Independent thinking is the only basis for a fulfilling career

The conservative thinker Peter Hitchens begins his book The Cameron Delusion with these words: “Conventional wisdom is almost always wrong. By the time it has become conventional, it has ceased to be wisdom and become cant.’

Hitchens’ brand of conservativism is unfashionable to say the least and he probably wouldn’t have it any other way. The things he’d have to say to be fashionable would be anathema to him.

But what marks Hitchens out from numerous commentators today is the habit of independent thinking: on any subject from the railways to grammar schools and to the Russia-Ukraine war it is always difficult to predict what he will have to say.

That was true also of the last generation of polemicists which included Gore Vidal or Clive James: the pleasure of reading them was in not knowing what they were going to say. The experience must be contrasted with those numerous columnists on both the right and the left where one can easily guess in advance what is to be said. This melancholy truth is also the case with many politicians, as left and right become harder to distinguish from each other, and as each party’s acceptable ideological band narrows.

At time of writing it isn’t clear how Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine will transpire; perhaps it will take decades before we really know. What is clear is that we are witnessing repeated crises and that these seem