Many people go through life rehearsing a role they feel the fates have in store for them, and I've long thought, for reasons explained below, that Christopher Hitchens has been asking himself for years how it would feel to plant the Judas kiss. Now, as a Judas and a snitch, Hitchens has made the big time.

At the end of last week, amid the embers of the impeachment trial, he swore out an affidavit that he and his wife had lunch with White House aide Sidney Blumenthal last March 19th and that Blumenthal described Monica Lewinsky as a stalker.

Since Blumenthal had just claimed in his deposition to the House impeachment managers that he had no idea how the stal ker stories had started, Hitchens's affidavit is about as flat a statement as anyone could want that Blumenthal had perjured himself, thus exposing himself to a sentence of up to five years in prison. At the very least, Hitchens has probably cost Blumenthal about $100,000 in fresh legal expenses on top of the $200,000 tab he's already facing. Some friend.

And we are indeed talking about friendship here. They've been pals for years; Hitchens has not been shy about trumpeting the fact. Last spring, when it looked as though Blumenthal was going to be subpoenaed by Independent Counsel Ken Starr for his journalistic contacts, Hitchens blared his readiness to stand shoulder to shoulder with his comrade.

"Together we have soldiered against the neo-conservative rat bags," Hitchens wrote in the Nation. "Our life a deux has been, and remains, an open book. Do your worst. Nothing will prevent me from gnawing a future bone at his table or, I trust, him from gnawing in return."

This was in an edition dated March 30th, which means - given the Nation's publication schedule - that Hitchens was writing these fervently loyal lines shortly before the lunch whose conversational menu Hitchens would be sharing with these same neo-conservative, right-wing ratbags 10 months later.

His friends have known for years that the surest way to get a secret into mass circulation is to tell it to Hitchens, swearing him to silence. He's a compulsive tattler, and this brings me to the psychic preparation that launched him in to the affidavit against his friend.

Over the past couple of years the matter of George Orwell's snitching has come to light. Orwell, in the dawn days of the Cold War and not long before his death, compiled a list of commies and fellow travellers, which he turned over to the British secret police. Orwell is Hitchens's idol, and Hitchens lost no time in defending Orwell in Vanity Fair and the Nation.

Finally, I wrote a Nation column taking the line that Orwell's snitch list was idle gossip, patently racist and anti-Semitic, pre-figuring McCarthyism. Hitchens seemed surprised by my position that snitching is to be shunned by all decent people.

Then, last week, he snitched on Blumenthal, betraying both a friendship and a journalistic confidence. I think he was muddling himself up with Orwell. They deserve each other.

Why did he do it? To Tim Russert on Meet The Press Hitchens said he couldn't let the White House get away with denying it had been in the business of slandering women dangerous to them. There was a moment of pure Hitchens - only he could declare Blumenthal to have lied to Congress and then with his next breath affirm that he "would rather be held in contempt of court" than testify in any separate court action brought against Blumenthal. Even now he seems only vaguely to understand what he has done to his erstwhile pal. Indeed, he still insists on calling Blumenthal his friend, saying that he's saved Sid from his worst self.

Hitchens has always liked to have it both ways, identifying himself as a man of the left while being, as was his hero Orwell, particularly towards the end of his life, a man of the right. "I dare say I'll be cut and shunned," he told the Washington Post, and I had the sense of a halo being tried for size, with Hitchens measuring himself for martyrdom as the only leftist who can think through the moral consequences of Clintonism.

Hitchens has done something despicable. It wasn't so long ago that he was confiding to a Nation colleague that for him the most disgusting aspect of the White House's overall disgusting behaviour was "what they have done to my friend Sidney". He's probably still saying it. Christopher always could cobble up a moral posture out of the most unpromising material.