Peter Jonathan Hitchens (born 28 October 1951) is an English conservative author, broadcaster, journalist, and commentator. He writes for The Mail on Sunday and was a foreign correspondent reporting from both Moscow and Washington, D.C. Hitchens has contributed to The Spectator, The American Conservative, The Guardian, First Things, Prospect, The Critic and the New Statesman.

Hitchens has authored several books critiquing the erosion of British institutions and values, including The Abolition of Britain (1999), which criticises the social and constitutional revolution under New Labour; The Rage Against God (2010), recounting his intellectual journey from Marxist atheism to faith amid the collapse of the Soviet Union and critiquing the New Atheists; The War We Never Fought (2012), criticising drug culture and challenging the idea that there had been a 'war on drugs' in Britain; and The Phoney Victory (2018), which questions and challenges what Hitchens regards as Britain's national myths about the Second World War's legacy.

Previously a Marxist-Trotskyist and supporter of the Labour Party, Hitchens became more conservative during the 1990s. He joined the Conservative Party in 1997 and left in 2003, and has since been deeply critical of the party, which he views as the foremost obstacle to true conservatism in Britain.

Hitchens identifies with an older strain of British conservatism shaped by Burkean scepticism, Christian moral teaching, and a degree of Gaullist national self-assertion, describing himself as a Burkean conservative, a social democrat, and an Anglo-Gaullist. He argues for a strong nation state, local institutions, and a social order grounded in Christian morality, duty, and self-restraint. His conservative positions often place him at odds with late-twentieth-century liberalisation in areas such as family law and drug policy, and he has been a prominent critic of what he sees as the moral and cultural decline in modern Britain and the progressive cultural revolution since the 1960s. He is an advocate of a return to academic selection and the reintroduction of grammar schools into the English education system. He also opposed aspects of the British government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including national lockdown measures and mask mandates, on civil-libertarian and evidential grounds.

Peter Hitchens was born in Sliema, Malta, where his father, Eric Ernest Hitchens (1909–1987), a naval officer, was stationed as part of the then Mediterranean Fleet of the Royal Navy. His mother, Yvonne Jean Hitchens (née Hickman; 1921–1973), had met Eric while serving in the Women's Royal Naval Service (Wrens) during the Second World War. Hitchens has Jewish ancestry via his maternal grandmother, a daughter of Polish Jewish migrants. His grandmother revealed this fact upon meeting his wife Eve Ross. Though his older brother, Christopher, was quick to embrace his Jewish identity following the principle of matrilineal descent, Peter noted that they were only one-32nd Jewish by descent, and has not identified as Jewish himself.

In his youth, Hitchens wanted to be an officer in the Royal Navy, like his father. However, when he was 10, he learned he had a lazy eye that could not be corrected, thereby barring him from service.

Hitchens attended Mount House School, Tavistock, The Prebendal School, Chichester, The Leys School, and the Oxford College of Further Education before being accepted at the University of York, where he studied Philosophy and Politics and was a member of Alcuin College, graduating in 1973.

Hitchens married Eve Ross in 1983. They have a daughter and two sons. Their elder son, Dan, was editor of the Catholic Herald, a London-based Roman Catholic newspaper, and is now Senior Editor of First Things. Hitchens lives with his wife in Oxford.