British journalist and author Peter Hitchens is famous for his bold & obstinate style (written or spoken) mainly on politics and social conservatism issues. He was born on 28 October, 1958 in Malta. His early education has been done at The Leys School followed by the Oxford College of Further Education. Then he went to University of York to study politics from 1970 to 1973.
Along with studying politics at York University, Peter Hitchens had been a very active member of Trotskyist International Socialists (1969-1975). Once during the lectures at the university he came late and when asked for the reason he mentioned, “I was too busy starting a revolution”. Peter deliberately describes himself as a Burkean conservative. Pursuing his revolutionary and conservative ideas he started to work at extreme-left in left-wing politics. In 1977, Hitchens joined the British Labor Party and within the same year he acquired a reporting job at a British tabloid newspaper, The Daily Express. The beginning of his work comprised of education and industrial labor issues. Later in the year, he started reporting politics and subsequently became Deputy Political Editor. In 1983, he left the British Labor Party as he was directly encompassing parliamentary affairs. After a while he started reporting foreign diplomatic and defense issues including the US military intervention in Somalia, last final months of the Soviet Union and last few days of racial segregation in South Africa in the early 90s to name a few. He then became the Washington correspondent at The Daily Express.
After his return to London in 1995, Hitchens started to work as a columnist as well as a commentator. Then in 2000 he left the Daily Express when the possession of the newspaper went to Richard Desmond with whom he didn’t agree to work stating that it would have shown ethical disagreement of interests. Later, he joined a British conservative newspaper, The Mail on Sunday where he got weblog and a weekly column to write. He has also written for other magazines such as The Spectator, The American Conservative as well as left-leaning newspapers, The Guardian Prospect and The New Statesman. In the acknowledgment of these services in the line of journalism he has been awarded as Columnist of the Year, British Press Awards in 2005 and the Orwell Prize in 2010.
Hitchens has also been appearing in broadcast media occasionally. Espousing his social conservatism beliefs, he usually debates about diplomatic and political issues, modern education reforms and recreational drugs. He condemns and despised sex education because he felt that the number of teenage pregnancies has raised eventually leading to an increase in abortions and sexually transmitted diseases. He has devoted his recent book, ‘The War We Never Fought’ in the wake of recreational drugs issues.
Hitchens has written and published six books since 1999. His two books, The Abolition of Britain (1999) and A Brief History of Crime (2003) were comprised of British society’s changes since 1960. Another book is Monday Morning Blues (2000) which is a conspectus of his columns written for the Daily Express. Three other books are The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost its Way (2009), The Rage Against God (2010) and The War We Never Fought (2012).
Peter Hitchens is still working with The Mail on Sunday as a weekly columnist and writes as a foreign correspondent occasionally. Famous author Christopher Hitchens (Late) was his elder brother. Hitchens resides in Oxford with his wife Eve Ross and three children.
Buy Books by Peter Hitchens
