Peter Jonathan Hitchens (born 28 October 1951) is an English 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.
A conservative, Hitchens has authored several books critiquing the erosion of British institutions and values, including The Abolition of Britain (1999), which criticises the social and constitutional revolution under New Labour; The Rage Against God (2010), 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 (2012), criticising drug culture and challenging the idea that there had been a 'war on drugs' in Britain; and The Phoney Victory (2018), 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.
Peter Jonathan Hitchens was born on 28 October 1951 in Sliema, Malta, where his father, Eric Ernest Hitchens (1909–1987), a naval officer, was stationed as part of the then Mediterranean Fleet of the Royal Navy. His mother, Yvonne Jean Hitchens (née Hickman; 1921–1973), had met Eric while serving in the Women's Royal Naval Service (Wrens) 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.
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.
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 (forerunners of the modern Socialist Workers' Party) 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.
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.
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."