Keith Richards Earns A Great Accolade - Condemnation From Reactionary Peter Hitchens

Regular readers of this blog should know that I'm a massive Stones fan and I'm looking forward to reading the autobiography of this legend of rock n' roll.  He is the walking riff, the embodiment of the rock n' roll spirit, the lynchpin of the greatest band the world has ever seen.



And he has now earned one of the greatest accolades.  He has been savaged by that right wing, reactionary caricature, Peter Hitchens.

Hitchens has described 'Keef' as a "sneering lout who did even more damage than Blair."

Hitchens, living in the shadow of his ultra talented brother, thinks that the world came to a grinding halt in the 1960s.  And the Stones represent everything that he hates.  He seems to think that the exoneration of Jagger and Richards after their drugs trial of 1967 was where everything started to go wrong.

All nonsense of course.  Such an analysis defies logic.  It is, as John Gray argued in the London Review of Books a few months ago, based on romanticising a 1950s created to a large extent by war socialism and the great Attlee government of 1945 (not something Hitchens would ever admit).  Like reactionaries from de Maistre onwards, Hitchens glorifies a golden age that never was.

Keith Richards should feel proud to be the object of Hitchens' ire.