Peter Hitchens was born in the Crown Colony of Malta, where his father, a career naval officer, was stationed as part of the then Mediterranean Fleet of the Royal Navy. Hitchens originally hoped to become a naval officer himself, but an eye defect prevented him from doing so. He was educated at 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. He later commented that he "must have been a severe disappointment" to his parents after making sure he "would never get into Oxbridge" by sabotaging his own education, through actions which included being arrested breaking into a government fall-out shelter in Cambridge.

Hitchens joined the Conservative Party in 1997, but left in 2003. He challenged Michael Portillo for the Conservative nomination in the Kensington and Chelsea seat in 1999, accusing Portillo of "washy moderation". However, he says that he had "no interest in securing the nomination" and "no chance" of doing so, his real reasons having been to gain book publicity and "to draw attention to Michael Portillo's non-conservative politics".  Hitchens believes that no party he could support will be created until the Conservative Party disintegrates, an event he first began calling for in 2006. From 2008, he claimed that what would facilitate such a collapse would be for the Conservative Party to lose the 2010 general election. In 2012, Hitchens announced he was once more considering standing as a Member of Parliament and called for British citizens to form "small exploratory committees in existing constituencies, under the Justice and Liberty motto".  Hitchens mainly comments on political and religious issues, and generally espouses a social conservative viewpoint. He is deeply pessimistic about recent, present and future Britain and sees himself as Britain's obituarist, writing about what he sees as the death of Britain for future historians to look back on. In 2010 Michael Gove, writing in The Times, asserted that, for Hitchens, what is more important than the split between the Left and the Right is "the deeper gulf between the restless progressive and the Christian pessimist", and in 2010 Hitchens himself wrote "in all my experience in life, I have seldom seen a more powerful argument for the fallen nature of man, and his inability to achieve perfection, than those countries in which man sets himself up to replace God with the State."  In 2009, Anthony Howard wrote of Hitchens, "the old revolutionary socialist has lost nothing of his passion and indignation as the years have passed us all by. It is merely the convictions that have changed, not the fervour and fanaticism with which they continue to be held.".

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