Christopher Hitchens saw through Vladimir Putin from the start

Here's The Hitch answering a question at the University of Western Ontario on 8 March 2005.

Unlike many commentators, he saw Putin for what he was right from the start.

Salman Rushdie claims 'handsy' Margaret Thatcher 'groped' him in private meeting

Embed from Getty Images

The judges are unanimous: the Mirror wins Headline of the Day.

Incidentally, Maggie has previous. Here's the late Christopher Hitchens:

It happened in the course of an exchange of views about Rhodesia in the late fall of 1977, when she was still leader of the opposition and was pandering to the racists in her party and the electorate. 

Influenced perhaps by the fact that we were meeting in the Rosebery Room of the House of Lords, I made the mistake of bowing as if to acknowledge some point of hers, and she took swift advantage of my posture by shrieking, "Bow lower!" and plying the document above mentioned. 

Like the British electorate, now shaking itself after more than a decade of Thatcherite pouvoir, I often look back wistfully upon that spanking in the hope of decoding its significance.

Christopher Hitchens warns about Vladimir Putin in 2005

Excerpts from a speech given at the University of Western Ontario on 8 March 2005.

Christopher Hitchens and JFK

Oliver Stone's film JFK was released at the end of 1991 and gave rise to this overmanned Late Show panel.

Christopher Hitchens and Pierre Salinger (who appears to be in the process of turning into Bernard Ingham) are no longer with us, but Anthony Summers and D.M. Thomas still are.

But the 1990s (my favourite decade) are a long way away and it is a surprise to find that the latter published a novel as recently as 2014.

A couple of thoughts on this clip.

The first is that talking heads make great television as long as their owners are interesting enough.

The second is that I believe Lee Harvey Oswald was the only gunman in Dealey Plaza that day, but if he was put up to it by anyone it was surely the KGB. He had, after all, gone to live in the Soviet Unon and then come back to the USA.

Anyway, the best book I know on Kennedy's assassination (which is probably my first memory) is A Cruel and Shocking Act by Philip Shenon.

Summers' discovery that no one had talked to many of the witnesses in 1963 chimes with the theme of that book.

Meanwhile, Sarah Dunant is going strong as a historical novelist.

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Nick Barlow is right to wince at calls to "take the politics out of" things.

"It’s 'mystifying' that Britain is persisting with the deal for Hinkley Point, Michael Liebreich, founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance said ... 'It seems to me that when you’re in a money hole, you should stop digging'." Alex Morales and Rachel Morison on the financing of the power station.

Chris Hanretty explains why Daniel Hannan and Owen Jones are both wrong about Portugal.

Matthew Lynn asks how long W. H. Smith, once a much-respected newsagent and bookseller, can keep squeezing profits out of falling sales and disgruntled customers.

She told the family of a severely disabled man that she could help him to communicate with the outside world, but the relationship that followed would lead to a criminal trial. Daniel Engber tells an extraordinary true story.

"As Christopher Hitchens noted ... Vidal was as close a figure to Oscar Wilde as America has ever had. He spoke in perfect epigrams, devoting his versatile intellect to matters high and low, and he lived his life in defiance of bourgeois sexual norms." Jennifer Senior reviews a life of Gore Vidal.

Lenny Harper on how Jersey is governed

Christopher Hitchens once described Ian Smith's Rhodesia as "Surrey with the lunatic fringe on top". You could say much the same about Jersey - a tax haven where people can be imprisoned for whistleblowing.

And if you don't believe me, listen to Lenny Harper. He is not a tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorist but a hard-bitten cop who served in Belfast, South London and Glasgow before he tangled with the Jersey authorities.

The Coalition, in the shape of Tom McNally, has had the chance to do something about Jersey but has declined to take it.

This video came to me via The People's Voice and Voice for Children.

Russell Brand to edit the New Statesman

You may have seen the embarrassing interview with Brand on yesterday's Newsnight.

The New Statesman's decision to ask him to guest edit an issue reminds me of this column I wrote for its website in the magazine's glory years:

I liked the Statesman in the 1970s. Under Anthony Howard’s editorship, the back half was written by the hip young gunslingers of the day: Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens and Julian Barnes. Those in the know called them “The Hitch”. “Mart” and “Julian Barnes”. 

Further forward it was all politics. They even printed the leading article on the front cover, which made the magazine appear wonderfully serious. 

Today, after 30 years of educational advance, the Statesman has to put a colour picture on the front or it wouldn‘t sell at all. 

And if you open it today you find that every comedian in the country has a column. And Julian Clary has a big one. 

It wasn’t like that in the seventies. The contents page didn‘t read: 

Freddie "Parrot-Face" Davies on the future of the Common Market; Dickie Henderson on the Palestine Question 

And coming next week: 

Mike and Bernie Winters debate the Bullock Report on Industrial Democracy.

Just because you murder someone, it doesn't mean your views are worth hearing

The front page of today's Guardian is the worst I have ever seen on any newspaper. Why the Guardian wants to turn itself into a propaganda sheet for a murderer, I cannot imagine.

When you are over the anger, two possible explanations suggest themselves.

One is that this is an example of the sort of self-hatred that Western liberals can fall prey to and that Christopher Hitchens used to complain about. Hurt us because we deserve it, the paper thinks its readers will say.

The other is that we tend to assume that their must be something remarkable about someone who commits such a grotesque crime and that his view must therefore be listening to.

That is a fallacy, as Munira Mirza showed when writing of the videos the 'martyrdom videos' the 7/7 bombers left behind them:

What we see in these videos are not soldiers in a war, but self-righteous young men who believe that their own moral certainty absolves them of the need to explain themselves properly. 

Nobody elected Khan or Tanweer. As far as we know, they did not have relations with anyone in Palestine, Bosnia or Chechnya. Indeed, these two men did not even bother to ask their family, friends or neighbours what they thought. 

At the local mosque near where three of the bombers grew up, one of the committee members, Muhboob Hussein, reacted with anger to 7/7: ‘This is not Islam, this is not jihad, these people are not Muslim. This man [Khan] never came to our mosque....’ 

Obviously, Khan or Tanweer did not show much interest in trying to win people over to their worldview - they thought that ‘democratically elected governments’ had less claim to act on behalf of people than they did.

And we saw just the same contempt for democratic government from the idiot presented on the front page of today's Guardian.

When I blogged about Mirza's article at the time, someone left a comment reminding me of a prophetic piece by Ian Buruma that began:

Does masturbation lead to suicide bombing? One would think not. There is no more direct link to suicide bombing than there is to blindness or schizophrenia. But there may be a connection between sexual inadequacy or frustration and the pull towards violent extremism.

Almost as depressing as the Guardian front page was the discussion of the Woolwich murder on Newsnight yesterday evening. One participant, the impressive Maajid Nawaz, spoke of the need for a Western narrative to challenge the world-view of Islamism. But you only had to look at the people with him to see there was little chance we would hear it last night.

There was John Reid who, as a Communist while the Soviet Union was the greatest tyranny on this planet, never bought into the Western narrative in the first place and is now employed by the security industry - though Newsnight never reminds of us during his frequent appearances. And there was Alex Carlile, a Liberal Democrat who long ago threw in his lot with the most repressive elements of Labourism.

And, sure enough, both Reid and Carlile told us that the most important thing is that we give the state more power to inspect the affairs of law-abiding citizens and weaken the safeguards for those it accuses of crime.

If that is the first reaction of those we are supposed to regard as statesmen, then you can see how weak the West's belief in its own values has become.

Karl Popper on the importance of argument

From Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens:

I pass to an observation of the late Sir Karl Popper, who could himself be a tyrant in argument but who nonetheless recognised that argument was valuable, indeed essential, for its own sake. It is very seldom, as he noticed, that in debate any one of two evenly matched antagonists will succeed in actually convincing or "converting" the other. 

But it is equally seldom that in a properly conducted argument either antagonist will end upholding exactly the same position as that with which he began. Concessions, refinements and adjustments will occur, and each initial position will have undergone modification even if it remains ostensibly the 'same'.

Headline of the Day

The Shropshire Star wins for its:

Telford tyre-burst driver in pothole cash wait

This headline makes good use of the Unit Headline Language identified by Michael Frayn in his novel The Tin Men. (it is worth reading the late Christopher Hitchens on this too.)

The judges also liked the same newspaper's

Call to turn Wem signal box into tearoom

for its evocation of Shropshire life.

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North Korea is a nation of racist dwarfs, the late Christopher Hitchens explains in an article published by Slate last year.

"If Europe lets the Euro fail it won’t stop there and just because we are outside the Euro, (it) doesn’t mean we won’t suffer the full impact of (the) unintended consequences." The Rambles of Neil Monnery shares the wisdom of a passing banker.

UK Polling Report explains why the Lib Dems always do best in ICM polls and worst in YouGov ones.

"I wonder if he now needs to move outside his sitcom comfort zone of deliberately un-PC fake fly-on-the-wall documentaries as he essentially now just repeating himself for rapidly diminishing returns." Mark Thompson's Blog is not impressed by Ricky Gervais's latest series Life's Too Short.

"John Piper's topographical paintings and prints offer an unparallelled record of mid twentieth-century Britain," says Adventures in the Print Trade.

Creative Review looks forward to the Painting by Numbers exhibition that opens at the London Transport Museum next month: "Painting by Numbers - Making Sense of Statistics will feature 20 London Underground posters, many dating back to the 1930s or earlier. The posters were designed not only to promote the benefits of travelling by London Transport but also in order to wow the travelling public with details of the remarkable service they were (hopefully) enjoying every day."

Christopher Hitchens: Simon Hoggart gets it wrong

Simon Hoggart devotes the greater part of his column in today's Guardian to an assassination of Christopher Hitchens' character.

Well, it's a free country and in a way his choice is appropriate. As Hoggart points out, no one was keener on attacking other people's idols than Hitchens.

And, with a characteristic prissy expletive, Hoggart does allow Hitchens one virtue:

But he could write. Heavens, he could write.

And that is where the problems start. Because Hoggart goes on to observe:

I can claim some tiny credit; in one of his later Vanity Fair columns, written under the death sentence, he generously said that I had told him to write as he spoke, and that had liberated his style. 

I don't recall the incident, but it's what I said to anyone who asked, so I'm sure it's true.

In other words, we owe the volume and brilliance of Hitchens' writing to Hoggart's wisdom. However, Hoggart is much too important to remember having shared it with him.

Hitch-22: A memoir by Christopher Hitchens

My review from today's Liberal Democrat News.

Hitch-22: A memoir
Christopher Hitchens
Atlantic Books, 2011, £9.99

This is the story of a journey. Christopher Hitchens began his working life on the fringes of London left-wing journalism and became a New York intellectual who toured American television studios to support the Iraq war.

You can make a case that this was not a simple shift to the right: traditionally, it has been British Conservatives who have been sceptical of foreign entaglements when no direct national interests are involved and the left that has been more likely to urge internvetion. And Hitchens’ willingness to criticise sacred cows from Mother Teresa to Bill Clinton is thoroughly healthy and was a necessary part of making his way as a contrarian. But his support for George W. Bush and Paul Wolfowitz does feels like conformity to the opinions of his new hosts.

Indeed, the book as whole has a very American feel. It’s not just the spelling, which is an irritant to the British reader which could surely have been corrected: the readers he has in mind are American too, judging by the references he does and does not explain.

New York is an intoxicating city, but in some ways it is surprising that Hitchens has landed there. While his friend Martin Amis’s literary heroes were always American to begin with, Hitchens is a far more consciously English, even if his great hero P.G. Wodehouse did end his days on Long Island.

Hitch-22 came out last year, but a reading of the paperback edition takes place in the shadow of a discovery that he made after writing it. In the words of Hitchens’ new preface: “I suffer from Stage Four esophageal cancer. There is no Stage Five.”

In many ways the early chapters of this book are the most interesting; certainly they are the best written. As well as being one of the last men of letters able to describe the experience of being subjected to the miseries of a traditional prep school education, Hitchens paints sympathetic portraits of his parents. His father was a disappointed former Naval officer who embraced a rather cheerless variety of Conservatism. His mother, the beautiful and brilliant Yvonne, committed suicide in a pact with her new lover in an Athens hotel room when Hitchens was in his early twenties. By contrast, his brother, the journalist Peter Hitchens, barely features at all.

Hitchens’ days at university were torn between a desire to be a social and sexual success and a burgeoning career as a Trotskyite agitator. Ironically for someone who was later to become a very public atheist, his induction into the International Socialists resembles nothing so much as a religious conversion.

Then it is on to Hitchens’ New Statesman days. These chapters are dominated by his accounts of the wit and wisdom of his Martin Amis and James Fenton and, from an older generation, Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest. Some of the stories are good, but there is no surer way of killing an anecdote than introducing it with “I heard a really funny story the other day...” and that is the cumulative effect of Hitchens’ lavish praise for his friends here.

The British reader may find Hitchens’ account of his time in America, which dominates the second half of the book less interesting. While his concern from human rights in Iraq goes back a long way – much longer than it does with most his later allies on the American right – some of the writing is mawkish. And his claim that he knows that weapons of mass destruction were discovered there is not credible.

In all honesty, much of Hitch-22 does not show him at his best. For that you have to turn to his journalism – witty, angry and wonderfully well read. But I did like the story here about the mother who bought Hitchens’ book Letters to a Young Contrarian for her son in the hope that he would become a contrarian himself. He refused to do so.http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hitch-22-Memoir-Christopher-Hitchens/dp/1843549212

Shakespeare's seven ages of man as a limerick

The Daily (Maybe) offers a selection of literary classics condensed into limericks.

But he does not include my favourite: Robert Conquest's reworking of Shakespeare's seven ages of man from As You Like It:

First you get puking and mewling,
Then very pissed off with your schooling,
Then fucks and then fights,
Then judging chaps' rights,
Then sitting in slippers, then drooling.

Thanks to Christopher Hitchens.

Conor Cruise O'Brien and Edmund Burke

The newspapers have all carried respectful obituaries Conor Cruise O'Brien - the Daily Telegraph is a good example. The Guardian website, characteristically, has a piece attacking him for not sharing that paper's views. It is written by Roy Greenslade.

My own debt to O'Brien is for Edmund Burke - an abridged version of his book The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke.

Burke is often claimed by English Conservatives as their intellectual ancestor, but that suggests they do not know much about him. As Christopher Hitchens has said:

Edmund Burke was neither an Englishman nor a Tory. He was an Irishman, probably a Catholic Irishman at that (even if perhaps a secret sympathizer), and for the greater part of his life he upheld the more liberal principles of the Whig faction.
He was an advanced opponent of the slave trade, whose "Sketch of a Negro Code" was written in the early 1780s, and who before that had opposed the seating of American slaveholders at Westminster. His epic parliamentary campaign for the impeachment of Warren Hastings and the arraignment of the East India Company was the finest example in its day of a battle against pelf and perks and privilege.

More than that, Burke supported the American revolutionaries and was for many years the great political ally and intellectual support of the Whig leader Charles James Fox. They fell out after the French Revolution, which Burke condemned while Fox insouciantly looked forward to its spreading to Britain. That falling out took place, very publicly, during a Commons debate, and O'Brien description of the exchanges is memorable.

Burke's defection from the Whig campaign has generally been seen as apostasy, but O'Brien argues that Burke was consistent because of his Catholicism (or at least his Catholic sympathies). He sided with the Whigs because of their support for religious toleration, but joined the Tories because of the Jacobins anti-clericism.

Whatever the truth of this, one important fact stands out. Burke was right and Fox was wrong.

I had always assumed that Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France was written as a response to French Revolutionary terror. In fact it was published in 1790, before the blood began to flow and when much English Whig opinion, like Fox, were broadly sympathetic to the Revolutionaries and their aims.

Burke's foresight - his realisation that terror would come in the wake of revolution - reminds me of the way that anarchist thinkers like Bakunin realised the dictatorship inherent in Marx's call for proletarian revolution.

British Liberals probably feel an instinctive sympathy for the French Revolution, but we should not forget that Karl Popper and Isiah Berlin, perhaps the greatest Liberal philosophers of the 20th century, were both profoundly anti-revolutionary thinkers.

Anyway, read O'Brien and read Burke. Hitchens quotes the unimpeachably radical William Hazlitt as saying:

It has always been with me a test of the sense and candour of any one belonging to the opposite party, whether he allowed Burke to be a great man.

Later. And read Lib Dem blogger Iain Sharpe too. He takes a similar line on reclaiming Burke from the Tories.

Welcome back Craig Murray

Craig Murray's blog has been down for a couple of days. We were worried that he had been spirited away to Guantanamo Bay.

But it seems not, as he is back with a characteristically thoughtful posting:

The most important rift in British politics today is not between left and right, it is between authoritarians and libertarians, between those who support human and civil rights, and those who prefer "Strong government". This fault line coincides closely with those who support, and those who oppose, the Iraq war, largely because both issues depend on the prior question "Is might always right?".

I therefore have much more in common with the Mail and Mr Wheeler, with Ken Clarke, Malcolm Rifkind, Peter Hitchens and Michael Ancram than I do with John Reid, Gordon Brown, or Michael White. This question of liberty is a prior question - without liberty, you're not allowed to disagree over economics. That is what poor, deluded Polly Toynbee has failed to grasp in her view that we should support Blair, no matter how many countries he invades or people he kills, because of his allegedly good child poverty policies.

Our parties are still structured around an economic fault, so now that authoritarianism has become the more crucial dividing line, they are all split. New Labour less so, because it has become a career vehicle of those attracted simply to personal power and wealth. It is fascinating how the old hard left of different varieties of communist - John Reid, Christopher Hitchens, David Aaronovitch, Melanie Phillips and their like - have taken so avidly to the new order. Of course, they never believed in liberty anyway. The Tories are - as Wheeler notes in his article - perhaps the most split. Every instinct of Ming Campbell is with the authoritarians; strangely that is true of most Lib Dem MPs, but few of their activists.

I think he grossly overstates his case when it comes to Ming and the Liberal Democrats, but his central point is surely correct.

Incidentally, Bloggerheads is back too.

The other end of the ice pick

Today's House Points from Liberal Democrat News, which somehow turned out less critical of Gorgeous George than it was intended to be.

The text message should certainly have read "PETE 2 WIN". And in a show of editorial caution the words "drink-sodden" were omitted before "former Trotskyist popinjay" in the published version.

I say: so sue me, Hitch.

Cat o'nine tales

George Galloway was back in the House on Monday. Not the house – you did not see ‘DENNIS IS FIT – PETE TO WIN’ scrolling across the screen – but the House. He had an adjournment debate on press regulation.

The Respect member for Bethnal Green and Bow has a long history of involvement with newspapers. He wrote a lucrative column for many years and he has netted around two million pounds in libel cases. (Which means I shan’t be repeating that story about him. Or that story. And certainly not that story.)

On Monday he was not calling for new controls so much as rehearsing his grievances against the press. And whatever you think of Galloway, he does have cause to feel aggrieved. It is probably no coincidence that such a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq found himself traduced on both sides of the Atlantic.

His most recent adventure is a run in with the News of the World. Galloway unmasked Mazher Mahmood the ‘fake sheik’ after what sounds like a crude attempt to set him up.

Perhaps the issues are more balanced than first appears – Mahmood has fingered many villains in his time and has reason to defend his anonymity – but it was still funny seeing the News of the Screws going to court to plead for people’s right privacy.

The only sane verdict on all this is Tom Stoppard’s: “I'm with you on the free press. It's the newspapers I can't stand.”

Where now for Galloway? His Respect party is not built to last. Its activists come from the Trots of the Socialist Workers Party, but Galloway himself is on the other end of the ice pick.

He once said “the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life,” and when he described Christopher Hitchens as a “drink-sodden former Trotskyist popinjay” he knew which word was meant to be most wounding.

Add to this a broad strand of Islamist identity politics – the party’s candidate for Mayor of Newham claimed Israel has been “formulating and directing UK and US foreign policy” – and you have a beast that makes a pantomime horse look graceful.

Made it. A whole column about Galloway without a single cheap crack about cats.