It would make the Hitch chuckle into his booze. A fine row is brewing between the British Humanist Association and Camden council over a statue of Christopher Hitchens it wants to erect in Red Lion Square.
Emails leaked to the Camden New Journal show a sharp exchange about the author of God Is Not Great, who died of cancer last December.
One councillor, Awale Olad, said he would rather resign than allow it: “I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead but I would resign before I’d ever support the bust of a pro-war Islamophobe.”
The BHA favoured Red Lion Square because it was one of Hitchens’s favourite spots in London and is next to Conway Hall, the scene of many radical debates. It is currently home to a statue of philosopher Bertrand Russell, politician Fenner Brockway, and has a memorial tribute to a victim of the Lockerbie bombing.
Councillor Julian Fulbrook, who represents Holborn, wrote: “My main problem is that Hitch left for the US in 1981 so any link with Red Lion Square is fairly tenuous.”
Objections to Hitchens’s support for the Iraq war were dismissed by the BHA: “Supporting a war doesn’t make someone ‘pro-war’.”
