The last time I spent any time with Christopher Hitchens was in the early summer of 2006. I was house-sitting in Georgetown researching a new book and he, with instinctive generosity towards a friend, insisted I’d come over to his apartment for supper ‘a deux’.
I can’t remember what we ate. But I do remember we drank not insubstantial amounts of alcohol and consumed countless cigarettes as we talked into the early hours about God- he was writing his book against him at the time, and he wanted to know why I was still a Catholic. He found my tribal loyalties-English Catholic father , Spanish Catholic mother- along with my Jesuit education , too easy and predictable an explanation. Only sometime after midnight did I attempt some theology around the mystery of transubstantiation and faith prevailing that God is in all things . But this was to be a night for revelations rather than conversions and we ended up agreeing to disagree.
I don’t know if in his suffering and final release Hitch came round to God in the end. When my older brother Tom, who was a dear friend from Oxford days, asked me this morning, I said I had my doubts although Tom seemed to doubt less. On reflection, the question should have been the other way round- did God come round to Hitch in the end? Well, there I believe he never left him.
Hitch not only had a God-given talent for writing and argument. He must rank , with Orwell, among the most illuminating modern essayists in the English language. He also had a profound sense of justice and humanity which only occasionally deserted him. I remember locking horns with him publicly during his demystification of Mother Teresa. I happened to be in India at the time visiting one of her hostels and found the reality of selfless care inspired by the woman so at odds with his caricature of her as an unprincipled fund-raiser that I wrote an angry anti-Hitchens opinion piece in the FT.
But absorbing the news of Hitch’s recent death, it is the words humour, courage, warmth, defiance, loyalty that I associate with him most. He was my’guru’ when I was an undergraduate and he was an emerging voice on the New Statesman, writing provocatively against corrupt Latin American generals, and Spain’s transition to democracy. Who else but Hitch would begin an article on the Spanish monarchy with a walk round the Goya gallery in The Prado noting just how stupid the Bourbons looked!
He later came to see me in Lisbon where I had my first serious journalistic job while working as a correspondent for the FT and the Observer. He treated me and my young wife to a great meal in the old quarter during a political festival. At a time when I was feeling hugely insecure and out of my depth, he was hugely supportive, and encouraged me with his own enthusiasm for the Portuguese Revolution and its democratic legacy.
In later years we found common ground in our opinions on the Falklands War and Al-Qaeda. We both agreed that it was the former that was probably the last conflict of modern times that had a clear beginning, middle and an end. We supported the British military recovery of the islands not because we were Thatcherites but because we hated despots like Galtieri .
Our last dialogue was over an idea we cooked up in Washington. Hitch offered to write a prologue to an updated edition of my book on the Falklands War. Sadly his illness took over. The last time I wrote to him was when he was interviewed after his diagnosis on Newsnight by Jeremy Paxman- an extraordinarily humbling occasion which moved me to prayer.
