Christopher hitchens

It hasn’t taken 20 years to work out that Christopher Hitchens was a dud, but this week’s collapse of Kabul obliges us to reexamine the Hitchens back catalog — because Hitchens had an outsized influence on debates about the supersised errors of post-9/11 foreign policy. The briefest of looks exposes the deficits of the neoconservative mind. An even clearer picture emerges of the hubris that led American policymakers, and the West in general, to justify the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as the spread of liberal enlightenment, rather than subjecting them to the tests of Realpolitik. Never trust a man whose favorite sport is politics.

The Spectator readers’ party was as always a swell affair, with long-time subscribers politely mingling with ne’er-do-wells like myself, the former having cakes and drinking tea, the latter desperately raiding the sainted editor’s office for Lagavulin whisky. But for once I was on my best behaviour, first out of respect for our readers, secondly because of the man I had personally invited to the party, Hannes Wessels, a Rhodesian-born 14th-generation African, whose book A Handful of Hard Men has me shaking with fury at our double standards where whites are concerned, and at the gauzy mythology of PC that has painted white Rhodesians as oppressors.

It reflects rather well on Richard Dawkins that he still hasn’t joined his followers – the religious connotations of the word are intentional – in objecting to the Church of England tweet on Friday about praying for his recovery from a stroke. https://twitter.com/c_of_e/status/698249409663000577 Presumably the CofE did so on the basis of Christ’s exhortation to 'Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you', as well as genuine affection for the old boy. But of course the kindly post got the inevitable response from more than 1,000 outraged Dawkinsites: 'Sarcastic or ignorant?' one asked.

Have we ever needed Christianity more than we do today? It’s a rhetorical question, for sure, because the loss of our faith and the inability to confront Islam have never been greater. When I was a little boy during the war, my mother assured me that if I believed in Jesus everything would be OK. This was during the Allied bombing on Tatoi, the military airfield near our country house where the Germans concentrated their anti-aircraft guns. My Fräulein, the Prussian lady who brought me up, was more practical. She handed me a beautiful carved knife that made me feel safer than my prayers ever did. Today, of course, 74 years later, my prayers are far more likely to give me peace of mind than a knife in my pocket. That’s the difference between being five and 79 years of age.

Have we ever needed Christianity more than we do today? It’s a rhetorical question, for sure, because the loss of our faith and the inability to confront Islam have never been greater. When I was a little boy during the war, my mother assured me that if I believed in Jesus everything would be OK. This was during the Allied bombing on Tatoi, the military airfield near our country house where the Germans concentrated their anti-aircraft guns. My Fräulein, the Prussian lady who brought me up, was more practical. She handed me a beautiful carved knife that made me feel safer than my prayers ever did. Today, of course, 74 years later, my prayers are far more likely to give me peace of mind than a knife in my pocket. That’s the difference between being five and 79 years of age.

After Christopher Hitchens died in December 2011, Douglas Murray wrote in the Spectator that he’d had 'a talent for making us, his readers, want to be better people. He used his abilities not to close down questions and ideas, but to open them up. In the process he made you, the reader, aware that you needed to do more, engage more, think more and know more. Writers often feel a need to impress their readers. Christopher made his readers want to impress the writer.' To nearly everything he wrote, Hitchens brought curiosity, indignation and analytical rigour and a vast frame of reference. It’s been a great pleasure looking through the recently digitised Spectator archive for Hitchens highlights.

There is some shock in Fleet Street tonight, following news that Pippa Middleton is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. The magazine was the last of the late Christopher Hitchens’ haunts; that’s a very long way for a bottom to have wiggled in such a short space of time. On hearing the news, a friend of mine put down his glass and remarked, ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, forgive Graydon Carter his foolish ways.’ Then he turned a reddened eye to your humble correspondent and declared, not without a clear note of resentment, ‘You’re responsible for this!’ He was referring, I believe, to Pippa Middleton’s two outings in these pages. You can read Pippa in Waitrose’s in-house mag.