Peter Hitchens believes the metaphor for his life is an unpopular sixties chocolate bar.
The Mail on Sunday columnist, who later this year will mark 50 years as a journalist, met me in an Italian deli down the road from the Mail offices in Kensington. Despite the 23 degree weather, he arrived buttoned-up in a long-sleeve white shirt and black trousers held up by suspenders.
“When you hit a certain shape, you have to decide if your trousers go above it or go below it, and the belt problems are huge,” he said. “It’s all solved by wearing braces.”
Hitchens has written for the Mail on Sunday for more than two decades, using his perch to lambast causes as varied as the invasion of Iraq, same-sex marriage, drug liberalisation and green energy.
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In each case, what he advocated for was the precise opposite of what happened.
“If somebody wanted, I’m open to offering myself to market research companies,” Hitchens said. “Because anything I like will fail commercially.”
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He said he was like Aztec, the chocolate bar introduced by Cadbury’s in 1967 as its answer to Mars.
“It was slightly bitterer than the Mars bar, and I really liked it. Shortly afterwards, Cadbury’s dropped it because nobody else wanted to eat it.
“And this is a metaphor for my life: whatever it is I like will fail, either commercially or as a moral cause.
“But so what? Majorities don’t decide the truth.”
Peter Hitchens’ career: ‘a bit mixed up’
Hitchens entered journalism in 1973, doing his first reporting stints for The Socialist Worker.
“I was thinking that the thing to do would be to get into Fleet Street and then, as a Trotskyist, use my position to nudge the country towards the revolution I then believed was both inevitable and necessary. Somewhere along the line I got a bit mixed up.”
His first job out of university was as an indentured apprentice on the Swindon Evening Advertiser, but Hitchens said he “wasn’t a very good reporter”.
“Like a lot of things that are good for you, it isn’t always terribly enjoyable”.
After three years at the paper he joined the Coventry Evening Telegraph; the next year, 1977, he got his first Fleet Street job as an industrial correspondent at the Daily Express.
“What I wanted was the opportunity to actually comment about things, rather than write about them,” he told me. “But I realised very early on that there was never going to be any use in commenting if you hadn’t got the solid background of reporting and knowledge.”
It would take until the nineties for Hitchens to earn a columnist position, by which time he had served in correspondent postings to Moscow and Washington and become the Express’ assistant editor. He left the paper in 2001 when it was purchased by Richard Desmond, saying the new proprietor’s ownership of pornographic titles made his position untenable. Hitchens has been at the Mail on Sunday ever since.
I asked whether he thought he was a good journalist.
“Yeah – why should I be falsely modest? I’ve been in this trade now for pretty much 50 years… I think I’ve made a reasonable fist of it.
“I mean, there have been times when I’ve messed it up completely, as all of us have… But I don’t think I would have lasted this long if I’d been no good.”
Prodded to identify some of those messes, he provided two: a general tendency, when he was an industrial correspondent, to “completely miss” stories; and a specific failure to understand Gorbachev’s liberalisation programme.
“I just thought he was trying to soften us up. Wrong.”
‘I have never, ever succeeded once, I think, in actually changing anybody’s opinion’
Despite his employment by the Mail newspapers, Hitchens is an inveterate critic of the Conservative Party. He describes himself as a “British Gaullist: essentially conservative about social and moral issues and about national sovereignty, but actually also quite keen on a strong welfare state and on the bettering of the conditions of the poor”.
His attacks on the Conservative Party, he said, had been “a 20-year project – which, when I embarked on it, would have been really useful, but now it’s gone beyond pointless”.
I asked whether he might have contributed in a modest way to the party’s current low standing in the polls.
“Not in the slightest. I don’t think I’ve achieved anything at all. What’s happened is that all the people who told me 20 years ago to shut up and get with the programme are now saying: ‘Hmm well, actually, yes, he may have had a point, the Conservative Party might actually be useless after all.’ Well thanks!”
“My career is studded by failure in trying to influence anybody. I’ve had a lot of fun, I’ve learned a lot, I’ve enjoyed myself a great deal, I’ve made some terrible mistakes.
“But I have never, ever succeeded once, I think, in actually changing anybody’s opinion or altering the balance of politics. Not ever.”
Some of Hitchens’ critics might quibble with that claim. In a career spent regularly weighing in on high-impact topics, perhaps the most controversial of Hitchens’ interventions came with his 2001 defence of parents refusing the MMR jab for their children over fears of a link to autism.
Hitchens wrote at the time: “The claims of an MMR risk have not been proved, but nor have they been disproved. There is no reason for either side to be certain, and every reason to be cautious, especially if the future of a tiny child is in your hands.”
The paper that kicked off the MMR scare is now widely regarded as fraudulent and a major factor in the subsequent rise of the anti-vax movement.
Hitchens did not endorse Wakefield’s claim and is not an anti-vaxxer, ultimately receiving the Covid-19 vaccine. But he has been pulled repeatedly back to defend his 2001 argument – suggesting that, whether or not his writing changed anyone’s minds, there are certainly some who think it did. (In an email to Press Gazette sent after this article was published, Hitchens emphasised that “many parents had already declined the MMR [jab]” by the time of his 2001 column, “and in fact I did not even enter the argument until three years after the Lancet paper was published”.)
Writing for yourself and your creator
Hitchens wrote earlier this year that the job of a journalist was to annoy people. In this regard, he considered his career a success.
“I know, for instance, for sure that I annoyed David Cameron a lot,” he told me. “I also know that I annoyed the Blair creature. In fact he once told me to ‘sit down and stop being bad’, so that’s quite good.
“These are things to be pleased about. But they don’t make much difference, except to your own feeling [that], ‘Well, actually, at least I did that.’”
I asked why, if he thought he had achieved so little, Hitchens bothered to write in the first place.
“I just do it because I think it needs to be said anyway,” he said.
“I don’t any longer have any political purpose. When I first started writing books 20 years ago, I thought, actually, maybe, possibly, I could alter opinion and alter the politics of the country.
“I really did believe that. And then as the years went by I realised I was only making myself unhappy.
“But it doesn’t mean that I should stop doing it. These things matter in another measure… It doesn’t absolve you of any duty, knowing that what you say will probably be ignored.”
He said, however, that he does speak to people now who thank him for opposing lockdowns early in the pandemic – something which reportedly led to his being monitored by the Cabinet Office.
“They thought the world had gone mad, and it was a solace to them to know that they weren’t the only ones.
“That alone would seem to me to justify doing it.”
Where does Peter Hitchens get his news?
Hitchens is kind enough to clue me in on where he gets his news.
“I have on my phone at the moment The Times, the FT, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Spectator”.
I said The New York Times seemed like an outlier.
“You have to read the opposition.”
Were there any journalists he particularly admired?
“I have to say, for me, the recent years have been a bit of a desert.”
He said he had been “profoundly discouraged” by the lack of “sceptical reporting” on the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
He did, however, cite Times columnist Janice Turner as someone whose work he had appreciated. Turner is perhaps most prominent today for her criticism of what she has called “the trans lobby”. But in an email after the interview, Hitchens pushed back on the suggestion that was the reason for his commendation.
“I just think Janice Turner is an unusually moving and cogent writer, on almost every subject she touches – even though I often disagree with her.”
Hitchens found it easier to name editors with whom he had admired working – Ted Verity, Arthur Firth, Nick Lloyd, Peter Wright and Rosie Boycott were all namechecked.
He recalled an instance in which Boycott took him to lunch.
“She said: ‘Everything you write is complete shit, but I really like you.’ One of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.”
Hitchens on GB News
I asked if he saw the launch of right-leaning broadcasters like GB News and TalkTV as a positive development.
“Well I have to say I cannot put the words Piers Morgan and conservative in the same sentence, so you can have that one for a start.”
He felt that while there was “a tiny bit of vestigial social conservatism now creeping in”, the politics these channels express was not for him.
“I’d probably be happier with the old BBC home service in the 1950s than with GB News, to be honest… It’s good for the trade and it’s also good for the possibility of real debate. But I would like something which actually took the British Gaullist position, rather than Nigel Farage’s.”
With much of the news trade’s attention invested in AI, I asked also whether he thought the technology was a threat to journalism.
“I don’t really understand it. I’ve got other things to worry about. I think I should probably be dead before it becomes important, so it’s one of those things I put on the second rung after the fate of my immortal soul.”
And how did he feel about the fate of his immortal soul?
“Worried. Aren’t you?”
‘It’s useless. Because it’s gone.’
In line with his pro-trade union views, Hitchens is a paying, albeit inactive, life member of the National Union of Journalists.
“I mean, almost everything the union says I disagree with. But that’s not the point,” he said. “The point is, I think, that the freedom to withdraw your labour is an essential freedom.”
He could be a member for free now, he said, “but I pay because I don’t know – there may be, at some point in somebody’s life, on some small newspaper or radio station, a moment when they need a union”.
Or indeed someone on a big newspaper like the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday, which in May announced a round of redundancies as the papers are brought closer together.
I asked whether he thought the Mail on Sunday would survive as a title independently from its daily sister.
“Yeah, why shouldn’t it? It has an identity, people like it. I mean, obviously it cannot continue to be as separate as it used to be, because that’s not possible… I certainly hope these things continue. I’ve worked for it for 20 years, so I have a certain sentimentality about that.”
He has a certain sentimentality about newspapers in general.
“I love newspapers. Even as a child I bought and read newspapers.
“I actually can remember when I first arrived in Fleet Street, the Daily Express sold two and a quarter million copies a day and was a broadsheet…
“In those times, I remember, if you were on late nights, the street filling up with the vans to take the papers to the railway stations for the newspaper trains. And the place actually did smell of ink.
“And round about 10:30 the building began to shake with the presses beginning to turn. And it was incredibly romantic.”
Hitchens’ speech halted. It sounded almost as though his voice was catching in his throat.
He said that at the Swindon Evening Advertiser “we all used to go down at lunchtime to the machine room to watch the first edition coming off. For the thrill of it! So I’ll always miss that. But it’s useless. Because it’s gone.”
There was a pause. I began a question, but Hitchens cut me off.
“I liked steam trains, as well. They’ve gone. These things are gone. And you have to learn to live and work with the new.
“I’ve always had a strong sympathy with the Luddites. I could see their point. But you could also see that they were going to be defeated. It wasn’t going to work, it’s a force too strong to fight.
“Everything in the temporal world is temporary. Including people.”
The subject of death came up several times in the hour. After our interview ended, Hitchens threatened to haunt me should he die before publication and it turn out that I misquoted him.
“You won’t like that. I’ll be sitting by your bed telling you long stories about the remote past.”
Perhaps it was meditations on mortality and the bigger picture that drove Hitchens to his most surprising admission: a single regard in which he had decided to stop swimming against the tide.
At one point in our encounter I corrected myself after erroneously using “less” rather than “fewer” in a sentence.
He said: “I’ve given that one up, by the way. I used to think the fewer [or] less thing was really important.
“But I now think, actually, it verges on pedantry. I’m more worried about the death of disinterested – nobody now knows what it means. People use it as a synonym for uninterested and it’s not, so we’ve actually lost a word…
“But fewer and less… let’s face it, who really cares?”
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