Peter Hitchens
Peter Jonathan Hitchens 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. Hitchens has contributed to The Spectator, The American Conservative, The Guardian, First Things, Prospect, The Critic and the New Statesman.
Hitchens has authored several books critiquing the erosion of British institutions and values, including The Abolition of Britain, which criticises the social and constitutional revolution under New Labour; The Rage Against God, recounting his intellectual journey from Marxist atheism to faith amid the collapse of the Soviet Union and critiquing the New Atheists; The War We Never Fought, criticising drug culture and challenging the idea that there had been a 'war on drugs' in Britain; and The Phoney Victory, which questions and challenges what Hitchens regards as Britain's national myths about the Second World War's legacy.
Previously a Marxist-Trotskyist 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 foremost obstacle to true conservatism in Britain.
Hitchens identifies with an older strain of British conservatism shaped by Burkean scepticism, Christian moral teaching, and a degree of Gaullist national self-assertion, describing himself as a Burkean conservative, a social democrat, and an Anglo-Gaullist. He argues for a strong nation state, local institutions, and a social order grounded in Christian morality, duty, and self-restraint. His conservative positions often place him at odds with late-twentieth-century liberalisation in areas such as family law and drug policy, and he has been a prominent critic of what he sees as the moral and cultural decline in modern Britain and the progressive cultural revolution since the 1960s. He is an advocate of a return to academic selection and the reintroduction of grammar schools into the English education system. He also opposed aspects of the British government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including national lockdown measures and mask mandates, on civil-libertarian and evidential grounds.
Background
Early life and family
Peter Hitchens was born in Sliema, Malta, where his father, Eric Ernest Hitchens, a naval officer, was stationed as part of the then Mediterranean Fleet of the Royal Navy. His mother, Yvonne Jean Hitchens, had met Eric while serving in the Women's Royal Naval Service during the Second World War. Hitchens has Jewish ancestry via his maternal grandmother, a daughter of Polish Jewish migrants. His grandmother revealed this fact upon meeting his wife Eve Ross. Though his older 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.In his youth, 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, thereby barring him from service.
Hitchens attended Mount House School, Tavistock, The Prebendal School, Chichester, The Leys School, and the Oxford College of Further Education before being accepted at the University of York, where he studied Philosophy and Politics and was a member of Alcuin College, graduating in 1973.
Hitchens married Eve Ross in 1983. They have a daughter and two sons. Their elder son, Dan, was editor of the Catholic Herald, a London-based Roman Catholic newspaper, and is now Senior Editor of First Things. Hitchens lives with his wife in Oxford.
Religion
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.Relationship with his brother
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 the belief in the existence of God. Peter was a member of the International Socialists from 1968 to 1975 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.After the birth of Peter's third child the two brothers reconciled. Peter's review of his brother's book God Is Not Great led to a public argument between the brothers, but no renewed estrangement.
In 2007 the brothers appeared as panellists on BBC TV's Question Time, where they clashed on a number of issues. In 2008 in the United States they debated the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the existence of God. In 2010 at the Pew Research Center, the pair debated the nature of God in civilisation. At a memorial service for Christopher after his death in 2011, Peter read St Paul's Epistle to the Philippians 4:8 which Christopher had read at their father's funeral.
Journalism
Christopher helped Peter to begin a career in journalism at the Socialist Worker. Its editor Roger Protz recalled that Peter "was as dry as a stick, and had no personality of any sort".Hitchens 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, and coinciding with a culmination of growing personal disillusionment with the Labour movement.
Hitchens worked for the local press in Swindon and then at the Coventry Evening Telegraph. 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. 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 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 1992 general election, closely following Neil Kinnock. He then became the Daily Express Washington correspondent. 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.
In 2000 Hitchens left the Daily Express after its acquisition by Richard Desmond, stating that working for him would have represented a moral conflict of interest. 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 and 2009, Hitchens won the Orwell Prize in political journalism in 2010. 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."
A regular on British radio and television, Hitchens has been on Question Time, Any Questions?, This Week, The Daily Politics, and The Big Questions. He has authored and presented four documentaries; one on the BBC about Euroscepticism, and three on Channel 4, including one on the surveillance state, and critical examinations of Nelson Mandela and David Cameron. In the late 1990s Hitchens co-presented a programme on Talk Radio UK with Derek Draper and Austin Mitchell.
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." 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."
Political views
Hitchens describes himself as a Burkean conservative, a social democrat and more recently, a British Gaullist. In 2010 Michael Gove, writing in The Times, asserted that, for Hitchens, what is more important than the split between the Left and the Right is "the deeper gulf between the restless progressive and the Christian pessimist." Hitchens joined the Conservative Party in 1997 and left in 2003. This was when he challenged Michael Portillo for the Conservative nomination in the Kensington and Chelsea seat in 1999.In 2025 a profile in the Oxford University student newspaper Cherwell asserted that:
"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. By ruling out conventional perspectives and accepting that not all progress is good, Hitchens attains a clear-sightedness which more mainstream commentators have missed."
He has been consistently dismissive of the modern Conservative Party since the 1990s. This is because he believes that the party has since abandoned true social conservatism. His view is that conservatism should embody a Burkean sense of public duty, conscience, and the rule of law, which he sees as the best guarantee of liberty. Furthermore, this view holds a general hostility to hasty constitutional reforms and foreign adventurism. This was central to his criticism of many policies of the New Labour government, which he viewed as attacks on liberty and facets of a constitutional revolution. He believes the Conservative Party should be a defender of establishment institutions such as the Church of England and the monarchy, but has shifted to social liberalism instead. He believes that atheism and cultural liberalism are the causes of the systematic undermining of Christianity. Hitchens has written "The left's real interests are moral, cultural, sexual and social. They lead to a powerful state. This is not because they actively set out to achieve one." He also believes that the First World War and the devolution of marriage are the causes of the demise of Christianity in Europe.
In his book The Cameron Delusion Hitchens argues that in the last few decades, the Conservative Party has become virtually "indistinguishable from Blairite New Labour". He argues that the Conservative Party's reason for existence is as "a vehicle for obtaining office for the sons of gentlemen" and he loathes the party. Hitchens's claim that the "Conservatives are now the main Left-wing party in the country" in his Mail on Sunday column has been met with criticism.
He is in favour of capital punishment, and was the only British journalist to attend and write about the execution of British-born Nicholas Ingram in America in 1995. In a 2025 article, he wrote that:
If you seek office and the power that goes with it, your most pressing task is to stand between your fellow countrymen and evil. To do that, you must maintain armed forces capable of lethal violence and ready to inflict it. If you lack the courage and resolve to do this, then do not seek office in the first place. You are not qualified for it. The apparatus of the death penalty has exactly the same purpose, to defend the weak and good against the strong and evil, by placing a sharp sword in the hands of justice. This point also disposes of the most popular argument against the death penalty, the fear of executing the wrong person. This is indeed a strong point. It is why, now that our courts have been turned into a shameful politicised and emotionalised travesty of justice, I could not possibly support the return of the gallows until major reforms have taken place.He supports first-past-the-post voting. He is opposed to the privatisation of railways and water and supports their renationalisation. Hitchens describes himself as a "lifelong trade unionist".
Hitchens has been a member of the campaign to clear the name of Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, from allegations of child sexual abuse. He has argued that the Church of England convicted him in what he described as a kangaroo court, and stated his wish that allegations are not treated as proven facts.
Hitchens "completely" opposes the Right to Buy scheme introduced by Margaret Thatcher, describing it as a "grave mistake" and advocates for replacing Housing Benefit, which he describes as an "absolute scandal", with a substantial increase in public housing.
He is a supporter of grammar schools and the principle of academic selection. He has argued for their reintroduction, reform and expansion since the 1990s, and has criticised progressive educational reforms for "wrecking" the education system of Britain. In Hitchens' view, both left and right were united in their opposition to grammar schools but for different reasons: the left, because the academic success of grammar schools expose the failure of comprehensive education and contradict the egalitarian ideal by proving that academic selection works. The modern right, meanwhile, resent grammars because they restrain the market logic they prefer, since academically selective state schools reduce demand for expensive private schooling and weaken the social advantages that the affluent expect to be able to purchase.