Peter Hitchens - Early Life

Early Life

Peter Hitchens was born in 1951 in Malta, where his father, a career naval officer, was stationed with the Royal Navy. He was educated at The Leys School and the Oxford College of Further Education before being accepted at the University of York.

Hitchens began on the far left of the political spectrum before moving to the right. Hitchens studied politics at York University from 1970 to 1973. He was a member of the Trotskyist International Socialists from 1969 to 1975 (in 2010 he dismissed the "cruel revolutionary rubbish" he promoted as a Trotskyist as "poison"). While at university he is said to have replied "I was too busy starting a revolution" when asked why he was late for a lecture.

He joined the British Labour Party in 1977, but left it in 1983 when he became a political reporter at the Daily Express, thinking it wrong to carry a party card when directly reporting politics. This also coincided with a culmination of growing personal disillusionment with the Labour movement. In 2009, Hitchens wrote of this period, "Against the Labour Party, which I knew to be penetrated by all manner of Marxists, and soaked in the ideas of the revolutionaries, it was increasingly necessary to support the Tories. This was partly because of the strikers' lies, but much more because of Poland and Czechoslovakia. On the Cold War, I knew she was right and the Left were wrong".

He married Eve Ross, the daughter of left-wing journalist David Ross, in 1983. Hitchens originally hoped to become a naval officer, but an eye defect prevented him from doing so.