The Hitch encounters a hitch

The New Statesman, which is enjoying a bit of a revival under a new editorial team led by Tom McTague (The Atlantic, UnHerd) and Will Lloyd (UnHerd, Sunday Times), last week announced the launch of a new gossip column.

I imagine it’s designed to compete with The Spectator’s popular Steerpike column, and they’re calling it The Hitch ‘to honour one of our greatest contributors by keeping his spirit alive’. Yes, they mean Christopher Hitchens who wrote for the New Statesman in the Seventies before emigrating in 1981 to America where he worked for The Nation and, later, Vanity Fair. 

However, the decision to appropriate his name for a gossip column didn’t go down well with everyone. Robert Colville, director of the Centre for Policy Studies, denounced it as ‘tacky’, and others agreed, pointing out that while Hitchens may have enjoyed gossip and parties, he never wrote a gossip column.

Deputy editor Will Lloyd defended the decision, saying it had the backing of ‘the family’, although this claim was undermined slightly when Peter Hitchens, the Mail on Sunday columnist and Christopher’s brother, denied he had been consulted. (It was subsequently explained that the magazine had spoken to Christopher’s wife and children and they had approved the idea.)

Peter, however, had another concern. His brother died in 2011, aged 62, from oesophageal cancer – which Christopher partly attributed to his heavy smoking and drinking – and the new gossip column features an illustration of Christopher smoking a cigarette. Peter is fiercely anti-smoking, no doubt as a result of his brother’s premature death, and he objected, describing it as ‘not necessary and a bit of a shame’.

According to the Telegraph, Will Lloyd and Peter Hitchens have since had a ‘cordial’ discussion, and ‘Mr Hitchens did not demand any changes from the New Statesman’. However, ‘The magazine is now expected to hold an internal discussion about whether to remove the cigarette from the cartoon of Hitchens’.

Personally, while I respect Peter Hitchens’ opinion on the matter, I would have thought the views of his brother’s wife and children should take precedence and, if they approved it, surely the matter should end there? Watch this space.

Funnily enough, and I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, Christopher Hitchens once described me, in an article for Vanity Fair, as ‘a rather dingy figure from the farther shores of what was once called Thatcherism’. It predates me working for Forest, and it’s not the epitaph I would choose for myself, but any association with Mrs T, however tenuous, is fine by me. I would however dispute his description of me as ‘dingy’! And what are the ‘farther shores of Thatcherism’?

Nevertheless, prompted by this week’s storm in a teacup, I have just purchased the 2021 edition of Hitch-22: A Memoir, which was first published in May 2010. Interestingly, and as far as I can tell, the 2010 edition featured, on the cover, the author smoking a cigarette. Another edition featured him, still looking ruggedly handsome but without a cigarette. In contrast the 2021 edition has removed any image of the author, and features instead the nib of a fountain pen on a plain yellow background. Boring!

PS. Although Peter Hitchens is anti-smoking, he’s open to debate on this and other subjects, which I greatly respect. Many years ago he spoke at two events organised by Forest, including a fringe event at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester. That was in 2008, I think, and he subsequently took part in a second discussion, this time in London.

More recently, however, he has declined invitations to speak at party conferences on the grounds that ‘for some years now I have not attended the party conferences, and it has made me much happier’. Can’t say fairer than that!