In the early morning of January 13, 1991, thousands of Lithuanians in the capital of Vilnius converged on the TV Tower. On March 11, 1990, Lithuania had become the first Soviet republic to declare independence from Moscow; Mikhail Gorbachev demanded that they renounce it. On March 17, the Lithuanians refused. KGB troops were sent in to quash the rebellion. As protestors surrounded the TV Tower, tanks drove into the crowds and the KGB opened fire. Fourteen people were killed; hundreds wounded. One of the journalists in Vilnius that night was Peter Hitchens. Witnessing history, he recalled, was one thing—getting the news to readers was another.
“The night after the Vilnius massacre, we were all trying to get copy out about what had happened,” he recounted. “The only telephones from which you could reach Moscow were in the Parliament building, which had been taken over by nationalist rebels who were convinced that the Russians would arrive that night. They’d filled the place with gasoline in tanks and hose pipes, intending to immolate themselves and anybody who came after them, and raided every construction site in the city with cranes and bulldozers and brought all the concrete blocks they could find and built a sort of medieval fortification around it. It was pretty frightening, but it was the only place with a telephone where I could call my wife in Moscow who would then transmit it to London.”
Peter Hitchens has many such stories; last year, he marked fifty years as a journalist. Currently a columnist with the Mail on Sunday, his career has taken him to 57 countries, including stints as a foreign correspondent in Moscow and Washington, D.C., and given him a ringside seat to some of the great historical events of the last century. He is now Britain’s best-known conservative polemicist with nine books to his name, including The Abolition of Britain, The Rage Against God, and The Phoney Victory. In 2010 he was awarded The Orwell Prize for his journalism, the UK’s most prestigious accolade for political writing. It was an honour he cherished; he “fell in love with George Orwell” in his middle teens after reading Orwell’s collected essays, and his desire to emulate that form of writing, he told me, has “always been the main thing that drove me.”
In an interview with The European Conservative, he reflected on his half-century in journalism. “I began to be interested in journalism early because I mistakenly thought it was about writing, which a lot of it isn’t,” he recalled. “I had a lot of fun producing family newspapers, school newspapers. Then I became a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary and I thought I could put what talents I had to the use of the revolution. That’s what propelled me into it in the first place, but as it happened, the experience of being a journalist was one of the things that made me cease being a Marxist-Leninist. I spent a lot of my teens in the city of Oxford, which is a kind of paradise separate from the real world. Then I went to a modern university campus in York, a sort of extraterritorial spaceship separate from the real world.”
Newspapers, however, were an introduction to the real world. “When I went into journalism, particularly at newspapers in provincial, industrial cities, I had to deal with normal human beings. It was revealed to me that I had a very poor understanding of what the world was really like,” Hitchens observed. “I had to revise that. I was pushed. The training you used to get in reporting—I was an indentured apprentice on my first newspaper—involved spending a lot of time with people like policemen, the fire brigade, and a lot of time in court, getting out and meeting the sort of people revolutionaries don’t have much time for, and discovering that they were not as advertised.” (The shorter version of Hitchens’s switch from callow Trotskyist to conservative: “I grew up.”)
His career began with shoe-leather reporting. “What I spent several years doing, from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, was covering what turned out to be a social revolution,” he said. “We didn’t know it at the time and didn’t recognize it as such, but those were the last great battles of the British labour unions. I was in a group of people, a quite distinguished and very intense group—almost a society within a society—who were engaged with this extraordinary thing. It was very melodramatic, kept us up late at night, got us up early in the morning, and forced us to go to unpleasant and uncomfortable places for a lot of the time. That was constantly exhilarating.”
While Hitchens didn’t much like reporting as such— “newspapers want concision and speed, not writing”—he did love the newspaper business. “There was a tremendous romance about it, but it’s all gone now,” he told me. “I’m very lucky to have seen the last of it. On my first newspaper we would often go down shortly before 12:45 to see the first edition going off the press. You could actually watch the amazing Victorian linotype machines with their pots of boiling lead and their dedicated operators and see it all made into those wonderful flongs and forms cast into the semi-cylinders, which were then cranked onto the machine and then the machine starting to run like a train going slowly out of the station to reach full speed—an amazing sight, the whole building trembling. The shouting, the tension, the speed—it was enormous fun.”
The job Hitchens really wanted was foreign correspondent, and on the advice of a veteran writer who told him that Prague was the last trace of 1930s Europe, he privately headed East. “I was completely entranced by the sinister glamour of it and the huge importance of what was going on,” he recalled. “I was captivated by Prague and by divided Berlin; to go on from divided Berlin into East Germany was enormously fascinating especially if you had been traveling in the West, because direct comparison between two systems of thought was possible. I did a lot of that, and when the moment came for my newspaper to revive its long-closed Moscow bureau after many years, I was a successful candidate for it. But I have to tell you, I tried very hard to get that job.”
Hitchens moved his family to the Soviet Union, where they lived from June 1990 to October 1992. It was an education, he said, that you couldn’t pay millions for. “It completely changed me and completely changed my life,” he reflected. “Moscow itself is one of the greatest cities that has ever existed. It’s enormous, quite a lot of it is staggeringly beautiful, and it is a tremendous stage for a great melodrama. It had me by the throat the whole time I was there. I’ve never gotten over it. I was glad to get out when I did because it was hard—everything you did took longer and was more difficult—but it was an extraordinarily valuable, unrepeatable experience. You can’t go there anymore. Soviet Moscow has vanished completely.”
The Hitchens family was fortunate in finding an exceptional place to live—an illegal let in a Communist Party elite building, where the Brezhnev family were just across the courtyard. “It was one of the loveliest places I’ve ever lived, but it was still Soviet,” Hitchens chuckled. “If I wanted to call home, I had to go through an immense procedure. Every so often, my phone would shut down because they were bugging it, and the tapes ran out. I had to go round to the next building where the exchange was, hammer on the door, and these beautiful girls would lean out the window and I would shout up”—here Hitchens briefly switched to Russian— “‘My phone, it doesn’t work!’ They’d laugh, and by the time I got back they’d have changed the tapes and the phone was working again.”
Moving an entire family to Soviet Moscow was not without potential hazards. “I’m very fortunate in having a wife who was prepared to march towards the sound of gunfire—literally, in some cases—and undergo the hardships that came along with it,” Hitchens observed. “She had to put up with a great deal, and one of our greatest fears was one of the children falling ill, because there wasn’t proper, advanced medical treatment available in Moscow except for the political elite. That was always a considerable worry. We always had a can of petrol gasoline in the car in case we had to drive to the airport, get out, and go to Helsinki, which was the nearest place with a decent hospital. That was difficult. But we were privileged people—we had hard currency, we could buy food in hard currency shops, and we could pay the very high prices at the market for fresh meat and vegetables.”
His then-editor, Nick Lloyd, told him to travel within the Soviet Union and describe what he saw; one of the scenes Hitchens recalls most vividly was a beer bar in Moscow “of unbelievable squalor and misery.” The family stayed long enough for Hitchens to be mistaken, at one point, for a Russian. “I’d gone to some part of Moscow where I thought Mikhail Gorbachev might be campaigning, and by that time I’d been living in Moscow for so long that I looked so downtrodden and shabby he thought I was a Soviet citizen and asked me to vote for him. I had to tell him I wasn’t able to.”
Gorbachev wasn’t the only world leader to seek Hitchens’s approval. At an event in the Rose Garden at the White House—Hitchens was apparently let in by mistake, which caused a kerfuffle later to determine who was responsible for it later—President Bill Clinton homed in on him. “He, seeing me as someone who disagreed with him, immediately turned his extraordinary charm on me full beam,” Hitchens recalled humorously. “It is all true what they say—it is immense. You feel as if you are being embraced and then given a bath in golden syrup. It was astonishing, the effort he was making to win me over.”
The Iron Lady was a different story. As a junior reporter, Hitchens occasionally ended up sitting at the back of her RAF plane. “Sometimes she would call us to the front and lecture us. It was extraordinarily dull because she had absolutely nothing private to say to journalists, and journalists want gossip. She just went on and on about her policy towards South Korea, or whatever. At one point during an immense lecture, I thought she’d finished and got up to leave. She hadn’t and fixed me with this furious stare. My suit nearly caught fire. I sat down, and we had to endure another half hour after that.” Politicians, Hitchens noted, are rarely surprising—their charisma and humor are just tactics to avoid revealing anything substantial.
One of the most rewarding aspects of his career, Hitchens says, is having developed a relationship with his readers, which began with his descriptive essays from Moscow. People began to write to him, which he’d almost never had as a reporter. “That was something that I found then and still find immensely satisfying,” he said. “You have some idea of what your readers think of what you’re writing.” Hitchens now has a large base of very dedicated fans, especially among young conservatives—I know a large contingent of Hitchens readers who have been loyally following his blog, interviews, and YouTube appearances for years. In a post-modern West, Hitchens invariably offers a bracing corrective to mainstream narratives, often differing with other conservatives. He prefers a bike to a bandwagon.
When I asked Hitchens why his work had attracted a dedicated following, he was thoughtful. “Well, I suppose it’s because people don’t want to be alone, any more than I do,” he replied. He was perhaps unconsciously echoing a line from William Nicholson in his C.S. Lewis film Shadowlands, often wrongly attributed to Lewis himself: “We read to know that we are not alone.” (Hitchens’s column on the unveiling of the C.S. Lewis memorial in Westminster Abbey, incidentally, is one of my favourites.) During the COVID pandemic, for example, Hitchens was one of the few commentators offering an alternative narrative. As Douglas Murray once wrote in the Spectator: “[E]very time I see him sally forth in print or on screen to argue his case, I thank God for whatever it was in the Hitchens milk that produced such argumentative, un-intimidateable sons.”
Despite that, Hitchens is firm and consistent in his assertion that his writing hasn’t changed anything but concedes that his audience might beg to differ. “Providing that sort of reassurance is important, and I’m very pleased to do it,” he said. “I get an awful lot of people who write to me about that, and I’m glad that it is some help, but the truth is that it is personal help. It made no difference at all. So really, it’s comfort journalism, you might call it.” I might not. Hitchens recently ended a broadside against the UK defence minister with this line: “Once, his actions would have seen him laughed out of office. Now they will make an interesting footnote in the history of this country’s final decline, which will be written by whoever conquers us.” Scintillating, certainly. Comforting, not so much.
There are many writers in the Hitchens family—Peter’s late brother Christopher, of course, but also his son Dan, who served as editor of the Catholic Herald and now writes for First Things, as well as Christopher’s son Alexander, the author of several books, and daughter Antonia, who writes for the New Yorker. “I won’t comment on the younger generation, who I feel rather sorry for, living in the shadow of terrible parents and uncles,” Hitchens chuckled. “I have children who have not gone into journalism, but I don’t talk about my private life. What Christopher and I both had in common is independence of mind, which will attract a certain audience. It will also make a lot of people very, very angry with you, and even hate you. I wonder if it isn’t our Cornish peasant ancestry, nasty, British, and short, thickset stumpy figures who, if they weren’t writing for the newspapers, would perhaps be smuggling or wrecking ships.”
There are only a few questions Hitchens declined to answer. When I asked him if he had any regrets, he laughed. “Oh, many—things I failed to do, things I got wrong, stories I missed. But I’m not going to tell you about them.” He won’t give any advice to young writers, either. “I’ve stopped giving advice. The one piece of advice I ever gave about British politics was to leave the country if you’re young enough to start a new life, and that has been so misinterpreted that I can’t be bothered to offer even that anymore.” As for people he admires: “I don’t admire people. I admire actions, sometimes. People always let you down. It’s not Christian to admire people, because nobody is in themselves good. It is also not wise to admire people. It makes you unhappy.”
At the age of 72, with a half-century of journalism behind him, Peter Hitchens is, fortunately, not yet finished. He sees all his books as one large book. “I have tried to get my publisher to put it all in one volume called The Obituary of Britain, but so far I haven’t persuaded them,” he told me. “It would be enormous, but others get away with it, so why shouldn’t I? A kind reader once did put them all together in one big black volume with The Obituary of Britain written on it, but it is the only existing one.” The next installment he’s hoping to write is tentatively titled The Madness of Cars. Aside from taxis, tanks, police cruisers, and fire engines, Hitchens believes that “civilization took a serious wrong turn” when it adopted cars en masse and that we should largely return to trams and trains. “I hate motorcars,” he observed.
The column that best encapsulates the consistency running through the Hitchens corpus is, in my view, “The making of a reactionary,” published at UnHerd, in which Hitchens describes his worldview. It is not political, he writes, so much as based on his “immovable love of certain, unchanging things” that he has always known “very deep down as essential and desirable.” He ends by noting that his youth, marked by austerity and severity but also by the great history of the British Isles, the poetry of Tennyson and Newbolt, and “the chilly beauty of the choir at evensong, the potent silence of a cathedral holding its breath between prayers,” likely ruined him for modernity. He concludes:
Someone should have taken me in hand, I suppose, and given me a normal modern upbringing, all about shiny new hospitals, equality, and the United Nations. But they came too late. I had already heard the distant trumpet call of a much more seductive, much older world view. And I am glad of that. I wouldn’t have missed any of it, and if now I can laugh cheerfully at the absurdities of our politics, tiny figures scuttling through cavernous halls built for much greater men, it is because for a few short, dreamy years I was given a glimpse of a lost past, just before it vanished forever. And from then on I knew what I liked.
For thousands of young conservatives who were born after that era ended, Peter Hitchens has served as a guide who helps us understand why we, too, dislike so much of modernity. He reminds us that it was not always this way, and that saying so matters. We cannot return to the past, he often observes, but we are always in the process of choosing the future—and thus we do not have to make the choices we are making. For that reason, despite his protestations, Hitchens’s writing does make a difference. Because while reading him, many have discovered a heritage largely abandoned before we were born—and have realized what we were missing. Now, many of us know what we like, too.
