There are two types of people in the world. Those who believe in binary divisions and those who don’t.

One of those who used to — all too starkly — was Peter Hitchens. The Mail on Sunday writer is a generator of Marmite journalism — quintessentially English, best when it’s not laid on too thick, and inspiring both devotion and distaste in equal measure. And just as the response to Peter’s work divided readers neatly into fans and enemies, so Peter used to divide the world cleanly into two opposing halves — Left and Right. His drawing of the dividing lines was all the more vivid because he had made the journey from revolutionary student Trotskyist to Tolstoyan Christian Conservative.

But in his latest book, The Broken Compass, Peter argues that the mechanism for deciding what is Left and Right no longer works. The directions in which you could expect political figures to go, based on their party allegiance, are no longer reliable.

Along the way Peter makes some telling points, which are discomfiting reading for conservatives who value grace and civility in our national life. I defy any natural Tory to read his chapter on the railways and not feel nostalgic for what we have lost. When Peter, in a recent column, lamented the growth in the aggressively loutish tailgating culture that sees obedience to the current legal speed limits on the part of careful drivers as a provocation and insult to be met with intimidation and obscenities, I cheered. It was just one, perhaps to some trivial, aspect of a decline in consideration for others, but it illuminates a wider scene. Few writers appreciate, and can anatomise, like Peter, just how a culture of wilfulness, impatience and self-gratification has coarsened our national life.

But the tension between freedom and order, while it absorbs Peter, is not the heart of his book. The real confusion between Left and Right that concerns him is the way in which the War on Terror shook up old allegiances. When Charles Moore and Nick Cohen applaud the invasion of Iraq while Peter Hitchens and Harold Pinter oppose, the only thing that remains certain is that we’re in for some fantastic polemic.

Of course, while these precise alliances are unprecedented, our history is rich with examples of conflicts provoking realignments. While Peter objects to the fellow-travelling of churchgoing neocons with muscular liberals, he skips lightly over the 1930s alliance between the old Imperialist Churchill and the trade unionists who opposed appeasement. Throughout the 19th century both parties, Liberal and Conservative, had isolationists and expansionists, arguing against each other within their own ranks. Foreign policy has always had the potential to make party lines blur.

Of course, if we are thinking of the curious new alignments that the Iraq war created, few are as striking as the embrace of George W. Bush by Peter’s elder brother, Christopher. The story of the militant atheist and “drink-soaked Trotskyist popinjay” Christopher joining the teetotal and born-again Bible- belt Republican Dubya, and finding himself fighting a new ideological battle against his deeply Anglican brother Peter, is a compelling drama crying out for a sharper pen than my own.

Peter’s, in fact. For those of you who may not like his journalism, let me assure you that this book has some passages of quite brilliant writing and it is at its best when Peter reflects on his own life and his disillusionment with the left-wing ideology of his youth. I long to see him take the next stage in his writer’s journey and examine, with his unsparing honesty, the rich human reality of the division he believes is now more important than the split between Left and Right — the deeper gulf between the restless progressive and the Christian pessimist. This division, the difference between between Prometheus and St Paul, the chasm that divides Shelley from T. S. Eliot, Lloyd George from Lord Salisbury, is nowhere better encapsulated than in the contrast between Hitchens major and minor. While Peter may feel that the choice between Left and Right needs proper definition, for many of us the choice between Christopher Hitchens and Peter Hitchens is the truly difficult one to make.

A word in your Shell-like

It’s hard, as a father of children under 6, to attach any idea of romance to long car journeys. And, as Peter Hitchens reminds us, contemporary road use involves a descent into a world where the Hobbesian vision of a brutal war of all against all becomes a daily reality.

But there is a way to restore enchantment to driving. Acquire any one of the (now sadly out of print) Shell Guides to the British Isles. In a recent trip to Wales the landscape became populated with heroes from the past, the buildings spoke to us, and beguiling diversions down neglected B roads took us to overlooked wildernesses of breathtaking beauty.

If any oil, sorry “energy”, company out there really wants to burnish its public image, it could do far worse than reissue the Shell Guides. It would be a sign of commitment to driving as a way of honouring our shared environment, rather than shutting yourself off in an air-conditioned, temperature-controlled environment of your own creation.

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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