism. I ask him to explain the term: “Two immense things happened in the spring of 1968. Firstly, the great uprising in Paris which toppled Charles de Gaulle and which had no apparent cause; at the time, I was seventeen, I longed to be there, throwing cobblestones at the CRS, but I couldn’t travel there. Secondly, in August, the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia. These two events changed the Left – totally. Intelligent people on the Left realised that was impossible to support the Soviet Union after it sent tanks to crush what was actually a socialist movement led by Dubček in Prague. In Paris the old trade-union-led Leninist ideals on the left had been replaced by this strange… cultural revolution. The work of an Italian Communist intellectual called Antonio Gramsci began to be dug out. He had visited the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, and knew that it would never work, that you could never impose this kind of thing on the urbanised, generally Christianised working classes of Western Europe, they would never buy this stuff. Instead, he said, we must achieve hegemony, the cultural and moral transformation of society before we move on to political transformation. That is Eurocommunism. That’s why that year, 1968, still has an extraordinary lit atmosphere to it in my memory.”
II
Hitchens’s best books are The Abolition of Liberty (2004), a polemic against legal and constitutional changes; Short Breaks in Mordor (2014), a travel anthology of his foreign reportage; The Phoney Victory (2019), a revisionist account of the Second World War; and A Revolution Betrayed (2022), a spirited defence of the old grammar-school system. Nonetheless his most famous work is The Abolition of Britain (1999), which examines social changes between the 1960s and the 1990s, and argues that the ideals of Eurocommunism, having found their leader in the person of Tony Blair, took root in British institutions. “Since New Labour came to power, we have had a Eurocommunist revolution in this country – a partial one,” he tells me. “When a lot of your revolution is constitutional and legal it takes quite a while for your landmines to drop. When the Supreme Court or judicial appointments were established, nobody had a clue how big a change that would make to the constitution.”
Admittedly I have never been convinced by this thesis. The weaknesses of The Abolition of Britain, as a polemic, are fundamental ones which can be inferred even from its title. Abolition stresses that such things as the treatment of single parents or the availability of contraception were the result of deliberate campaigns for change; he does not think that these changes might have happened naturally over time. Moreover, the focus specifically on Britain overlooks the fact that such inventions as colour television or the contraceptive pill were worldwide phenomena, by no means exclusive to this country.
There is, however, a deeper instinct, much more significant than the bogey of Eurocommunism, which underlies Hitchens’s political philosophy and all of his characteristic books. This instinct is conservatism – conservatism in the literal sense of love of the past and suspicion of change. It is not that he is averse to all change, simply that he rejects what he sees as change for the worse. Like Edmund Burke, he possesses an instinctive preference towards ideas and systems which have evolved naturally, over time, from the bottom-up, and he views with suspicion their shiny premanufactured counterparts. Thus, common law, imperial measurements, grammar schools, and the first-past-the-post system are always preferable to civil law, metric measurements, comprehensive schools, and proportional representation. The perfect is the enemy of the good; if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it; “new” does not always mean “better”; “perfect” almost invariably means “dystopian” – that is a fair summary of Burkean conservatism and of Hitchens’s general outlook.
It is difficult to exaggerate his dislike of anything which is, in the loosest sense, modern. When I ask him if anything in Britain today is better than it was sixty years ago, Eurostar, restaurants, and bicycle brakes are the only things which come to mind. No doubt his conservatism leads him to many conclusions which I would dispute, but on other issues it gives him a valuable insight. In his upcoming book The Madness of Cars (expected 2026), he argues that motor-cars damage our health and environment, and are largely unnecessary given the alternatives of travelling by foot, cycle, train, or tram – “Almost every major British city had a system of electric trams until the early 1950s.” Who else would be sufficiently immersed in the memory of the past to make this unheard-of but completely valid point? By ruling out conventional perspectives and accepting that not all progress is good, Hitchens attains a clear-sightedness which more mainstream commentators have missed. Here are two more examples of what I mean – one is education, the other is policing.
In A Revolution Betrayed Hitchens argues passionately for the merits of the old grammar-school system, and explains how it was abolished by egalitarians who disliked selection by merit. Before abolition in 1965, he tells me, “You didn’t have to pay to get your children educated, because there were good state schools – like really good state schools. In Oxford there were two direct grant schools, Oxford High School for Girls and Magdalen College School, both open to children from any primary school in Oxford if they passed the 11+. Now they’re both fee-charging schools.” The greatest success of the grammar schools was social mobility: the most striking statistic in the book is that, by 1962, both parents of two-thirds of grammar-school pupils had left school at fourteen. This sort of intergenerational mobility has become almost impossible in state schools today. Selection by merit has given way to selection by mortgage. Affluent, well-educated neighbourhoods contain affluent, well-educating schools. Deprived, crime-ridden neighbourhoods contain deprived, crime-ridden schools. Parents with enough money or knowledge of the system can in any case send their children to privates or to comprehensives in wealthy areas. Who suffers? Families on benefits or low incomes, residents of council estates, ethnic minorities. The system is dysfunctional – “Its main effect is to trap its pupils in whatever social, economic, racial, or cultural place they happen to be at the age of eleven” – but almost nobody in public discourse points out or even acknowledges the disaster. Nobody, that is, except Hitchens.
His position on policing, outlined in The Abolition of Liberty, is another example of his tendency to base valid arguments on tenets of the past which most people have forgotten. Again, nobody else in politics or the media has the sense to see what he does: that since the change of policing policy under Roy Jenkins in the 1960s our police force has not been a police force at all. The job of the police as first established by Robert Peel was to patrol the streets by foot and prevent crime. The job of the police today is to arrive at a scene and respond after a crime has been committed. If a constable is on foot patrol on a street late at night, a passerby is not likely to be mugged or attacked, nor is a house likely to be burgled. But if there is no patrol, and a mugging or a burglary is committed, the police can do nothing after the fact, any more than a doctor can vaccinate a dead man. Hence, though the number of police officers has nearly doubled since 1961 – both in total and per head of the population – the crime rate in the same time has rocketed up.
No doubt there are other factors at play, but anyone should be able to grasp that it is the absence of officers on patrol, more than institutional racism or understaffing, which has brought down and invalidated the police force. “Don’t let’s get carried away about it. The old police force had its faults. Police forces inevitably do. The kinds of people who want to be police officers aren’t always the kinds of people who ought to be police officers. But if you run it well with a central organisation that is small, you can have an effective police force.” Who suffers from the decline in policing? Again, those in the most vulnerable pockets of society. And again, almost nobody but Hitchens tries to point this out. Even when he does, he is ignored. “I remember when Theresa May was Home Secretary, I was at a Mail on Sunday lunch with her, and I actually brought with me a copy of The Abolition of Liberty, pressed it on her and begged her to read it. I didn’t get even a postcard saying thanks. I’ve given it to judges, to chief constables, and to a Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. I’ve never had any response.”
III
My admiration for Hitchens consists in agreement with him on a handful of policy points, and in the certainty that his opinions, even the most unusual or offensive of them, are driven by a worldview which is internally coherent and never malicious. This lack of malice is a great strength. Anyone who reads the right-wing tabloids with any kind of regularity will see that, very often, their tendency is to pick out underdogs and kick them down, but Hitchens, a Mail on Sunday columnist, is not in the same category as some of his colleagues. True, some of his views do him no credit: his suspicion of what he sees as the products of the cultural revolution has led to him to controversial opinions on such issues as unmarried couples, working women, gay marriage, the trans debate, multiculturalism, and the contraceptive pill. But these opinions do not represent a veil for minority-bashing as they might do with some of his colleagues. I can see as much even though I strongly disagree with him. He has no truck with isolating or attacking individual people, and he does not speak from malice or hatred but from what he sees as the structural change towards Eurocommunism. It is, if my reading of his philosophy is correct, the same instinct which makes him sceptical of e-scooters, television, pornography, swearing, drug use, rock and roll, postmodern novels, and neoliberal economics – namely, that these things have upset the order of society as it existed before about 1960. In no case is he motivated by bigotry. Quite the opposite: if Hitchens’s defining trait is love of the past and suspicion of change, then his great inestimable merit is the moral sense which in The Rage Against God (2010) he attributes to his Christianity.
“Because I’m conservative about morals and culture, it doesn’t mean I want to grind the faces of the poor.” In too many cases the two things go hand in hand, and this is what marks Hitchens out from the crowd. It also explains why, as well as being a Burkean conservative and an Anglo Gaullist, he is a social democrat, a man who believes, for instance, in a strong welfare state and trade unions, and who in so much of his writing takes care to stick up for the underdog. As one reviewer of The Abolition of Liberty put it, no other commentator of his ilk is “so obviously more interested in the welfare of the common man than in the approbation of his peers.” Morality overrides political affiliation.
This same moral clarity allows him to take intellectually honest stances on foreign policy. He has opposed the bombing of populations by the West not only in the last quarter-century in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Gaza, but in historical cases such as the Allied bombing of German civilians during the Second World War, against which he wrote a book, The Phoney Victory. To deflate a national myth for moral reasons is the kind of thing usually applied to colonialism and usually described as “woke”; for Hitchens to do it is another example of his moral sense overriding his political grouping. In the most recent example of civilian bombing, Israel’s destruction of Gaza and its killing of over 50,000 Palestinians, his opinion is even more noteworthy, because this is a war which the right-wing press in this country has ruthlessly supported, usually by trying to change the subject or by dismissing the casualties as fabrications. Politically Hitchens is a supporter of Israel, but his politics appear to melt away beside disgust at the killing of innocents:
“I am against the bombardment of populations, it’s just morally indefensible, you cannot under any rules of law justify it. It’s wrong. Just like Putin’s invasion of Ukraine it’s not only morally wrong but stupid.” He jumps up in his chair in emphatic frustration. “Why do we keep doing things which are both wrong and stupid? But in the British media and politics there are only two sides to this: either you’re supposed to be howling for Hamas, or you’re supposed to be cheering on Netanyahu. I do neither. But there’s almost no point in speaking. The right response to the October 7 atrocities is not to respond in kind; if you respond in kind nothing will be gained. I think probably the level of hatred now between Arabs and Israelis is greater than it has ever been. There’s such a river of blood between them. Anyone who goes there ends up liking the people on both sides, and if your concern is for the welfare of the people in the future, then the last thing you want is more war. There is no hiding the fact that the bombardment of Gaza has killed huge numbers of innocent people. Why do we defend it? Why did Biden not put a stop to it? What has happened to conservatives in the West that they allow themselves to be so uncritical of Netanyahu? My stance is what it always has been. It doesn’t put me on the side of the Left, I wouldn’t go on a pro-Palestinian march or anything like that, but it just means that I have no camp.”
It is astonishing how the retention of a single principle, that the killing of civilians is wrong and must never be allowed to happen, can place one on the right side of history in so many cases. (In the case of the Second World War, he says that though it was necessary for the Allies to fight, we used the wrong tactics and remember the war in the wrong way). Hitchens’s positions on these foreign-policy issues contain enough moral sense in themselves to counter the allegations of malice with which he is often, wrongly, charged. On the one hand there are torture camps, regime change, forced displacement, detentions without charge, the plundering of national oil reserves, the annihilation of defenceless communities from the sky – all of which he regards as inexcusably wrong, although countless observers would defend these things if committed by the “right” side. On the other hand, he has personal, honest but not ill-natured opinions on multiculturalism or divorce which might offend some people. Which is the lesser evil? Which is a better gauge of genuine moral courage?
IV
In May 2010, having reached the shortlist twice previously, Hitchens was awarded the Orwell Journalism Prize for his foreign correspondence in The Mail on Sunday. In choosing him as the winner, the panel of judges cited a passage from the end of Orwell’s essay “Charles Dickens” (1940). Orwell reflects that any strongly individual piece of writing gives the impression of a face somewhere behind the page. “It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer… What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have.” In imagining the face that Dickens ought to have had he produces a description which, in the judges’ view, accurately reflects the literary face of Hitchens. The passage concludes:
“It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry – in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.”
