Dan Hitchens

United Kingdom

Writer at Freelance

Senior Editor at First Things

Columnist at Compact

Senior editor @firstthingsmag | Co-writing a book about Dr Johnson | Newsletter: https://t.co/yj4GPUYs00

Articles

How Assisted Suicide Will Destroy the NHS

3 weeks ago | compactmag.com | Dan Hitchens

What do opponents of assisted suicide fear? It isn’t just that thousands of people will request lethal drugs because they feel like a burden, because their care is too expensive, because they are depressed, because they were let down by the system. It isn’t just the deaths from coercion, manipulation and malpractice. There is something else as well, harder to describe but nevertheless important. Last week, the MPs examining Britain’s assisted suicide bill voted through a very remarkable subclause.
Populism, Interrupted

1 month ago | compactmag.com | Dan Hitchens

Now that populism is on a roll, it has been recategorized as inevitable. Any idiot, apparently, could have seen it coming. If Nigel Farage is hammering Keir Starmer in the polls, if even the oligarchs are falling at Donald Trump’s feet, if one European center-right party after another is being eaten alive by its nearest evolutionary rival, that is only what you should expect. Condescend to the people whose votes you are demanding, and you’ll be punished.
Where is the scrutiny over the assisted suicide bill?

2 months ago | spectator.co.uk | Dan Hitchens

Kim Leadbeater has described her assisted suicide bill as ‘potentially one of the most important changes in legislation that we will ever see’. For Leadbeater and her allies, it is an attempt to make the law merciful: to give relief to those who want to control the manner of their death. But there is another, darker way to see the Leadbeater bill, and last week at the bill committee we got a glimpse of it. The committee stage was meant to reassure the doubters.
Where is the scrutiny over the assisted suicide bill?

2 months ago | spectator.com.au | Dan Hitchens

Kim Leadbeater has described her assisted suicide bill as ‘potentially one of the most important changes in legislation that we will ever see’. For Leadbeater and her allies, it is an attempt to make the law merciful: to give relief to those who want to control the manner of their death.
One Woman’s Fight to Rebuild Syria

Jan 24, 2025 | compactmag.com | Dan Hitchens

Traveling in Europe in the 2010s, the Syrian architect Marwa al-Sabouni was baffled by the questions she would receive. How do you feel, people would ask earnestly, visiting places of such wealth and ease, when your own country has been shattered by war? “I’m always perplexed by this question,” al-Sabouni once wrote, “because I see neither prosperity nor grandeur in Europe.” On the contrary, the cities of the West struck her more as a hideous warning of what a rebuilt Syria might look like.
Opinion | Sister Clare Crockett, a Prospective Saint for the Digital Age

Jan 16, 2025 | wsj.com | Dan Hitchens

The Brunswick Moviebowl in Derry, described as “the foremost entertainment complex in the North West of Ireland,” doesn’t usually offer a live stream of Madrid’s Catholic cathedral. But last Sunday was an unusual day. In the Spanish capital, the church officially opened the beatification cause of Clare Crockett, an Irish nun who died at 33 in the 2016 Ecuador earthquake. For her hometown of Derry, it was cause for celebration—and for a trip to the cinema to watch the event.
MPs are held to a double standard when it comes to telling the truth

Dec 11, 2024 | telegraph.co.uk | Dan Hitchens

Kim Leadbeater and Keir Starmer Credit: Christopher Furlong/Getty Misleading parliament is generally considered a pretty serious offence. When polled, the public say honesty is the most important virtue in a politician; 73 per cent think parliament would be improved if MPs were expelled for lying. And parliamentarians are bound to uphold the “Nolan principles” of public life, which include being truthful. But holding them to it isn’t easy. Two recent stories illustrate the current situation....
What Conclave Yearns For | Dan Hitchens

Dec 8, 2024 | firstthings.com | Dan Hitchens

The pope is dead. Sede vacante. From the round earth’s imagined corners come the 120 cardinal-electors, the progressive and the conservative, the extrovert and the taciturn, the Latin and the Eastern, the bearded and the clean-shaven, to elect a successor behind the walls of the Vatican. A sturdy African conservative (Lucian Msamati) and a choleric Italian traditionalist (Sergio Castellitto) are the front-runners, but a reformist faction plots in the shadows.
Scruton and the roots of modern conservatism

Dec 3, 2024 | thecritic.co.uk | Dan Hitchens

This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. If you could be transported back 50 years, to the London of 1974, where would you choose to be a fly on the wall? Surely at 52 Campden Hill Square in Holland Park, the home of Sir Hugh Fraser — the charismatic war hero, Scottish aristocrat and Tory MP — and his wife Lady Antonia, the historian, writer and part-time society beauty.
Why Britain Chose Death

Nov 29, 2024 | compactmag.com | Dan Hitchens

During Friday’s extraordinary events in the House of Commons, there was one bizarre, semi-comic, deeply unsettling moment that summed up the debate over the assisted-suicide bill better than almost all the speeches. Speaking in opposition to the bill, Danny Kruger, a Conservative member of Parliament, was suddenly halted by a point of order. “He’s using the incorrect language,” said the Labour MP Catherine Eccles, looking appalled. “It’s not suicide. That’s offensive.