Peter Hitchens

Peter Hitchens was born in Malta, where his father, Eric Ernest Hitchens (1909–1987), a 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.

As a boy, Hitchens wanted to be an officer in the Royal Navy, like his father. However, when he was 10, he learned he had a lazy eye that could not be corrected, therefore barring him from military service.[5]

Hitchens attended Mount House School, Tavistock, the Leys School, and the City of Oxford College[6] before being accepted at the University of York, where he studied Philosophy and Politics and was a member of Alcuin College, graduating in 1973.[7]

He married Eve Ross, the daughter of journalist David Ross, in 1983.[8] They have a daughter and two sons.[7] Their elder son, Dan, is editor of the Catholic Herald, a London-based Roman Catholic newspaper.[9] Hitchens lives in Oxford.

Hitchens was raised Christian 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.[10][11]

Hitchens was not aware of his maternal grandmother's Jewish background, whose ancestors were from Poland, until he introduced her to his wife. Unlike his brother, Christopher, who called himself Jewish, Peter refers to himself as only one 32nd Jewish.[12]

External video
Debate with Christopher and Peter Hitchens on The Abolition of Britain, October 14, 1999, C-SPAN

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.[13]

Peter was a member of the International Socialists (forerunners of the modern Socialist Workers' Party)[14] 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.[15][13] After the birth of Hitchens' third child, the two brothers reconciled.[16]

Peter's review of his brother's book God Is Not Great led to a public argument between the brothers but no renewed estrangement.[17] 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.[18] In 2008, in the US, they debated the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the existence of God.[19] In 2010 at the Pew Forum, the pair debated the nature of God in civilisation.[20]

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.[21]

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.[42]

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"),[40] 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"),[43] China, and North Korea.

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,[67] and opposes the war in Afghanistan.[68] 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 argues that the UK entered World War II too early, and that the UK overly glorifies World War II.[69][70][71] 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.[72] 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.[73] 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.[74]

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".[75]

Peter Hitchens is very critical of the European Union and has argued for many years that Britain would be better off outside of it.[76] He endorses 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.[77] However, he did not vote in the 2016 UK EU referendum because he is critical of referendums.[77] Instead of a referendum, he argued that a leave decision would be best done by voting into power a political party whose manifesto committed the country to withdrawal by an act of Parliament.[78] He has 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 has expressed a hope that Brexit could lead to a more socially conservative party being shaped than the current Conservative Party.[79]

Hitchens opposed the MMR vaccine,[80][81] asking in a 2001 article: "Is it really our duty to risk our children's lives with this jab?"[82] In 2013, he defended this earlier article as a reasonable criticism of "State bossiness in an age that has seen a catalogue of mistakes, panics and mysteries in the world of disease and medicine", citing the thalidomide scandal and noting that "The same authorities who refuse even to consider that there might be a risk from the ... vaccine have embarked on a massacre of cattle, ... when there is still no actual proof that eating BSE-infected meat leads to CJD. ... They shout 'bad science' at Andrew Wakefield, the consultant who has persistently raised questions about MMR".[82]

Hitchens has written about the enforcement of drug laws, most notably in his book The War We Never Fought (2012). He advocates harsher penalties properly enforced for possession and illegal use of cannabis,[83] stating that "cannabis has been mis-sold as a soft and harmless substance when in fact it's potentially extremely dangerous."[83] 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.[84] Hitchens disagrees with the notion of drug addiction, arguing that it goes against the notion of free will. He says: "People take drugs because they enjoy it."[85]

Hitchens argues that the transgender rights movement promotes zealotry and that the erosion of traditional gender roles in society is "destroying truth itself".[86] Hitchens was one of the most outspoken opponents of same-sex marriage in 2013, the year before same-sex marriage was legal in Britain.[86] However, in speaking to Guardian journalist Owen Jones in 2015, he said his real issue was with the decline of heterosexual marriage in society and the legalisation "of what was in effect no-fault divorce", and that same-sex marriage is "a side-effect ... It's a consequence of the collapse of heterosexual marriage, and I regret now getting involved in the argument about same-sex marriage, because it was a Stalingrad, a diversion. Why is one worrying about a few thousand people who want to have same-sex marriages, without being at all concerned about the collapse of heterosexual marriage, which involves millions of people, and millions of children?"[87]

In 2019, the University of Buckingham organised a "free-speech society" after Hitchens' "no-platforming" by the University of Portsmouth over his views on gay rights, which they believed would cause conflict with LGBT events on campus.[88] Hitchens was the first guest invited by the society to address students.[89] In response to his being no-platformed by the University of Portsmouth, Hitchens was invited by the Archivist and the Head of History and Politics at The Portsmouth Grammar School to give a short talk on "The myth of Russian aggression" to Sixth Form pupils.[90]

Upon reporting on the third day of Rhodes Must Fall protests at Oxford University in June 2020,[91] footage of Hitchens strolling through the streets of the university, followed by protesters who opposed his presence, emerged.[92] One video, edited and set to "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees, went viral and was watched nearly one million times.[93] Speaking to Mike Graham on talkRADIO, Hitchens described the protests as "the Establishment on parade".[91]

Hitchens argues that the COVID-19 virus is not as serious to the general population as is widely believed.[94] He has been very critical of the UK government's response to the pandemic, arguing against restrictions on the public[95] from a right-libertarian position.[96]

He has referred to the UK government's lockdown 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.[97][98] He argues that the government should have followed Sweden's response to the pandemic 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".[99]

He cited examples of what he saw as "dubious statistics" that informed the government's decision to go into lockdown,[100] including those from Imperial College London given by Neil Ferguson who said that there could be up to 500,000 COVID-19 deaths if the government did not impose a lockdown.[101] In his Mail on Sunday blog, Hitchens identified Ferguson as being "one of those largely responsible for the original panic".[102]

Hitchens also sees the recording of cases and deaths relating to the virus as suspicious, saying that when a patient died, hospital staff recorded COVID-19 on the death certificate even when the patient had died of other causes. He said that the statistics about how deadly the virus had been skewed by death certificates 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.[103][104]

He has been against the mandatory wearing of face masks during the pandemic.[105][106] This is because he argues that the scientific evidence for wearing face masks to reduce infection rates is lacking and is "more superstition than science". He refers to masks as "face muzzles" or "face nappies"[96][107] because he believes that the government forcing people to wear face coverings is oppressive. His views and reasoning for his opposition to the lockdown have been the subject of debate and criticism.[108]