A 1999 Interview of PH , and a 2009 analysis of the Useless Tories

Nigel Farndale, now a successful novelist, has recently posted his 1999 interview with me (originally published in the Sunday Telegraph) on the Internet.

 

You can find it here

 

http://www.nigelfarndale.com/2013/06/peter-hitchens/

 

It caused a certain amount of hilarity in my home after publication. Even our Burmese cat (now alas deceased) laughed at the description of Mrs Hitchens as ‘tall’ (I don’t recall Mr Farndale being specially short)  , and the poor creature, no stranger to vanity himself, had to be carried from the room wheezing with helpless mirth after reading the claim that I suffer from ‘low self-esteem. I’d add that some of the words placed in quotation marks couldn’t conceivably have been precise transcripts of what I said.

 

I’d always thought the jest about Canada was quite good, but so many people take it as a genuine, earnest comparison that I realise now that the image of the sour, humourless, jealous Peter Hitchens conflicts so totally with a response of this kind that they simply can’t absorb it. 

 

What interested me when I read it again after all these years was how many of the points put to me by Mr Farndale are exactly the same as, or enormously similar to, the sort of questions I get asked by left-wing interviewers today, the psychologising, the stuff about my brother, the idea that I do it for effect. I’ve given my responses to them over and over again, but the people who come to interview me now never seem to have paid any attention to my replies, and just come up with the same stuff over and over again.  The idea that my conclusions are reasoned and researched, rather than the products of a tortured mind and some sort of complex, cannot be entertained.

 

I stopped a person on Twitter in his tracks the other day by stating (as I believe to be the case) that my late brother had much more of a problem with my existence than I had with his.  He was not asked such questions, though.

 

Oh, and this is also rather good, about the Tories. From (I think) late 2009.

 

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/platform/2010/01/peter-hitchens.html