Right on cue, Peter Wilby has an hilariously self-righteous piece in today's Guardian, 'When lefties turn to the right'. Wilby asks a question:

So what are we to make of Nick Cohen, the most uncompromising left-wing columnist in the British press for most of the past decade? How far right is he going? He cheered the Bush/Blair invasion of Iraq and, despite all that has happened and all that has been revealed since, continues to do so. He has also questioned harshly the motives of the anti-war movement. More recently, he has declared opposition to comprehensives and support for the return of grammar schools.

His column in the London Evening Standard last Tuesday revealed what looks like another rightwards lurch, and perhaps the most dramatic yet, given Cohen's history as an eloquent defender of civil liberties. Judges who try to stop Muslim clerics being deported unlawfully, he argued, are wrong. He quoted the case of Hani Youssef, allegedly a member of Islamic Jihad. This was the case that caused the prime minister, when informed of difficulties in the courts, to scribble furiously: "This is crazy. Why can't we press on?" Cohen is with Blair. Youssef should go back to Egypt, he insists, even though he has no chance of getting a fair trial.

And then he trots out the case of Christopher Hitchens who - quelle horreur - 'since September 11 2001, has stood shoulder to shoulder with the American neocons'.

Wilby goes on to ask why these traitors to the left behave as they do:

Perhaps some just follow the cliché that if you are not a socialist up to 40, you have no heart and, if you are still one after 40, you have no head. Others find that property ownership or parenthood make them right-wing. Others again get mugged or burgled. I suspect a good many just want more income; after all, there are only a few left-of-centre newspapers and magazines and most of them pay badly, or not at all. But I fear there is another reason. Leftwing commentators get bored.

Of course it never crosses Wilby's mind that Cohen et al might not simply be bored or looking for some extra dosh, but might actually believe that progressive politics should be about freeing people from tyranny, resisting murderous terrorists who seek to destroy civilisation and impose a Caliphate, and defending Western liberties. It is of course inconceivable that it is the left which has lost its moorings, not Cohen and Hitchens.