MY JERICHO
Peter Hitchens
Mail on Sunday columnist
This meeting was held on February 26, 2019
Image: Nigel Luckhurst, Creative Commons
Guppy-faced controversialist, Peter Hitchens..Well, you shouldn’t write the first line before seeing whoever it is: in person Peter Hitchens turned out to be modest and unassuming, not perpetually rushing off somewhere more important. From the neck down to his black shiny shoes he looked like an off-duty policeman, from the neck up an 18 century clergyman.
He remains Hitchens Minor, younger brother of the late Christopher Hitchens, who flew the coop, left the country, found fame and departed this life within a disconcertingly short period of time. The brothers share the same deep sonorous voice. Their youth reminiscent of the painting ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’: the young Hitchenses hugging their knees while Leon Trotsky pointed to an improbable revolutionary future.
The relationship between the Hitchens brothers was difficult, sometimes violent. “You have to remember Christopher had a gift for falling out with people. He even managed to fall out with James Fenton over the Falklands.”
They were both in the International Socialists, the left-wing student group that preceded the Socialist Workers Party. “I like world-views. I just find it difficult to live without purpose.”
He attended York University: “The Long Sixties were still going on at York – they ended with the Yom Kippur War in 1973. There were a lot of minor successes for IS in Oxford and York. It wasn’t a complete failure, it was like National Service for a previous generation.” His radicalism declined: “I had to work for a living.”
He served a journalistic apprenticeship on the Swindon Evening Advertiser. “There isn’t much Trotskyism you can put into a report of a flower show.” From the Coventry Evening Telegraph he moved to the Daily Express in London. “The worst general reporter the Daily Express has ever had.”
He would like to see his MI5 file, but believes those from the relevant period were destroyed to spare the blushes of New Labour Cabinet minister Peter Mandelson who began life as a Communist.
Peter Hitchens left IS in 1975 and moved to Labour. He joined the Hampstead branch and voted against the adoption of Ken Livingstone as parliamentary candidate in 1979.
“I belong to a trade union – always have. They were fighting organisations. The NUM conference was known as the Intergalactic Drinking Festival.”
Hypocrisy is another pleasure journalists have always enjoyed. “There was a terrible amount of expenses fraud in Fleet Street.”
The TUC were very reluctant to support Solidarity, the independent trade union formed in Poland in 1980. Peter Hitchens went by train to interview the union’s leader Lech Walesa. “I found the experience so thrilling. I just found the whole of Eastern Europe completely fascinating. I was in Prague for the [1989] Velvet Revolution, there in Romania for the Ceausescu murder.”
In 1990 he re-opened the Daily Express Moscow bureau. “It was an Evil Empire. Filthy, dirty, rat-infested.” Peter Hitchens lived in a nomenklatura, [Soviet elite] apartment across the courtyard from the Brezhnev family. He was in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, during the attempted coup by the KGB Alpha Group in January 1991.
Two years in Washington during the Clinton era followed. “It was too easy after Moscow. You were only allowed to complain if three bad things happened to you in a day.”
Donald Trump? “I saw this coming. It’s like the famous New Yorker [magazine] cover showing the view from Manhattan with nothing between there and the West Coast.“People get tired of being despised. People will eventually respond by electing something horrible.”
He joined the Conservative Party in response to Tony Blair’s election. “But it was dead in 1997. Whether it has ever been alive I don’t know.” Margaret Thatcher beat the unions by shutting down the industries where they were strong.
Now Peter Hitchens finds himself as a Mail on Sunday columnist in an apparently dying industry. “You’ll miss us when we’re gone. Free speech is dying in this country. I used to say I hope they spell my name right [in his obituary]. Now I’m more interested in whether The Times or I die first.
Report by: Roger Howe
My Jericho offers a series of independent events organized by Jericho resident John Mair. Many are at at St Barnabas. Others are streamed on YouTube.
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