Nominated three times, Peter Hitchens wins the George Orwell Award for his foreign reporting on China, Canada, Eastern Europe and Africa.
Guardian's Roy Greenslade writes:
I would guess that some, more than some, leftish-inclined journalists were a little put out by Peter Hitchens having been awarded the Orwell Prize for journalism.
The iconoclastic Mail on Sunday columnist picked up the award for his foreign reporting.
Evidently, a friend warned Hitchens afterwards to be careful because people would now think he was respectable.
"Never", he replied, "they'll hate me even more for this."
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Peter Hitchens reflects that if his hero George Orwell were alive today he probably wouldn't like him very much:
"Might he [Orwell] have approved of liberal intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya?
I suspect he might. After all, he himself took part in the prototype liberal intervention in Spain.
Might he [Orwell] have approved of the sexual revolution? I am sure he would, at least to begin with.
Would he have looked down his nose at conservative popular newspapers such as mine?
I am more or less sure of it. An Etonian revolutionary could hardly be expected to do anything else.
Would he [Orwell] have supported comprehensive education? Yes, I think the man who wanted London’s squares stripped of their railings would have seen this as a liberating measure.
Would he have favoured large-scale immigration into this country? Very possibly. He would have instinctively sided with the person he regarded as the underdog, perhaps not seeing that when mass immigration comes to a country, both migrants *and* hosts are underdogs.
Would he have supported relaxed drink licensing laws? I think so. He viewed such things as silly and puritan.
Would he have fervently opposed smoking bans? Without a doubt. His generation viewed smoking as a normal human activity.
In all these matters, it is only right to consider him as a whole, as a man of his place and time, the very things which forged the steely core of him.
But there are one or two issues on which, willy nilly, we would have found ourselves on the same side. I believe that the man who wrote so cleverly about Newspeak would have seen the speech codes and inclusive language of political correctness for the sinister linguistic prisons that they are.
I believe he would have loathed the attempt to introduce identity cards.
I believe he would have supported Steve Thoburn and the metric martyrs against concrete-headed attempts to prosecute them for selling bananas by the English pound.
And I think he would have hated motorways, and the devastation of the railways, and the grisly new liturgy of the Church of England, and the insane massacre of healthy trees by health and safety fanatics.
And he would have absolutely loathed Anthony Blair.
None of us here would ever have found him entirely convenient, or comforting, or a certain ally. He had that genuine independence of mind whose unfailing magnetic north is a love of truth and a loathing of humbug and which scorns all conventional wisdom. That’s why, knowing that he would probably have scorned me and everything I ever wrote or said, I’m still very proud to be associated with his name here today."
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