Peter Hitchens was born in 1951 in Malta, where his father was stationed with the Royal Navy. He was educated at The Leys School, which he left at 15, completing his secondary education at the Oxford College of Further Education before entering the University of York, where he attained a BA in Politics, and is said to have replied 'I was too busy starting a revolution' when asked why he was late for a lecture. He married Eve Ross, daughter of left-wing journalist David Ross, in 1983.

Hitchens worked for the Daily Express between 1977 and late 2000, initially as a reporter specialising in education and industrial and labour affairs, then as a political reporter, and subsequently as Deputy Political Editor. While working for the newspaper in 1992 he broke the story concerning Jennifer's Ear.

Leaving parliamentary journalism to cover defence and diplomatic affairs, he reported on the decline and ultimate collapse of the communist regimes in several Warsaw Pact countries, an assignment which culminated in a stint as Moscow Correspondent, where he witnessed and reported on the final months of the Soviet Union in 1990/91. He became the Daily Express Washington correspondent soon afterwards. Returning to London in 1995, he became a commentator and, eventually, a regular columnist. Hitchens continued to espouse a conservative viewpoint despite the publication's general move towards the political centre in the mid-nineties, and its decision to support the Labour Party under Tony Blair in the months approaching the 1997 General Election. In 2001, Hitchens announced his departure from the The Daily Express in response to the title's acquisition by Richard Desmond; Hitchens felt that his own moral and religious conservatism was incompatible with Desmond's publishing a string of sex magazines. He joined The Mail on Sunday, where he has a weekly column and weblog in which he debates directly with readers and produces occasional reportage from the UK.

Hitchens has also written for The Spectator, a conservative British magazine, and sporadically for more left-leaning publications such as The Guardian, Prospect, and the New Statesman. He is also an occasional contributor to The American Conservative magazine.

In 2007 and 2009 Hitchens was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in Political Journalism.

Foreign reporting

Hitchens first became a roving foreign reporter in the early 1990s while working for The Daily Express, when he reported from South Africa during the last days of Apartheid, and from Somalia at the time of the US-led military intervention in the country. He continued his foreign reporting after joining The Mail on Sunday, for which he has written several foreign reports, including from Russia (including Moscow) and the US, Western and Eastern Europe, many of the former Soviet Republics (including a 2008 visit to Minsk in Belarus, and a 2010 report from Sevastopol in Ukraine described by Edward Lucas in The Economist as a "dismaying lapse"), the Middle East (including Israel, Gaza, a 2003 visit to Iraq in the wake of the 2003 invasion, and an undercover report from Iran, which was described by Iain Dale as "a quite brilliant account"), Africa (including a trip to the Congo in 2008, during which he narrowly avoided being lynched) Cuba, Venezuela, China, Japan, North Korea, Burma and Istanbul. In 2009, Hitchens was shortlisted for Foreign Reporter of the Year in the British Press Awards. In 2010, Hitchens was awarded the Orwell Prize in recognition of his foreign reporting.

Appearances in the British broadcast media

Hitchens speaks frequently on British radio and television, often debating (typically left-wing) opponents on a variety of social and political topics. He is a regular panellist on Question Time and Any Questions? and has been a frequent guest on This Week with Andrew Neil, The Daily Politics and The Big Questions.

Hitchens has authored and presented several documentaries on Channel 4 and BBC Four, in which he examined Britain's entry into the Common Market, discussed the erosion of civil liberties in the UK, and critically examined the political achievements of Nelson Mandela, and later the career of David Cameron (see On the Conservative Party). In the late 1990s, he co-presented a programme on Talk Radio UK with Labour Party stalwarts Derek Draper and Austin Mitchell. Hitchens was offered the chance to present a programme on his own by the station's then boss, Kelvin MacKenzie, but preferred and suggested an adversarial format with a left-wing co-presenter, believing this to be the best way of achieving broadcast fairness and balance.

Hitchens studied politics at the University of York from 1970 to 1973. He was a Trotskyist member of the International Socialists from 1969 to 1975, and joined the British Labour Party in 1977, campaigning for Ken Livingstone's unsuccessful candidature for Hampstead in the 1979 general election. Hitchens left the Labour Party in 1983 when he became a political reporter at the Daily Express, thinking it wrong to carry a party card when directly reporting politics. The period also coincided with a culmination of growing personal disillusionment with the Labour movement. In 2010, Hitchens dismissed the "cruel revolutionary rubbish" he promoted as a Trotskyist as "poison".

He joined the Conservative Party in 1997, but concluded that the party had no idea what it was facing and would never be able to challenge New Labour, and subsequently left in 2003. Hitchens challenged Michael Portillo for the Conservative Party nomination in the Kensington and Chelsea seat in 1999.

Hitchens believes that no party he could support will be created until the Conservative Party disintegrates, an event he first began calling for in 2006. From 2008, he began frequently advocating in his writing that what would facilitate such a collapse would be for the Conservative Party to lose the 2010 General Election: "If they fail to win an election against this awful government, then it is my belief and hope that they will collapse. Many of their MPs and supporters will leave politics altogether, others will go to the Liberal Democrats or Labour, where they belong. Some will be interested in an entirely new party, which will not be the Conservatives and so will be able to appeal to the many patriotic, law-abiding people abandoned by Labour".

In The Guardian, James Silver describes Hitchens as "the Mail on Sunday's fulminator-in-chief" and his columns as "molten Old Testament fury shot through with visceral wit". Hitchens has said of his reputation: "I know a lot of people consider me to be disreputable or foaming at the mouth, but you have to learn not to care, or at least not to mind. I don't like being called 'bonkers' and I think to some extent it demeans people who use phrases like that. But I take comfort from the fact that most totalitarian regimes tend to classify their opponents as mentally disordered."

Hitchens is noted for his controversial views and commentary. He has been called a 'maniac' by UK prime minister David Cameron. Mr Cameron also grudgingly permitted a question from Hitchens at an election press conference in May 2010, saying 'let's have the Peter Hitchens memorial question!'. Hitchens then asked Mr Cameron if he considered himself closer to the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg or to the former Conservative Cabinet Minister Norman Tebbit. Mr Cameron had some difficulty in answering this. In a similar clash in 1997, the then Labour Party leader Tony Blair told Hitchens to 'sit down and stop being bad!' after he questioned him about the contrast between his schools policy and the education of his own children. . In 2010, he summarised his views on the Conservative Party, stating 'he (William Hague), like so many Tory politicians and journalists of the Nineties, decided to make his peace with the Blairite settlement, to accept the cultural revolution and the EU takeover and the rest'.

Politically, Hitchens could be classified as a Moral and Social Conservative. His stance resembles the paleoconservative tradition in the United States. Apart from the occasional condemnation of the UK's tax burden, and the scope and reach of its Welfare State, he rarely comments on fiscal matters. Hitchens is critical of neoconservatism, arguing that an unwavering allegiance to the unfettered free market is no substitute for Christian morality, and that the free market, pursued dogmatically, can often damage institutions which conservatives should value. Correspondingly, he has frequently criticised Thatcherism for ignoring the value of institutions and traditions, and has said the left are not entirely wrong when they accuse the Thatcher government of having damaged British society.

In propounding his socially conservative views, Hitchens frequently criticises political correctness, which he considers to be a manifestation of Cultural Marxism. He says it is important to acknowledge that the Left has been correct in its long opposition to racism. He maintains that opponents of political correctness will fail unless they accept that it has some positive elements, and that it is attractive to so many because of its promotion of simple good manners. However he argues (in opposition to the Left) that genuine good manners, tolerance and decency are impossible, in the long term, without the foundation of traditional morality and religious faith.

Michael Gove, writing in The Times, has 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".

Morality and religion

Hitchens, a former atheist, is a confirmed and communicant member of the Church of England and an advocate of moral virtues founded on religious (particularly Christian) faith. He argues that these have been undermined and eroded by social liberals, and by those he calls cultural Marxists, since the 1960s...a theory he explores in his book The Abolition of Britain.

In support of this thesis, Hitchens cites, among other things, what he describes as serial attacks on marriage by the State. He identifies these attacks as the introduction of no-fault divorce, the removal or redistribution of what were formerly the exclusive privileges of marriage (and the resultant decline in status of the matrimonial state), the abolition of the Christian Sunday, and the growing economic and cultural pressure on wives and mothers to go out to work. He believes that without faith and without strong families, the development of conscience is stunted, private life is diminished and the power of the state increased.

He believes that many of the measures which created the "permissive society" were mistaken or excessive and need to be reexamined, and posits that homosexual relationships should not be granted legal parity with heterosexual marriage. Hitchens rejects the term "homophobia" as an epithet which, he argues, is increasingly used to stifle legitimate debate on social policy, and in 2009 stated that people are being "forced to say that we think homosexuality is a good thing, that homosexual couples are equal in all ways to heterosexual married couples".

Hitchens believes that abortion should be illegal at any stage of pregnancy.

Hitchens is an Anglican, and he defends the use of the Church of England's 1662 Book of Common Prayer and the Authorised (or King James) version of the Bible not only because he believes they are beautiful and memorable, but also because he feels that they are the indispensable foundations of Anglicanism's "powerful combination of scripture, tradition and reason". However he opposes the liberal positions of the current Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.

Evolution

Hitchens sees evolution as a speculative and unfalsifiable theory which cannot be observed in progress, and maintains that supporters of Darwinism often mistake adaptation of existing species for a far more ambitious process required for evolution. He therefore contends that the theory is unlike other scientific theories with which it is often compared. He regularly likens belief in evolution to religious faith, on the basis that religious claims also cannot be tested and similarly have their origins not in certain knowledge, but rather in the preferences of the believer. In support of his scepticism he cites Karl Popper's remarks on the scientific status of evolution, in which Popper confesses to being disturbed by the apparent tautology of the theory of natural selection. Hitchens believes evolutionary theory to be an ingenious possible explanation for the origins of species, but one which he himself prefers not to embrace.

Hitchens does not subscribe to a literal interpretation of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. In a review of his brother's work How Religion Poisons Everything, he stated that, "many decades have passed since I fancied the story of Adam and Eve was literal truth, if I ever did.

Liberty, security and crime

Hitchens advocates a society governed by conscience and the rule of law, which he sees as the best guarantee of liberty. He believes that capital punishment is a key element of a strong justice system.

He warns that the decline of conscience and morality will inevitably lead to a strong state. He is especially critical of the use of "security" as a pretext for diluting and eroding individual liberty. He argues that increased "security" destroys freedom without necessarily increasing safety, and says that there is no contradiction between maintaining liberty and protecting the realm.

Hitchens is critical of moves towards authoritarian government and the erosion of civil liberties, whether they come from the Right or the Left of the political spectrum. Accordingly, he has been highly critical of the British government's desire for identity cards, its attempts to abolish jury trial, to centralise the police, and its creation of a national law enforcement body in the form of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA). He describes these developments as facets of governmental desire for permanent, irreversible constitutional revolution, and an attack on English liberty in general.

Hitchens is opposed to the relaxation of laws against the possession of illegal recreational drugs. He argues that the law's active disapproval of drug taking is an essential counterweight to the "pro-drug propaganda" of popular culture. He has said that attempts to combat drug use by restricting supply and persecuting drug dealers are invariably futile, unless possession and use are punished as well. He counters claims that the "War on Drugs" has failed by suggesting that the state has made no serious efforts to reduce or eliminate illegal drug consumption for many years. Hitchens has said that the prevailing approach, known as "Harm reduction", is defeatist and counter-productive. He was among the earliest commentators to argue that cannabis presents a major mental health risk to users.

Foreign policy

Hitchens opposed the Kosovo and 2003 Iraq Wars on the grounds that neither was in the interests of either Britain or the United States. He has not, however, associated himself with the Left-dominated anti-war campaigns, not least as he remains a strong supporter of the State of Israel. He also opposes the British military presence in Afghanistan, arguing that it is destined to fail and has no achievable aim. Hitchens made a live appearance on BBC News in November 2009 during which he stated, in a response to Gordon Brown's announcement that more troops would be sent to Afghanistan, that a ridiculous position had been reached in which none of the front bench politicians of any of the three main British parties were prepared to say that the British mission to the country had failed.

On Europe, Hitchens argues that the United Kingdom should negotiate an amicable departure from the European Union, whose laws and traditions he regards as incompatible with the laws and liberties of England, and with the national independence of the United Kingdom as a whole. He also believes that the interests of the European Union are often different from...and in many cases hostile to...those of the UK. Devolution of governmental powers to Scotland and Wales in 1998 was, for Hitchens, not a step towards true independence for those countries, but rather part of an EU-inspired strategy to dissolve the UK into statelets and regions, as a preliminary step to its complete absorption into a European superstate. For the same reason, he has opposed attempts to divide England into regions.

World War II

For most of his career, Hitchens took the view that World War II was "the part of British history which provides the ultimate justification and vindication of this country's existence, its heroic and solitary battle against Nazi tyranny". However, in 2008 he publicly reversed this view, referring in particular to the declaration of war made against Nazi Germany (after the invasion of Poland) which had, in his opinion, disastrous consequences for Britain. A subsequent analysis that Hitchens made of this issue in one of his columns was described by Michael White of The Guardian as being "as melancholy a cry of pain about the modern world as I have recently encountered".Hitchens has also written critically about the Allied policy of strategic bombing of German cities during the second world war, citing in particular the A.C. Grayling book Among the Dead Cities, which in Hitchens's view makes "the case against the bombing of German civilians unanswerable".

Northern Ireland

Hitchens condemned the 1998 Belfast Agreement as a surrender to the Provisional IRA and a violation of the rule of law. He believes that the best approach to solving Northern Ireland's problems would have been the full integration of Northern Ireland into the United Kingdom, arguing that creating a Northern Irish Parliament at Stormont impeded this. He believes that the achievements of direct rule over Northern Ireland, not least in removing discrimination against Roman Catholics, have been greatly underestimated. He maintains that Northern Ireland is now only a provisional part of the UK since, under the terms of the agreement, it can be transferred to Irish sovereignty by a single, irreversible referendum.

Education

Hitchens condemns comprehensive education, the Plowden reforms of primary schooling and modern child-centred teaching methods, seeing them as egalitarian political projects with no educational justification and many educational disadvantages. He bases his case on John Marks's The Betrayed Generation, (Centre for Policy Studies 2001), the Engineering Council's survey of changing undergraduate maths skills in 2000, and Durham University's unvarying annual general ability test, and has also cited a 2004 article by Jenni Russell in The Guardian which draws attention to this issue. Hitchens has also contended that comprehensive education has brought about a general dilution of education and of examination standards, and explores in detail the history and consequences of this development in Chapter Eleven of The Broken Compass...'The Fall of the Meritocracy'. He believes a further consequence of egalitarian schooling is serious damage to the national culture, and fears that lowered standards in technical, scientific and mathematical education, combined with poor teaching of English and the resulting decline in literacy, threaten to leave Britain lagging behind emerging economic powers such as China and India.

As a means of improving standards in the UK, Hitchens supports a return to the academically selective grammar school system which has been gradually dismantled by successive British governments since the issuing of Circular 10/65 by Anthony Crosland in 1965 (though Hitchens prefers the German system of selection to the Eleven Plus examination).

As a supporter of orthodox Christian morality, Hitchens opposes sex education in schools. He argues that the general introduction of sex education in schools has incontrovertibly been accompanied by an increase in sexual activity among the young, with a resultant rise in pregnancies, abortions and instances of sexually transmitted diseases...the very things that sex education is ostensibly intended to prevent. He argues that its real purpose is the undermining of Christian sexual morality, based on stable monogamous marriage.

Labour party

Hitchens contends that the modern version of the Labour party was "formed mainly by struggles in the 1980s" and in a programme of "social liberalism, egalitarian education and the sexual revolution" envisaged at the end of the 1950s by figures such as Anthony Crosland and Roy Jenkins; the latter Hitchens has written critically of at considerable length, and has likened his 1959 pamphlet The Labour Case to "a revolutionary manifesto".

Hitchens is critical of New Labour for what he describes as "attacks on the constitution", and has described Prime Minister Tony Blair's constitutional reforms as a "slow-motion coup d'état". He has also asserted that the New Labour policy on immigration was a "slow motion putsch". Hitchens believes that the most profound changes brought about by New Labour were designed to concentrate power in the hands of the executive, to debauch civil service neutrality, and to turn Parliament into a mere tool of Downing Street, with Blair himself as Chief Executive. In Hitchens's view, the most significant single action in this programme was the passing of Orders in Council allowing Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell, both political appointees, to give orders to civil servants. This signalled, in his view, a general attempt to politicise Whitehall, which has continued ever since. Hitchens claims to have detected a parallel effort to appropriate some of the trappings of monarchy and to diminish the Crown's significance and standing, which he sees as embryonic presidentialism.

Hitchens has also often caricatured Blair as "Princess Tony". This is a reference to Blair's use of the expression "The People's Princess" to eulogise Princess Diana after her death. Hitchens has also been very critical of Blair's activity subsequent to his stepping down as Prime Minister. Hitchens has described Blair's successor, Gordon Brown, as a "boring, dismal Marxoid", whose public performances were "horribly like Humphrey Bogart's portrayal of the tormented Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny". However, Hitchens criticised what he saw as a "prejudiced, shallow" attempt to destroy Brown by the media after the latter became Prime Minister in 2007.

Conservative Party

Hitchens is dismissive of the modern British Conservative Party, frequently deriding the party's leadership as the "useless Tories". He has often been at odds with fellow conservatives, and has argued that the Conservative Party has a consistent record of ill-considered parliamentary acts and policies that cannot be dismissed as accidents or mistakes. He cites as examples: the reorganisation of local government in 1974, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984, the introduction of the GCSE exam, the Criminal Justice Act of 1991, the negotiation and signing of the Single European Act and the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, the severe reduction in defence spending at the end of the Cold War, the privatisation of the UK's railways, the Iraq War and the final abandonment of all attempts to re-introduce grammar schools.

He is also critical of what he considers to be a continuing idolatry of Margaret Thatcher among many Conservative Party supporters. Thatcher, in his view, weakened Britain's institutions and singularly failed to address moral or cultural questions.

Hitchens has expressed contempt for David Cameron, the current party leader, regarding him as a member of the "liberal elite" with little conception of the challenges facing modern Britain. He argues that the Conservatives have indiscriminately adopted the policies of their opponents over the last century out of an unprincipled desire for office at all costs, a process, he maintains, that has accelerated under Cameron's leadership.

In March 2007 Hitchens wrote and presented a television programme for Channel 4, Toff at the Top, in which he argued this view. Hitchens views Cameron's social, educational, and foreign policies as being indistinguishable from those of New Labour. Cameron, having declined previous interview requests from Hitchens, also declined to participate in the broadcast. Subsequent to the programme's airing the Conservative leader described Hitchens as "a maniac" at a public meeting in Oxfordshire.

Hitchens has called for the establishment of a new political party in the UK, representing the traditionalist conservative strand of opinion that he espouses, and which would, in his own words, be "neither bigoted nor politically correct". He believes that such a movement cannot come into being until the Conservative Party collapses, arguing that many millions of Britons habitually vote for this and other political parties out of tribal loyalty, from which they cannot be detached by reasoned argument.

Poverty and wealth distribution

Hitchens believes there to be a correlation between adherence to strong ethical standards, including conscientious labour, deferred gratification, self-denial and thrift, and middle class status (and the material well-being it generally brings). He has stated that "The middle classes are not good because they are better off. They are better off because they are good." He rejects the belief that any poverty which exists in Britain is anything other than relative. "The British 'poor' of today do not starve, do not freeze, do not go without medical treatment...as truly poor people across the world undoubtedly still do." He argues that the claim that absolute poverty continues to exist in Britain is "a lie the Left uses to destroy the middle class".

Transport

Hitchens has criticised the Privatisation of British Rail in the 1990s, and mocks Conservatives for their belief that road transport, heavily state subsidised, is in some way more conservative than railways. He has also bemoaned the large-scale reductions made to Britain's rail infrastructure in the 1960s, and the subsequent increased focus on the motor car as the central plank of transport policy. Hitchens explores this issue in depth in 'The age of the train', chapter twelve of his book The Broken Compass.

Global warming

Hitchens is sceptical of the alleged extent of man made global warming, has described the fuss surrounding it as "alarmist" and the facts presented as false or misleading or using data selectively. In particular, he praises the Christopher Booker work The Real Global Warming Disaster as being an effective exposé of many of what he sees as myths surrounding the theory.

Hitchens's elder brother is the prominent US-based writer and polemicist Christopher Hitchens. Christopher has said that the main difference between the two is a belief in God. Peter himself has said "we inhabit separate worlds" and "We're not close. We're different people, we have different lives, we have entirely different pleasures, we live in different continents. If we weren't brothers we wouldn't know each other."

The brothers had a protracted falling out after Peter wrote an article in 2001 in The Spectator alleging that his brother had said he "didn't care if the Red Army watered its horses at Hendon"...a claim denied by Christopher. After the birth of Peter's third child, the two brothers reconciled, although Christopher said "There is no longer any official froideur, but there's no official...what's the word?...chaleur, either."

Peter's review of God Is Not Great led to public argument between the brothers but not to any renewed estrangement. In the review, Peter wrote that his brother’s book was misguided, "mostly in the way that it blames faith for so many bad things and gives it no credit for any of the good it may have done. I think it misunderstands religious people and their aims and desires. And I think it asserts a number of things as true and obvious that are nothing of the sort".

In June 2007, the brothers appeared as panellists on BBC TV's Question Time, where they clashed over a number of issues, most notably the intervention in Afghanistan.In April 2008, on US soil, they debated the invasion of Iraq and the existence of God, respectively. Peter Hitchens indicated that the occasion would mark the last time he would participate in such events with his brother, "because of the danger that they might turn into gladiatorial combat in which nothing would be resolved and enmity could be created."

However, in October 2010 at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the brothers again had a debate - described as a conversation with the press - over the nature of God in civilization. During the debate, the two clashed over the main issues, with Peter lamenting the decline in civility to levels "not far the Stone Age." However, when the subject of Christopher's illness in concert with religion was brought up, Peter defended his brother's choice of beliefs, stating that he thought "it would be quite grotesque to imagine someone would have to get cancer to see the merits of religion. It’s just an absurd idea. I don’t know why anyone imagines it should be certain."

Hitchens is the author of The Abolition of Britain (1999, ISBN 978-0-7043-8140-7) and A Brief History of Crime (2003, ISBN 978-1-84354-148-6), both critical of changes in British society since the 1960s. A compendium of his Daily Express columns was published under the title Monday Morning Blues in 2000.

An updated edition of A Brief History of Crime (2003 ISBN 978-1-84354-148-6), re-titled The Abolition of Liberty: The Decline of Order and Justice in England (ISBN 978-1-84354-149-3) and featuring a new chapter on identity cards, was published in April 2004. How British Politics Lost its Way (Continuum ISBN 978-1-84706-405-9), was published in May 2009, and The Rage Against God (Continuum ISBN 978-1-4411-0572-1), was published in Britain in March 2010, and was due to be published in the US (Zondervan ISBN 978-0-310-32031-9) in May 2010.