Popes and pop stars come and go, but this wordsmith was a one-off

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Opinion

September 12, 2025 — 2.26pm

I have lived to see the death of six popes, Burma, the USSR, the Holden, the Queen, Princess Diana, half The Beatles, all The Band and, at a guess, Elvis.

They were all either bigwigs in non-essential fields or pernicious kleptocracies, and none were missed by anyone who wasn’t an in-group proselyte of the stuff they were selling.

Princesses and popes are immediately replaced; theirs is an office, not an achievement. I was a great fan of the Pope when I was a kid. I remember seeing Paul VI blinged and grinning and deciding I’d like to be pope myself one day. A week later I was caught by Deidre Collins while playing kiss chasey and earthly desire trashed those plans. That and the fact I wasn’t a Catholic, I guess.

Point is, Dalai Llamas beget Dalai Llamas by dying. When death clubs an archbishop, another pops up whack-a-molishly indistinguishable from the last. Pop music, too, demands a reigning sovereign – Prince easily becomes Drake.

But when Christopher Hitchens died the mourning was essential and justified by those of us who enjoy the real stuff delivered hard and with style. Because a great public mind creates a unique intellectual space and when it goes there’s no filling it. No one else committed as fully, and hostilely, to the cause of reason as The Hitch.

The celebrated journalist Janet Malcolm once wrote that not editing what people had said in interviews while transcribing them was a kind of vandalism, because we all speak so imprecisely that our talk needs proofing for the page. Not Hitchens. He had history and wit perpetually balanced on the tip of his tongue. When controversial televangelist Jerry Falwell died, Hitch was asked for comment while on TV.

“I think it’s a pity there isn’t a hell for him to go to,” he said. “The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offences to morality and to truth in this country if you’ll just get yourself called Reverend. Who would, even at your network, have invited on such a little toad to tell us that the attacks of September 11 were the result of our sinfulness and were God’s punishment if they hadn’t got some kind of clerical qualification. People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup.”

These were spoken words, not written. Imagine being that good off the cuff. He wrote of the Reverend: “If you gave Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.” Has there ever been a more elegant way of saying a man was full of shit? It’s a sentence oblique enough to co-opt its readers into deciphering it, thereby making them feel clever.

Whether denouncing demagogues, debunking Islamists, running rings around evangelicals, or mocking tabloid saints like the Princess of Wales or Mother Theresa, he was unencumbered by the debilitating impulse to be polite or restrained. Politeness, he reasoned, was a prop, a fan with which charlatans covered themselves, as faux coy as geishas. And restraint was a type of dishonesty we’d all gotten too used to. Boots-and-all was his methodology.

When global swathes of Islam became murderous over some Danish cartoons he said, “If people are determined to be offended – if they will climb up on the ladder, balancing it precariously on their own toilet cistern to be upset by what they see through the neighbour’s bathroom window – there is nothing you can do about that.”

Asked for a quick comment on Trump back in 2007, when the man was still a commonplace charlatan he said, “He’s managed to cover 90 per cent of his head with 30 per cent of his hair.” A satirical suggestion that people are wrong to assert Trump is a man without accomplishment.

He was one of history’s great bullshit matadors and I wonder what he’d have done with our current Liar-In-Chief. Would the blatancy of the president’s imposture have made his denunciation redundant? I doubt it. I see Hitchens plonking the Johnny Walker alongside the Smith Corona with grim relish ... at last his monster had arrived, his gibbering Nixon, his valencia Voldemort.

Alas, Hitchens predeceased the Grendel fate made for him. But I urge you to go on YouTube and watch him in debate flaying the virtue-cloaked blowhards who dominate the public square in a world where scepticism is undervalued.

“What could be more agreeable?” as he used to say.