Everyone has his or her own YouTube vortex, right? A particular hole you find yourself falling into when drunk, hung-over or unable to sleep. Maybe it’s floating otters. Maybe it’s Oscar acceptance speeches. Maybe it’s those ASMR clips of people folding towels. Maybe – just maybe – it offers a little glimpse into your soul, at least until you snap out of it and go to bed.
Mine are the public appearances of Peter Hitchens. For the uninitiated, Mr. Hitchens is a political author, Mail on Sunday journalist and regular guest on programs such as Question Time and Newsnight. His persona can best be described as an eloquent curmudgeon with an exquisite line in haughty disdain. He is also that most rarified of online creatures: a genuine independent thinker.
The things he thinks – that the Tory party is ‘left wing’, that alcohol and drug addiction is a myth perpetuated by people who just enjoy alcohol and drugs too much, that Britain is a spent force doomed to an unspecific dystopia best summarised, as far as I can tell, as ‘even less like the 1900s than it is now’ – are not things I agree with at all.
But that’s rather the whole point. I spend all day listening to people I agree with on Twitter, nodding a like drinking bird desk toy, not because I’ve applied rigorous analysis to their arguments (who has time!) but because what they say ‘feels’ right and fits with the crayoned broad strokes of my own politics.
Which is what made Mr. Hitchens - I’d call him Peter, in the unearned familiarity of internet takes, but I sense he’d prefer I didn’t - so valuable to me. He runs against the grain of liberal consensus, but not in the sad, dancing bear way of your Katie Hopkins or with the damaged-child theatrics of your Milos, but in the manner of a man free from affectation, so authentically sure he is right about everything, it’s utterly compelling. He makes me think outside my box.
Favourite clips include him facing off with Matthew Perry and, elsewhere, Russell Brand on Newsnight (“I don’t think you’re real Peter” Brand says to him at one point, at another: “What happened to you mate?”) and in a ‘battle of the titans’ debate on theology with his late, rock star atheist brother Christopher Hitchens - a clip so dripping with Oedipal froideur it’s like witnessing someone else’s anxious Christmas dinner. I've watched them all countless times.
My absolute fav, though, is his interview with the Guardian’s Owen Jones, who met him in a sunlit pub garden somewhere in 2015, clearly tickled by the idea of prodding a grumpy bear on the wrong side of woke.
He springs a kind of trap though, Hitchens. Because here we see a whole different side to him: still firm in his intellectual superiority but also relaxed, self-effacing, at times almost playful, at times – pause it – prepared to smile. There is something about the rare sight of Peter Hitchens smiling that makes my heart sing. When he does it, you see how exhausting it must be to frown all the time like that. It makes you root for him.
Hitchens is also just about the best thing on Twitter, where he quote-tweets anyone who dares to challenge him with a trademark withering dismissal, usually focused on their inability to debate logically and fairly (perhaps his biggest gripe of all), or else says thing like:
This is simply beautiful. Do you know how many people Hitchens follows on Twitter? Zero people. Even Donald Trump follows 35. It’s the ultimate power move, the mark of a true intellectual anarchist. If you take God out of the equation, Hitchens gives less of fuck than every rapper in history combined.
Or so I thought. A few weeks ago, Hitchens made the mistake of tweeting his own name rather than searching for it - a move popularised (and subsequently overegged) by Ed Balls, so deliciously embarrassing because it reveals not just a luddite’s misstep but a measure of vanity we all share but would rather not admit to.
The tweet remained in place for days. I began to believe Mr Hitchens must have spotted it and decided to allow the error to remain – a wonderful concession of grace and humour that seemed to contradict his reputation. It made me think he had been playing with us all along, that he didn’t really take himself or the world that seriously after all. It was like a tweet version of that smile.
And so I retweeted it - out of affection and admiration, hoping others would think the same.
That was my own, sad mistake.
A week or so later, I returned to discover Peter Hitchens had blocked me for the my petulance (I assume it was for this reason, for he didn't follow me and I had never tweeted at him before). Presumably, he blocked everyone with the same temerity*.
I was on the outside. Shunned by my secret hero. Reader, I confess: it stung.
What is the point of this story? Perhaps there isn’t one. Except that to me, the episode seems to encapsulate some of the problems that blight public discourse in the internet age.
I disagreed with Hitchens on everything, but I admired him. Did I make this known to him, or public, in any way? No: because it felt too nuanced an emotion to explain, because I feared people on my ‘side’ of politics would think less of me for praising a Mail on Sunday regular.
For Peter Hitchens’ part - though I am of course but a professional minnow to him - he had, in me, a fan. Someone his ideas at least reached, if not convinced. But he blocked me out the assumption I was something else: another leftie troll with my fingers in my ears, just out to mock him for what he stands for.
What a sad state of affairs. We could have been something else, Peter! (Sorry: Mr. Hitchens). In a small way, we could have shown the world that disagreement needn’t be accompanied by vitriol, that finding common ground can be more invigorating than launching firebombs across the void.
But we blew it, and we never even met. Instead, all I have is my YouTube vortex and daydreams of what could have been. Me and Peter Hitchens - Peter Hitchens and I – poles apart, for sure, but somehow, despite it all, together.
*Since the article was been published, Peter Hitchens has denied he has ever blocked anyone for this reason.
