Your conscience defines you

CHARLOTTE GRIMSHAW

- CHARLOTTE GRIMSHAW

In a chapter of Inside Story titled "Politics and the Bedroom", Martin Amis is in Blackpool with fellow writer Christopher Hitchens. It is 1978, and they are covering a party conference for their respective papers. In the pub, Hitchens reports that he nearly got off the night before with the deputy treasurer of the Young Conservatives Association. Only drunkenness could explain this, they agree. Hitchens was always the guy rejecting suitors as insufficiently left wing.

Amis, for his part, felt no correlation between politics and the bedroom. It's hard enough getting there, he says. Why throw obstacles in the way? When Hitchens suggests Amis would have been happy to get off with the Conservatives' deputy treasurer, he replies, "Uh, yeah. As long as she didn't actually goosestep into the bedroom." Trotskyist Hitchens rejects posh girls, too: he says they make him feel guilty, because the arc of history suggests he'll eventually be stringing them up.