Nick Cohen, Owen Jones and Me

Last week, the Leftist journalist Nick Cohen (who has, for reasons which escape me, won the love of several conservative journals), used a column in the Spectator to call Owen Jones the 'Peter Hitchens of the left'.

I don't think either of us exactly welcomed the comparison.

Mr Jones, a youthful left-winger, is the author of a book called 'Chavs' and now a columnist for the Independent. At his age I was still toiling away in the stokeholds and engine-rooms of journalism, and many years from having my own column.

He gave his own rebuttal of this in the Independent. I wrote a letter to the Spectator, which is published in this week's issue, and reads:

 

'Sir: Nick Cohen (‘Forget “militant” atheists’, 24 August) presumably seeks to injure me by calling Owen Jones ‘The Peter Hitchens of the Left’.  Mr Jones - who also did not take the equation as a compliment - has offered his own response to this elsewhere.  I am mainly mystified. Mr Jones and I are both human, and both write for a living, but this doesn’t seem to me to amount to an important resemblance.

 

But I recall that Mr Cohen has never sought to rebut, with facts or logic,  some serious criticisms I once made (in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’) of his support for the invasion of Iraq. I also scolded my fellow-conservatives for imagining that this stance made Mr Cohen in any way their friend or ally. He seems to me to remain a committed enemy of conservative opinions, especially mine. I also recall with some amusement a rather raucous and personal public attack which he made on me at an Orwell Prize event some years ago.

 

I think it would be civil of Mr Cohen, whose past support for selective state schools shows him to be a man of intelligence,  to argue with what I say, rather than attacking me personally.

 

Peter Hitchens'

 

I really would be interested to hear Mr Cohen's response to the critique I make of his position on the Iraq war, and of the welcome he received among conservatives when he supported that war. I believe there is a YouTube version of his Orwell Prize attack on me, for those who enjoy that sort of thing. Anyone who does watch it should know (because I think it has some bearing in the incident) that the year before I too had criticised the Orwell Prize judges, for shortlisting Alastair Campbell for the prize. I thought, and still think, that Mr Campbell is absolutely not in the Orwell tradition.