Obituary: Christopher Hitchens - Thought-provoking journalist, radical political activist, essayist and bon viveur

CHRISTOPHER Hitchens was an author and journalist whose writings courted controversy. In his career he wrote mostly for American literary magazines but was also associated with several American academic institutions. In America, he was seen on talk shows putting forward controversial and dogmatic views in a convincing and articulate manner. He was very much his own man and in 2005 was voted the world’s fifth top public intellectual.

His radical and often conflicting opinions angered many, but he had the ability to expose pomposity and unearth facts. He targeted such international names as Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa (“She was not a friend of the poor,” Hitchens wrote ruefully, “but a friend of poverty”) and Henry Kissinger. He attacked with his remorseless pen any demagogic regime and supported the Palestinian cause in the Middle East. Many of his causes were unfashionable and scorned by Americans, but his writing had the ring of a fierce originality, an eye for the facts and a cunning way with words. “Be brave, be yourself,” he once said on a US talk show. Hitchens was certainly that.

Christopher Eric Hitchens’ parents had met when they were serving with the Royal Navy at Rosyth during the Second World War. He attended the Leys School in Cambridge and then read philosophy, politics and economics at Balliol College, Oxford. While there, he was a member of the College’s team in ITV’s University Challenge. Throughout his youth Hitchens was firmly on the Left, against the Vietnam war and took issue with Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s “contemptible support for the war”. That was Hitchens’ first brush with authority and got him expelled from the Labour Party.

Hitchens’ political activities probably interfered with his studies (he got a third) and his first job was with Times Higher Educational Supplement from which he was sacked. In the early Seventies he moved to the New Statesman, where he built up a fierce reputation for his attacks on Henry Kissinger, Roman Catholicism and the political right in Greece and the UK.

In 1981 Hitchens moved to the US, where in a succession of cutting and savage articles he warned against the politics of Ronald Reagan and the US foreign policy in Latin America. America took to this raffish, outspoken and gleefully irreverent upper-class Englishman who was able to write and talk with such ease on political and literary subjects.

Hitchens rapidly created a reputation as a severe and uncompromising polemicist. Indeed, such was his colourful image that many have suggested he was the inspiration for Tom Wolfe’s character Peter Fallow in his 1987 novel The Bonfire of Vanities.

Hitchens could never be pigeon-holed. He wrote widely on international affairs and savaged both left and right-wing regimes. Significantly he wrote: “I have one consistency: I am against the totalitarianism of the left and of the right.” Hitchens was openly critical of both Mao and Castro and in 1983 wrote supporting Margaret Thatcher’s war against General Galtieri’s Argentina – thus causing a severe rift with former left-wing colleagues.

A defining moment in his political thinking came in 2001. After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington Hitchens announced he was no longer “on the left” – while denying he had become “any kind of conservative” – and “swore a sort of oath to remain coldly furious”.

His target became “fascism with an Islamic face” and he strove to expose the tyranny of Osama bin Laden. To much surprise Hitchens accepted an invitation from George W Bush to the White House and became a US citizen.

The onslaught of cancer may have dimmed him medically, but his faculties remained on sparkling form. In an interview with Jeremy Paxman Hitchens admitted to “a sense of betrayal to my family and friends. Death does not make me angry but objective. I am resisting – not battling – cancer.” He then added with an air of resignation: “The prospect of death makes me more sober.”

Hitchens was something of a bon viveur. On his own admission he described himself as “Mr Both Ways” which certainly referred to his political and social ambitions. Indeed, in his memoirs he claimed at Oxford that he had bedded two future (male) government ministers in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet.

Hitchens was a heavy smoker and drinker all his life and never apologised for his way of life. He was a vociferous defender of smoking and admitted to “knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light”.

Hitchens revelled in being contrary and provoking reactions from politicians. It is a shame that much of his journalism was done in America: his tenacious and positive mind would have brought much colour and life to the British political scene. It was his ability as a wordsmith (he described the dying embers of the Callaghan government in the Seventies as “Weimar without the sex”) that marked Hitchens out as a journalist of real calibre. He moved from outrage to sympathy through stark aggression with a deft ease. But readers knew his opinion and sitting on the fence was not the Hitchens style.

Friends remember him as a more relaxed man. “Hitch was wonderfully funny,” one commented yesterday, “loyal and blessed with bags of charm.”

Hitchens was an iconoclast with a ferociously innovative mind that was capable of startling original observations. The Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who once worked as an intern for Hitchens, said yesterday: “Christopher was everything a great essayist should be: infuriating, brilliant, highly provocative and yet intensely serious.”

No greater compliment could have been paid to Hitchens’ eminence in America than the action taken by the New York Times. It closed down its presses at midnight so it could put Hitchens’ obituary on the front page.

Christopher Hitchens is survived by his wife, Carol Blue, and their daughter, Antonia, and his children from a previous marriage, Alexander and Sophia.

Alasdair Steven