Peter Hitchens, born in 1951, is an English author, broadcaster and journalist who writes for The Mail on Sunday and served as a foreign correspondent in both Moscow and Washington. His trajectory is part of the story: once a Marxist-Trotskyist and Labour supporter, he turned conservative during the 1990s, joined the Conservative Party in 1997, left it in 2003, and has attacked it ever since as the foremost obstacle to true conservatism in Britain.
His books amount to a sustained critique of what he sees as the erosion of British institutions and values. The Abolition of Britain took aim at the social and constitutional revolution under New Labour; The Rage Against God traced his own road from Marxist atheism to faith; The War We Never Fought disputed the notion that Britain ever really waged a war on drugs; and The Phoney Victory challenged national myths about the Second World War’s legacy. He describes himself as a Burkean conservative – and, more surprisingly, a social democrat and an Anglo-Gaullist – arguing for a strong nation state, local institutions and a social order grounded in Christian morality, duty and self-restraint.
4 hours and 7 minutes
