Ian Katz (Guardian features editor): I want to start by asking you Christopher to tell me what this row was about.
CH You want to know what the joke was as well?
IK We have to have the joke.
CH When I was at Oxford I had a friend called Fran Hazelton, who was an actress at the time, and she was also a member of the Communist party. When the party split over the invasion of Czechoslovakia, in August 1968, she told me she'd had a row with her father. Her father, who had served in the Communist party, said one should never criticise the party, and she'd said her father had said, 'Prague, I don't care about Prague, I won't be happy till I see the Red Army watering it's horses in the Thames.' In Hendon I think he said, or somewhere like that. And I thought it was quite funny, and must have told it many times, and must have told it in the hearing of Peter, because a week after September 11, when I'm up to here with fuckwits in the United States who are saying Chomskyian things, what I don't need, is to get [in] the Spectator my brother recalling, 'I don't see why Christopher has become so pro-American; I can remember when he said he wouldn't be happy until he saw the Red Army watering its horses in the Thames.' And I thought, well what I thought was 'Fuck you'. I don't need this, I don't need it from [my] brother.
IK Peter, did you falsely characterise your brother as a Stalinist?
PH No ... I think that sometimes Christopher is a great loss to the Foreign Office, and he has actually made out that I've withdrawn a statement that I never made. I never said he was a Stalinist. He didn't actually give [the joke] the full delivery today. That evening, in our small house in Oxford ... this is so long ago, we were discussing medium-range nuclear missiles ... the argument was about whether there was any justification for having a cruise missiles base in Britain and my view was that there was such a justification because the Soviet Union seemed to present a major threat to western Europe, which would be neutralised if cruise missiles existed, that was the argument - I'll just give you that as background, nothing to do with Stalinism. It was at that point, when we all get tired of reason sometimes, when were sick of the subject and we don't particularly want to say anything else about it, we still say something that's important. And what he said was, I don't care if the Red Army waters its horses in ... and there was a pause here ... Hendon. Not the Thames, in Hendon.
CH (interrupts): Is Hendon, or is it not, on the Thames?
IK It is not on the Thames
PH Hendon's vice in the eyes of people of your fashion is that it's a suburb, and it contains half-timbered, fake-tudor houses ... that's why I think it was at the end of your joke. It didn't convey to me that you were a Stalinist, though we had earlier on discussed the 1936 constitution of the Soviet Union, and its implications for the argument about whether the evils of Stalin and the evils of Hitler could be compared.
CH The Red Army was only a mounted force, come to think of it, when it's commander was Leon Trotsky. It hasn't been that equine lately. It's a very eloquent clarification but I think if someone is deemed to have said that they'd rather see the Red Army in England than out of Czechoslovakia, or in England at all, then the implication is that one is at least a communist sympathiser. And what annoyed me, I think, is that I kept reading this reference sourced to blood, a bro, in the reactionary press in the US.
PH You should have done what you do in almost any other occasion when you disagree with someone, you should have argued about it, and then we would have reached this position much earlier. Silence is never an answer to anything.
CH I wanted it to mature in the cask.
IK When you were growing up, did politics infuse everything in the Hitchens family home?
PH Erm, no ... I don't think really politics engaged us until - oh - until Christopher decided that socialism was the thing that he really believed in and brought that back to what had been a pretty conventional English middle-class sort of home. He was about 14 or 15 at the time. And there are some wonderful pictures of this that I've lost of him, standing as a Labour candidate in the school elections.
CH I only just beat the Communist guy. Yes, that would be my memory, too, and Peter and I went together on the march from Aldermaston to London in 1966 I remember and we were both in different times and in different towns members of the International Socialists. I think he may have stayed in longer than I did. I was never quite sure when I finally left. It's a great credit to our father, who was very conservative, that he never attempted to inculcate any politics into either of us, there were no heretical positions in the family. The real difference between Peter and myself is the belief in the supernatural. I'm a materialist and he attributes his presence here to a divine plan. I can't stand anyone who believes in God, who invokes the divinity or who is a person of faith. I mean, that to me is horrible repulsive thing.
IK Peter when did your belief kick in, when did this become an issue between you?
PH Oh, it's never been an issue. I returned as it were to the Anglicanism of my childhood. Such as it was - it wasn't particularly strong: one has some background music of Hymns Ancient & Modern and the King James Bible, but not very much more than that. I'm probably keener about it now than I was then. I suppose [I returned] in my early 30s when people sometimes do, when various things start happening. As an issue between us, I think he overestimates the issue. He has several faiths. He has the faith I think of Darwinism, which is just like Christianity an unproven and unprovable theory, which you can believe in if you want because you prefer that arrangement of the universe. I happen to think the arrangement of the universe based on the belief in intelligent design is more tolerable both morally and aesthetically, but he prefers another. I dislike only the attitude of the atheist that his is not a faith, cause it is. I have absolutely no disgust or anger at anybody who disagrees with me about that. I'm much more worried by people who are indifferent to the question.
Female audience member Excuse me. I'm not usually awkward at all but I'm sitting here and we're asked not to smoke. And I don't like being in a room where smoking is going on.
CH (smoking heavily): Well you don't have to stay darling, do you? I'm working here and I'm your guest, OK? And this is what I'm like; nobody has to like it.
IK Would you just stub that one out?
CH No. I cleared it with the festival a long time ago. They let me do it.
FAM We should all be allowed to smoke then.
CH Fair enough. I wouldn't object. It might get pretty nasty though. I have a privileged position here, I'm not just one of the audience, so it would be horrible if everyone was like me. This is my last of five gigs, I've worked very hard for the festival. I'm going from here to Heathrow airport. If anyone doesn't like it they can kiss my ass.
IK Would anyone like to take up that challenge?
(Laughter. Woman walks out)
IK Christopher. You've talked slightly with your tongue in your cheek about regretting the competition for your mother's attention and you said in one interview with the Times: "Mothers aren't supposed to have favourites, are they? But boys know. And to know that your mother loves you most, more than anyone, more than your father, more than your brother, which I always did know ..." Did you have a firm conviction that you were favourite?
CH No, what I was expressing there and badly, too, [was] an ambition, I hoped it was true but I am sure it was not. I don't usually use this term as a compliment but she was very even handed. Impartial. What I'm really saying there I think would be obvious to anyone who has even scanned the more accessible works of Sigmund Freud, is that had I been an only child, I could probably have handled it, to have mummy to myself and then of course to kill daddy and marry mummy. I thought I had all my ducks in a row, and suddenly to have to go to some nursing home and bring home a bundle was a shock and I may never have got over it. Took up smoking at around that time.
PH I don't know about the parenting but there was a story, although I can't remember anything about this, of Christopher having been discovered gleefully releasing the brake of the pram in which I was lying ...
CH That's when I took up drinking ...
PH There was another occasion when Christopher was sitting on the edge of a flower bed, admiring the blooms, when he saw a sinister shadow, growing, and it was me staggering up behind him with a rake. I have no memory of that ...
CH I do! I remember that very well. I've never moved so fast in my life. What I've left out, because what everybody prefers in some way to talk about is mama, is the personality of our father, who was not a very assertive person, but a very determined one, and very modest and stern. He'd had a very long and bitter war in the Royal Navy, after having been brought up in Depression conditions and post-war austerity, and had been I think disappointed by the way England had gone. He was not religious, but was a person who religion was a good thing, had come from a very strict fundamentalist Baptist home. And I was always pretty sure that Peter was much more like him than I was, and I think I suspected that he slightly preferred Peter. And I can live with that.
IK People have often posited a competition between you, and they've generally implied that you, Peter, were living in Christopher's shadow - though you of course are columnist of the year now and one of the grandest commentators in the country ...
CH I had NO idea, well done! Bloody good! I don't belong to the prize-winning fraternity. I always get nominated, but I never win.
IK Did it occur to you when you won that award [Peter], did you think, "Ahh, that's one up on him!"
PH Never. I always get asked whether I'm worried about living in my brother's shadow ... you might try asking that the other way from time to time.
IK I want to ask one last personal question. The idea of this meeting today was more about brotherhood than politics. One thing that you, Christopher, have talked about in the past, is your mother's suicide when you were, I think, a student. Can I ask how formative an experience was that, and how did it change the dynamics of your family?
CH Yes, you can, but I would rather you hadn't. I wasn't a student, I was working in London. I'd just got a job with the New Statesman when I was woken up with the news that my mother had taken her own life. It was a terrible moment in my life which turned into a terrible week. I had to go, as the eldest son, to Greece. My father didn't feel up to it, he was quite old by then. And Peter had just got his first job and wasn't able to leave, and couldn't be expected to come. I was quite happy to do it, but it also coincided with a military-backed coup in Athens. There were tanks in the streets. When I first saw the Acropolis it was from my dead mother's hotel window. If I was the kind of person you might think I am, I would have written a piece about that, but I haven't. What it's taught me - and if it's any help to anyone here who might have a distressed family member - is that you should never believe that there's such a thing as a suicidal personality and that if they don't seem that type they won't do it. The most unusual people find life unbearable. No one could have been more life-affirming than my mother.
IK Peter, I've not heard you talk about this before, do you want to add anything?
PH No.
IK Are you two friends?
PH No. There was an old joke in East Germany that went, Are the Russians our friends or our brothers? And the answer is, they must be our brothers because you can choose your friends.
CH The great thing about family life is that it introduces you to people you'd otherwise never meet.
IK One last question from the audience.
Audience member You've been casting furtive glances at each other throughout the whole event but you've never yet made eye contact. Would you for this final moment, look each other in the eye?
CH You don't know what we've just been through. We were asked by James Naughtie to do an on-radio handshake, [and] I thought it was a handshake made for radio.
Audience member So will you do it?
[CH and PH look briefly at each other]
PH They want everything to be all right.
CH They want a happy ending - that's their problem.