My battles with Christopher Hitchens

As Christmas remains a religious occasion, a few thoughts from that perspective commend themselves.

This newspaper seems to have been plunged into mourning for Christopher Hitchens, perhaps best-known for his belligerent atheism. I must say that I had a few fierce written exchanges with Christopher over the years, mainly in Britain's Spectator magazine, but not on religious matters. In our polemical battles, which were entertainingly acidulous and ungentlemanly on both sides, the arguments he made were so unmitigatedly fatuous, he always seemed to me rather silly, more a pest than even a gadfly, much less a sage or wit.

Our first pyrotechnic outburst came when President Reagan had just endured a cancer operation and was about to meet Mikhail Gorbachev. Christopher wrote that Reagan should resign the presidency and not embarrass the West by having to interrupt the summit meeting every 15 minutes to go to the lavatory. It was, as I wrote, an utterly tasteless (and inaccurate) prediction (and not without its ironies given its author's subsequent medical history). Christopher retreated ungraciously, especially after the Reagan-Gorbachev meeting was universally seen as a success. However, when Ronald Reagan died, in 2004, widely hailed as a popular and outstanding president, Christopher carped after him as "an idiot."

My battles with Christopher Hitchens

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