"How they wish I did not exist," says Peter Hitchens. 70 on 28th October, and having had his Mail on Sunday column for an astonishing 21 years, has he been given cause to see the writing on the wall? And if so, then who could replace him on the page that had once hosted George Gale, Alan Clark and Norman Tebbit?
Hitchens is wrong about a very great deal, but his successor would not be someone who held his view on energy, or on transport, or on housing, or on wars, or on civil liberties, or on global capitalism in general, or on the extension of its principles to drugs in particular.
Hitchens is able to smuggle those in because no one from the political position where they were prevalent and even definitive would ever be given a platform. But instead of anyone like that, the gig would go to a common or garden Rightist of the next generation down. As if there were any great shortage of those in the commentariat. The loss of Peter Hitchens would be a loss, indeed.
It would be like losing this blog.
ReplyDeleteYou really are far too kind. I have no expectation of the Orwell Prize.
Delete