I wonder what Peter Hitchens would make of those people inclined to sympathise profoundly with his piercing and insightful analysis of British society and Britain's ills - but find little to no value in his analysis of the Conservative Party.
Perhaps he would dismiss such people as hopelessly optimistic dupes if they plan to vote Conservative. But that would only show the extent to which Hitchens' own broader political outlook - which I'm sure millions will share - has to him become subordinate to his (anti-)partisan preferences.
There's nothing stopping people valuing what Hitchens says when he writes about poverty, about family life, marriage, divorce and decency and being sceptical when he turns his attention to the Tory Party - indeed, I recommend such an approach. But I wonder if we wouldn't all be wiser and better informed if he wrote more of the former and less of the latter.
I also wonder if this anger at the Conservative Party isn't preventing him from acknowledging even substantial - if partial - political victories. Peter Hitchens has been writing about Britain's broken society for over a decade, pointing to the way in which Roy Jenkins liberalism has led to the misery and demoralisation of so many, with grave consequences for us all. For most of this period, Hitchens' views were ignored or ridiculed. Look at the many scathing reviews when his masterful book The Abolition of Britain was released eight years ago to see how such arguments were generally treated until very recently.
If he felt so inclined, Hitchens could claim quite truthfully that much of what Iain Duncan Smith and David Cameron are now saying, he was writing about years earlier. Instead, he remains preoccupied with a quite common media narrative of the Conservative leader as a member of a trendy Notting Hill liberal elite, either oblivious to this country's social breakdown or positively lauding it. Such a view is not exactly absurd, as some in the party (George Osborne called them 'ubermodernisers') really do advocate this kind of deference to 'enlightened' liberal opinion.
Certainly many in these enlightened liberal circles would like to believe it, too - how flattering to them and to their views if the Conservatives became popular only by adopting them. The perceptive Labour blogger Hopi Sen has noted the tendency of some journalists to be so preoccupied with the notion that Cameron has repositioned the Conservative Party that they continue to filter out evidence of the party sticking to positions it has held in the past. Even those who don't filter it out tend to report it in a spirit of bafflement. Hence these "Cameron would have us believe the Tories have changed, but look at ...." pieces one sees in the left-wing press and blogs that go on to describe some orthodox conservative policy or other as weirdly incongruous with their notion of Cameron as some kind of Howard Marks or Peter Tatchell figure - though one a bit ill-disposed towards the EU and state spending.
I think I can see their logic: such a figure would of course be genuinely popular among liberal journalists in fashionable areas of London; to anyone who reads opinion polls, Cameron is very popular; therefore, either these people must (a) face up to the idea that their views aren't particularly widespread or (b) they must hail David Cameron as such a figure (or at least report that he is presenting himself as such and that is why he is doing well). It's only human nature for them to do the latter.
But quite why Peter Hitchens refuses to recognise a largely orthodox conservative when he sees one is another question. If he did acknowledge how much the Conservative Party is focused on the issues that have been closest to his heart for so long, he could still find fault with the remedies, and ask if the proposed policies are really commensurate with the scale of Britain's social problems. But having given up on the Tory Party years ago, Peter Hitchens' mind does indeed appear closed to the evidence within the party of how far his own views have come.
