Peregrine Worsthorne
Encyclopedia
Sir Peregrine Gerard Worsthorne (born 22 December 1923) is a British
journalist, writer and broadcaster. He was educated at Stowe School
, Peterhouse, Cambridge
and Magdalen College
, Oxford. Worsthorne spent the largest part of his career at the Telegraph newspaper titles, eventually becoming editor of The Sunday Telegraph. He left the newspaper in 1997 but remains an active contributor to various publications.
, an English Roman Catholic and the granddaughter of the 12th Earl of Abingdon
. The family name was anglicised following the birth of Worsthorne's older brother Simon Towneley
(later the Lord Lieutenant
of Lancashire
from 1976 to 1996). The two boys were baptized Roman Catholic, but did not attend Catholic denominational school.
Worsthorne's mother divorced his father when he was five years old, and she would soon marry Sir Montagu Norman
, then the Governor of the Bank of England
. As a consequence of the split, the family butler effectively raised the two brothers for several years. "Unhappy as some of my formative experiences were, all in all, it was pretty good soil for someone wanting to go into public life", he would later recall, commenting on the tradition of public duty and service so prevalent in his family and his family's social circle.
Worsthorne's biological father reverted his name to Koch de Gooreynd in 1937 and lived in Rhodesia
for several years; Worsthorne discovered in the early 1960s that a half-brother was born during this period.
Worsthorne wrote that while at Stowe he was once seduced by a fellow pupil, the jazz singer and writer George Melly
, on the art room chaise-longue, an accusation that Melly always denied. Perry went on to Peterhouse, Cambridge in 1942, having won an exhibition to read History. The master of Peterhouse at that time was the Conservative academic Herbert Butterfield
. As was normal practice Worsthorne was called up for war service after three terms; Worsthorne was rusticated
during the last term. However, in army training he injured his shoulder and after being admitted to a hospital in Oxford was able to persuade Magdalen College
to admit him for a term.
He saw active service in Phantom
during the Italian campaign
with the philosopher Michael Oakeshott
, and was part of the occupying force in Hamburg
for three months in 1945. Worsthorne returned to Peterhouse and took his degree a year early, gaining a Second. Michael Portillo
's admission of youthful same-sex relationships in 1999 caused Worsthorne to reminisce on his own experience while at Cambridge (though he had mentioned it before in his 1993 biography).
graduates. He then worked for The Times
from 1948 on the Foreign Desk, again as a sub-editor in his first year there. During this time at one point he was called in to the office of the newspaper's editor William Casey
, who then told him: "Dear Boy, The Times is a stable of hacks and a thoroughbred like you will never be at home here".
He became a correspondent in Washington (1950–52), where his admiration for Senator Joe McCarthy's pursuit of communist subversion in the United States government eventually led to a split with the more circumspect Times, and, in 1953, he joined the Daily Telegraph. Despite moving to a newspaper more suited to his politics, Worsthorne nevertheless left The Times with some regret, feeling that working for any other title in Fleet Street
could only be anti-climactic, and that working conditions at The Telegraph were inferior to those at The Times, then based at Printing House Square
. At this time he also contributed articles to the magazine Encounter
(then covertly funded by the CIA
).
In a November 1954 article discussing McCarthyism titled "America: Conscience or Shield?", he wrote that America's flaws were something the British would have to accept for their own benefit, because: "legend created an American god. The god has failed. But unlike the Communist god which, on closer examination, turned out to be a devil, the American god has just become human". More recently he favourably compared a post-war America which "put its faith in the [intellectual elites]" over a Britain dedicated to the "masses".
. In due course though, he became a leading columnist on his newspaper, taking a conservative High-Tory stance.
Worsthorne mourned the loss of the British Empire; he once argued that the public's acceptance of decolonisation was paralleled by their acquiescence to socialism. Of the Six-Day War
in 1967 he wrote an article titled "Triumph of the Civilised":
The following year, after Enoch Powell
's speech in April 1968 on the perceived threat of non-white immigration, he argued that voluntary repatriation was the "only honest course".
More recently, in common with his friend, the journalist Paul Johnson, he has advocated the recolonisation of former colonies, in Worsthorne's case, the "poor countries" of Africa
. In 1965 though, he had defended the declaration of UDI
by the white-minority government of Ian Smith
. Worsthorne, in an article on the Sunday following the declaration, wrote:
Worsthorne initially accepted Britain's entry into the European Economic Community
(now the European Union). After the publication of the Heath
Government's 1971 White Paper
, he wrote in a Daily Telegraph column that the "Europeans" deserved to win in the battle over British entry. "The sceptics have failed to produce an alternative faith", he argued. However, by the time of the Single European Act in 1992 he wrote: "Twenty years ago, when the process began, […] there was no question of losing sovereignty. That was a lie, or at any rate, a dishonest obfuscation", in contradiction of the Treaty of Rome
's commitment (1957) to an "ever closer union".
On the BBC
's Nationwide
programme in March 1973, he was the second person on the nation's television to say "fuck", when asked if the general public were concerned that a Conservative Government minister Lord Lambton (his future father-in-law) had shared a bed with two call girls. Improbably, Worsthorne was preceded by Kenneth Tynan
(in 1965) and followed by the Sex Pistols
(in December 1976) in breaking this particular taboo. It was to cost him the opportunity to edit the Daily Telegraph, as its then owner Lord Hartwell
strongly objected to Worsthorne's comment and was persuaded to bar him from appearing on television for six months. Worsthorne was, nevertheless, promoted to Associate Editor in 1976.
Worsthorne argued in 1978 that the possible advance of "socialism" created an "urgent need ... for the state to regain control over 'the people', to re-exert its authority..." in the context of Britain "being allowed to spin into chaos". He was critical of Mrs Thatcher's connection of domestic socialism with the form in the Eastern bloc as he did not perceive this as being in line with the experiences of most of the population (the "untalented majority"). He saw "the needs and values of the strong" as something which "should obsess the popular imagination" of "all healthy societies". He defended the conduct of Pinochet's
forces in the 1973 Chile
an coup, and wrote that he hoped the British army would launch a coup in Britain if a radical minority socialist government should ever enter power.
In 1978 Worsthorne did not see the potential for elements of his views (the end of socialism as an alternative in Britain) to be reflected in the forthcoming change of government (in what the political scientist Andrew Gamble
came to call "the free economy and the strong state"), possibly because Perry's core sensibilities pre-dated the development of capitalism
. In the year before Thatcher's election he wrote that her government "is not going to make all that much difference... Her proposals amount in effect to very little: a controlled experiment in using market methods to improve the workings of social democracy".
Worsthorne has since come to criticise quite strongly the legacy of Margaret Thatcher
's government; during the 1980s, his ambivalence to what he saw as her "bourgeois triumphalism" resulted in Worsthorne and the Telegraph being out of favour at 10 Downing Street
for some time. More recently in 2005 he argued that Thatcher's "utterly un-Tory ideological excesses left such a bad taste in the mouth of the English people as to make Conservatism henceforth unpalatable, except as a last resort in the absence of a less dire alternative". He added: "For many of our people, life in the late 20th and in the 21st Century will be repulsive, brutal, and short as well."
After Conrad Black's
holding company gained 80% of the company stock in 1986, Worsthorne was finally able to become editor of The Sunday Telegraph, though in the end only for three years. In 1989 the Telegraph titles briefly became a seven-day operation under Max Hastings
, with the bulk of the Sunday Telegraph edited by Trevor Grove
. Worsthorne's responsibilities were reduced to the three comment pages by the editor-in-Chief Andrew Knight
. The lofty ethos of the comment pages, with contributors including Bruce Anderson, was captured in their nickname, 'Worsthorne College'. This arrangement continued until September 1991 when Worsthorne's commitments were reduced to solely his weekly column.
Despite his own experience at his public school, Worsthorne long criticised homosexual activity, castigating Roy Jenkins
in particular in an 1982 editorial, for his tolerance of "queers". At the time of the debate over Section 28
in January 1988 he appeared on BBC Radio Three's
Third Ear programme and persistently referred to gay men as "them", which caused the other interviewee, Ian McKellen
to come out
by saying, "I'm one of them myself". Worsthorne also said on the programme that not being gay was "a close-run thing" for some of his contemporaries.
He now accepts the possibility of same sex marriages, believing they allow gay people to form "stable relationships" and even argued that Conservatives should embrace political correctness
as a form of modern courtesy.
In 1990 Worsthorne was the defendant in a libel case brought by Andrew Neil
and The Sunday Times
, over an editorial in The Sunday Telegraph which claimed that as a result of Neil's involvement with Pamella Bordes
, "playboys" should not be editors. Neil won the defamation case, but with relatively derisory damages of £1,000, and his paper won 60p, its then cover price.
. From that point, Worsthorne became critical of Black for his newspapers' unsparing defence of Israel
and the foreign policies of the United States. In a speech at the Athenaeum Club
on 19 June 2006 he asserted that: "The liberal argument for the importance of a free press was that it gave voters the necessary information on which they could vote intelligently. Of all British newspapers today, only The Guardian even tries to do that." The previous year Worsthorn complained that the Telegraph was becoming a "a cloned new version of the Daily Mail which represents English conservatism at its very nastiest".
On the changing Britain, he has said that, "this is not a country I recognise or am particularly fond of any more", and that he no longer views himself as a nationalist. Worsthorne has embraced the Euro federalist option for Britain's future.
He has also changed his view of the acceptability of the nuclear deterrence: "would some historian emerging centuries later from the post thermonuclear war Dark Ages have judged (pressing the button) morally justified, or so evil as to dwarf even the most monstrous inequities of Hitler, Stalin and Mao?... How could we have believed anything so preposterous?".
Although on the political right, Worsthorne regularly contributes book reviews to the New Statesman
. In his 2005 In Defence of Aristocracy, he commented that, "a commitment to goodwill is what is missing today in all walks of life, public and private." He goes on to say that this commitment should take the place of aspirational objectives that may be excuses for mere greed, and that "there will be no revival of the Tory cause until once again it can be associated with noble ideals in all walks of life, high as well as low".
In the Athenaeum Club speech cited above (published as Liberalism failed to set us free. Indeed, it enslaved us) he noted that the emergence of David Cameron
in a positive light, seeing in him "the return of the English gentleman." His criticism of modern liberalism mirrors some of the concerns of a younger generation of conservative journalists such as Peter Hitchens
and Melanie Phillips
, but his affinity for The Guardian and Cameron is not shared by them.
He writes a regular opinion column called "Kind of Blue" for the online newsmagazine
The First Post
.
. The couple live in Buckinghamshire
.
His daughter, Dominique, is married to the potter Jim Keeling and they have five children and two grand-children.
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
journalist, writer and broadcaster. He was educated at Stowe School
Stowe School
Stowe School is an independent school in Stowe, Buckinghamshire. It was founded on 11 May 1923 by J. F. Roxburgh, initially with 99 male pupils. It is a member of the Rugby Group and Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference. The school is also a member of the G20 Schools Group...
, Peterhouse, Cambridge
Peterhouse, Cambridge
Peterhouse is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. It is the oldest college of the University, having been founded in 1284 by Hugo de Balsham, Bishop of Ely...
and Magdalen College
Magdalen College, Oxford
Magdalen College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. As of 2006 the college had an estimated financial endowment of £153 million. Magdalen is currently top of the Norrington Table after over half of its 2010 finalists received first-class degrees, a record...
, Oxford. Worsthorne spent the largest part of his career at the Telegraph newspaper titles, eventually becoming editor of The Sunday Telegraph. He left the newspaper in 1997 but remains an active contributor to various publications.
Early life, school, and military service
Peregrine Worsthorne was born the younger son of Alexander Koch de Gooreynd (himself the son of a Belgian banker) and Priscilla ReyntiensPriscilla Reyntiens
Priscilla Cecilia Maria Reyntiens, The Lady Norman, CBE, JP was a London councillor, board member, and supporter of mental health and nursing institutions....
, an English Roman Catholic and the granddaughter of the 12th Earl of Abingdon
Earl of Abingdon
Earl of Abingdon is a title in the Peerage of England. It was created on 30 November 1682 for James Bertie, 5th Baron Norreys of Rycote. He was the eldest son of Montagu Bertie, 2nd Earl of Lindsey by his second marriage to Bridget, 4th Baroness Norreys de Rycote, and the younger half-brother of...
. The family name was anglicised following the birth of Worsthorne's older brother Simon Towneley
Simon Towneley
Sir Simon Peter Edmund Cosmo William Towneley, KCVO, KCSG was born with the surname Koch de Gooreynd, the elder son of a British father of Belgian stock, Alexander L.W...
(later the Lord Lieutenant
Lord Lieutenant
The title Lord Lieutenant is given to the British monarch's personal representatives in the United Kingdom, usually in a county or similar circumscription, with varying tasks throughout history. Usually a retired local notable, senior military officer, peer or business person is given the post...
of Lancashire
Lancashire
Lancashire is a non-metropolitan county of historic origin in the North West of England. It takes its name from the city of Lancaster, and is sometimes known as the County of Lancaster. Although Lancaster is still considered to be the county town, Lancashire County Council is based in Preston...
from 1976 to 1996). The two boys were baptized Roman Catholic, but did not attend Catholic denominational school.
Worsthorne's mother divorced his father when he was five years old, and she would soon marry Sir Montagu Norman
Montagu Norman
Montagu Collet Norman, 1st Baron Norman DSO PC was an English banker, best known for his role as the Governor of the Bank of England from 1920 to 1944...
, then the Governor of the Bank of England
Bank of England
The Bank of England is the central bank of the United Kingdom and the model on which most modern central banks have been based. Established in 1694, it is the second oldest central bank in the world...
. As a consequence of the split, the family butler effectively raised the two brothers for several years. "Unhappy as some of my formative experiences were, all in all, it was pretty good soil for someone wanting to go into public life", he would later recall, commenting on the tradition of public duty and service so prevalent in his family and his family's social circle.
Worsthorne's biological father reverted his name to Koch de Gooreynd in 1937 and lived in Rhodesia
Rhodesia
Rhodesia , officially the Republic of Rhodesia from 1970, was an unrecognised state located in southern Africa that existed between 1965 and 1979 following its Unilateral Declaration of Independence from the United Kingdom on 11 November 1965...
for several years; Worsthorne discovered in the early 1960s that a half-brother was born during this period.
Worsthorne wrote that while at Stowe he was once seduced by a fellow pupil, the jazz singer and writer George Melly
George Melly
Alan George Heywood Melly was an English jazz and blues singer, critic, writer and lecturer. From 1965 to 1973 he was a film and television critic for The Observer and lectured on art history, with an emphasis on surrealism.-Early life and career:He was born in Liverpool and was educated at Stowe...
, on the art room chaise-longue, an accusation that Melly always denied. Perry went on to Peterhouse, Cambridge in 1942, having won an exhibition to read History. The master of Peterhouse at that time was the Conservative academic Herbert Butterfield
Herbert Butterfield
Sir Herbert Butterfield was a British historian and philosopher of history who is remembered chiefly for two books—a short volume early in his career entitled The Whig Interpretation of History and his Origins of Modern Science...
. As was normal practice Worsthorne was called up for war service after three terms; Worsthorne was rusticated
Rustication (academia)
Rustication is a term used at Oxbridge to mean being sent down or expelled temporarily. The term derives from the Latin word rus, countryside, to indicate that a student has been sent back to their family in the country, or from medieval Latin rustici, meaning "heathens or barbarians"...
during the last term. However, in army training he injured his shoulder and after being admitted to a hospital in Oxford was able to persuade Magdalen College
Magdalen College, Oxford
Magdalen College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. As of 2006 the college had an estimated financial endowment of £153 million. Magdalen is currently top of the Norrington Table after over half of its 2010 finalists received first-class degrees, a record...
to admit him for a term.
He saw active service in Phantom
GHQ Liaison Regiment
GHQ Liaison Regiment was a special reconnaissance unit first formed in 1939 during the early stages of World War II and based at Pembroke Lodge, a Georgian house in Richmond Park, London.- History :...
during the Italian campaign
Italian Campaign (World War II)
The Italian Campaign of World War II was the name of Allied operations in and around Italy, from 1943 to the end of the war in Europe. Joint Allied Forces Headquarters AFHQ was operationally responsible for all Allied land forces in the Mediterranean theatre, and it planned and commanded the...
with the philosopher Michael Oakeshott
Michael Oakeshott
Michael Joseph Oakeshott was an English philosopher and political theorist who wrote about philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and philosophy of law...
, and was part of the occupying force in Hamburg
Hamburg
-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...
for three months in 1945. Worsthorne returned to Peterhouse and took his degree a year early, gaining a Second. Michael Portillo
Michael Portillo
Michael Denzil Xavier Portillo is a British journalist, broadcaster, and former Conservative Party politician and Cabinet Minister...
's admission of youthful same-sex relationships in 1999 caused Worsthorne to reminisce on his own experience while at Cambridge (though he had mentioned it before in his 1993 biography).
Early career in journalism
Worsthorne entered the newspaper industry as a sub-editor on the Glasgow Herald in 1946, on a two-year training program for OxbridgeOxbridge
Oxbridge is a portmanteau of the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge in England, and the term is now used to refer to them collectively, often with implications of perceived superior social status...
graduates. He then worked for The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
from 1948 on the Foreign Desk, again as a sub-editor in his first year there. During this time at one point he was called in to the office of the newspaper's editor William Casey
William Francis Casey
William Francis Casey was a journalist and editor of The TimesHe was born in Cape Town, the son of Patrick Joseph Casey, theatre proprietor, of Glenageary, and was educated at Castleknock College and Trinity College, Dublin....
, who then told him: "Dear Boy, The Times is a stable of hacks and a thoroughbred like you will never be at home here".
He became a correspondent in Washington (1950–52), where his admiration for Senator Joe McCarthy's pursuit of communist subversion in the United States government eventually led to a split with the more circumspect Times, and, in 1953, he joined the Daily Telegraph. Despite moving to a newspaper more suited to his politics, Worsthorne nevertheless left The Times with some regret, feeling that working for any other title in Fleet Street
Fleet Street
Fleet Street is a street in central London, United Kingdom, named after the River Fleet, a stream that now flows underground. It was the home of the British press until the 1980s...
could only be anti-climactic, and that working conditions at The Telegraph were inferior to those at The Times, then based at Printing House Square
Printing House Square
Printing House Square is a London court, so called from the former office of the King's Printer which occupied the site. For many years, the office of The Times stood on the site, until it relocated to Gray's Inn Road and later to Wapping....
. At this time he also contributed articles to the magazine Encounter
Encounter (magazine)
Encounter was a literary magazine, founded in 1953 by poet Stephen Spender and early neoconservative author Irving Kristol. The magazine ceased publication in 1991...
(then covertly funded by the CIA
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...
).
In a November 1954 article discussing McCarthyism titled "America: Conscience or Shield?", he wrote that America's flaws were something the British would have to accept for their own benefit, because: "legend created an American god. The god has failed. But unlike the Communist god which, on closer examination, turned out to be a devil, the American god has just become human". More recently he favourably compared a post-war America which "put its faith in the [intellectual elites]" over a Britain dedicated to the "masses".
At The Sunday Telegraph
In 1961, Worsthorne was appointed as the first deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph; a job with fewer responsibilities than its title implies, and in his autobiography Worsthorne expresses some regret that he rejected an offer to become editor of The Yorkshire PostYorkshire Post
The Yorkshire Post is a daily broadsheet newspaper, published in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England by Yorkshire Post Newspapers, a company owned by Johnston Press...
. In due course though, he became a leading columnist on his newspaper, taking a conservative High-Tory stance.
Worsthorne mourned the loss of the British Empire; he once argued that the public's acceptance of decolonisation was paralleled by their acquiescence to socialism. Of the Six-Day War
Six-Day War
The Six-Day War , also known as the June War, 1967 Arab-Israeli War, or Third Arab-Israeli War, was fought between June 5 and 10, 1967, by Israel and the neighboring states of Egypt , Jordan, and Syria...
in 1967 he wrote an article titled "Triumph of the Civilised":
The following year, after Enoch Powell
Enoch Powell
John Enoch Powell, MBE was a British politician, classical scholar, poet, writer, and soldier. He served as a Conservative Party MP and Minister of Health . He attained most prominence in 1968, when he made the controversial Rivers of Blood speech in opposition to mass immigration from...
's speech in April 1968 on the perceived threat of non-white immigration, he argued that voluntary repatriation was the "only honest course".
More recently, in common with his friend, the journalist Paul Johnson, he has advocated the recolonisation of former colonies, in Worsthorne's case, the "poor countries" of Africa
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
. In 1965 though, he had defended the declaration of UDI
Unilateral Declaration of Independence (Rhodesia)
The Unilateral Declaration of Independence of Rhodesia from the United Kingdom was signed on November 11, 1965, by the administration of Ian Smith, whose Rhodesian Front party opposed black majority rule in the then British colony. Although it declared independence from the United Kingdom it...
by the white-minority government of Ian Smith
Ian Smith
Ian Douglas Smith GCLM ID was a politician active in the government of Southern Rhodesia, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Rhodesia, Zimbabwe Rhodesia and Zimbabwe from 1948 to 1987, most notably serving as Prime Minister of Rhodesia from 13 April 1964 to 1 June 1979...
. Worsthorne, in an article on the Sunday following the declaration, wrote:
Worsthorne initially accepted Britain's entry into the European Economic Community
European Economic Community
The European Economic Community The European Economic Community (EEC) The European Economic Community (EEC) (also known as the Common Market in the English-speaking world, renamed the European Community (EC) in 1993The information in this article primarily covers the EEC's time as an independent...
(now the European Union). After the publication of the Heath
Edward Heath
Sir Edward Richard George "Ted" Heath, KG, MBE, PC was a British Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and as Leader of the Conservative Party ....
Government's 1971 White Paper
White paper
A white paper is an authoritative report or guide that helps solve a problem. White papers are used to educate readers and help people make decisions, and are often requested and used in politics, policy, business, and technical fields. In commercial use, the term has also come to refer to...
, he wrote in a Daily Telegraph column that the "Europeans" deserved to win in the battle over British entry. "The sceptics have failed to produce an alternative faith", he argued. However, by the time of the Single European Act in 1992 he wrote: "Twenty years ago, when the process began, […] there was no question of losing sovereignty. That was a lie, or at any rate, a dishonest obfuscation", in contradiction of the Treaty of Rome
Treaty of Rome
The Treaty of Rome, officially the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community, was an international agreement that led to the founding of the European Economic Community on 1 January 1958. It was signed on 25 March 1957 by Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany...
's commitment (1957) to an "ever closer union".
On the BBC
BBC Television
BBC Television is a service of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The corporation, which has operated in the United Kingdom under the terms of a Royal Charter since 1927, has produced television programmes from its own studios since 1932, although the start of its regular service of television...
's Nationwide
Nationwide (TV series)
Nationwide was a BBC News and Current affairs television programme broadcast on BBC One each weekday following the early evening news. It followed a magazine format, combining political analysis and discussion with consumer affairs, light entertainment and sports reporting...
programme in March 1973, he was the second person on the nation's television to say "fuck", when asked if the general public were concerned that a Conservative Government minister Lord Lambton (his future father-in-law) had shared a bed with two call girls. Improbably, Worsthorne was preceded by Kenneth Tynan
Kenneth Tynan
Kenneth Peacock Tynan was an influential and often controversial English theatre critic and writer.-Early life:...
(in 1965) and followed by the Sex Pistols
Sex Pistols
The Sex Pistols were an English punk rock band that formed in London in 1975. They were responsible for initiating the punk movement in the United Kingdom and inspiring many later punk and alternative rock musicians...
(in December 1976) in breaking this particular taboo. It was to cost him the opportunity to edit the Daily Telegraph, as its then owner Lord Hartwell
Michael Berry, Baron Hartwell
William Michael Berry, 3rd Viscount Camrose and Baron Hartwell MBE was a newspaper proprietor and journalist.Michael Berry was the second son of the 1st Viscount Camrose. He succeeded his brother Seymour Berry, 2nd Viscount Camrose as Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph...
strongly objected to Worsthorne's comment and was persuaded to bar him from appearing on television for six months. Worsthorne was, nevertheless, promoted to Associate Editor in 1976.
Worsthorne argued in 1978 that the possible advance of "socialism" created an "urgent need ... for the state to regain control over 'the people', to re-exert its authority..." in the context of Britain "being allowed to spin into chaos". He was critical of Mrs Thatcher's connection of domestic socialism with the form in the Eastern bloc as he did not perceive this as being in line with the experiences of most of the population (the "untalented majority"). He saw "the needs and values of the strong" as something which "should obsess the popular imagination" of "all healthy societies". He defended the conduct of Pinochet's
Augusto Pinochet
Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte, more commonly known as Augusto Pinochet , was a Chilean army general and dictator who assumed power in a coup d'état on 11 September 1973...
forces in the 1973 Chile
Chile
Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...
an coup, and wrote that he hoped the British army would launch a coup in Britain if a radical minority socialist government should ever enter power.
In 1978 Worsthorne did not see the potential for elements of his views (the end of socialism as an alternative in Britain) to be reflected in the forthcoming change of government (in what the political scientist Andrew Gamble
Andrew Gamble
Andrew Gamble FBA, AcSS, FRSA is a British author and academic. Since January 2007 he has been Professor of Politics at the University of Cambridge...
came to call "the free economy and the strong state"), possibly because Perry's core sensibilities pre-dated the development of capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
. In the year before Thatcher's election he wrote that her government "is not going to make all that much difference... Her proposals amount in effect to very little: a controlled experiment in using market methods to improve the workings of social democracy".
Worsthorne has since come to criticise quite strongly the legacy of Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990...
's government; during the 1980s, his ambivalence to what he saw as her "bourgeois triumphalism" resulted in Worsthorne and the Telegraph being out of favour at 10 Downing Street
10 Downing Street
10 Downing Street, colloquially known in the United Kingdom as "Number 10", is the headquarters of Her Majesty's Government and the official residence and office of the First Lord of the Treasury, who is now always the Prime Minister....
for some time. More recently in 2005 he argued that Thatcher's "utterly un-Tory ideological excesses left such a bad taste in the mouth of the English people as to make Conservatism henceforth unpalatable, except as a last resort in the absence of a less dire alternative". He added: "For many of our people, life in the late 20th and in the 21st Century will be repulsive, brutal, and short as well."
After Conrad Black's
Conrad Black
Conrad Moffat Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour, OC, KCSG, PC is a Canadian-born member of the British House of Lords, and a historian, columnist and publisher, who was for a time the third largest newspaper magnate in the world. Lord Black controlled Hollinger International, Inc...
holding company gained 80% of the company stock in 1986, Worsthorne was finally able to become editor of The Sunday Telegraph, though in the end only for three years. In 1989 the Telegraph titles briefly became a seven-day operation under Max Hastings
Max Hastings
Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings, FRSL is a British journalist, editor, historian and author. He is the son of Macdonald Hastings, the noted British journalist and war correspondent and Anne Scott-James, sometime editor of Harper's Bazaar.-Life and career:Hastings was educated at Charterhouse...
, with the bulk of the Sunday Telegraph edited by Trevor Grove
Trevor Grove
Trevor Grove is a British journalist and former editor of The Sunday Telegraph .Raised and educated in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Grove was appointed editor of The Sunday Telegraph on 3 October 1989 under Max Hastings, then editor-in-chief of both the daily and Sunday titles...
. Worsthorne's responsibilities were reduced to the three comment pages by the editor-in-Chief Andrew Knight
Andrew Knight
Andrew Stephen Bower Knight is a journalist, editor, and director of News Corporation.-Career:He joined The Economist Magazine in 1966 on the international business and investment sections...
. The lofty ethos of the comment pages, with contributors including Bruce Anderson, was captured in their nickname, 'Worsthorne College'. This arrangement continued until September 1991 when Worsthorne's commitments were reduced to solely his weekly column.
Despite his own experience at his public school, Worsthorne long criticised homosexual activity, castigating Roy Jenkins
Roy Jenkins
Roy Harris Jenkins, Baron Jenkins of Hillhead OM, PC was a British politician.The son of a Welsh coal miner who later became a union official and Labour MP, Roy Jenkins served with distinction in World War II. Elected to Parliament as a Labour member in 1948, he served in several major posts in...
in particular in an 1982 editorial, for his tolerance of "queers". At the time of the debate over Section 28
Section 28
Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 caused the controversial addition of Section 2A to the Local Government Act 1986 , enacted on 24 May 1988 and repealed on 21 June 2000 in Scotland, and on 18 November 2003 in the rest of Great Britain by section 122 of the Local Government Act 2003...
in January 1988 he appeared on BBC Radio Three's
BBC Radio 3
BBC Radio 3 is a national radio station operated by the BBC within the United Kingdom. Its output centres on classical music and opera, but jazz, world music, drama, culture and the arts also feature. The station is the world’s most significant commissioner of new music, and its New Generation...
Third Ear programme and persistently referred to gay men as "them", which caused the other interviewee, Ian McKellen
Ian McKellen
Sir Ian Murray McKellen, CH, CBE is an English actor. He has received a Tony Award, two Academy Award nominations, and five Emmy Award nominations. His work has spanned genres from Shakespearean and modern theatre to popular fantasy and science fiction...
to come out
Coming out
Coming out is a figure of speech for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people's disclosure of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity....
by saying, "I'm one of them myself". Worsthorne also said on the programme that not being gay was "a close-run thing" for some of his contemporaries.
He now accepts the possibility of same sex marriages, believing they allow gay people to form "stable relationships" and even argued that Conservatives should embrace political correctness
Political correctness
Political correctness is a term which denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, certain other religions, beliefs or ideologies, disability, and age-related contexts,...
as a form of modern courtesy.
In 1990 Worsthorne was the defendant in a libel case brought by Andrew Neil
Andrew Neil
Andrew Ferguson Neil is a Scottish journalist and broadcaster.He currently works for the BBC, presenting the live political programmes The Daily Politics and This Week...
and The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times (UK)
The Sunday Times is a Sunday broadsheet newspaper, distributed in the United Kingdom. The Sunday Times is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of News International, which is in turn owned by News Corporation. Times Newspapers also owns The Times, but the two papers were founded...
, over an editorial in The Sunday Telegraph which claimed that as a result of Neil's involvement with Pamella Bordes
Pamella Bordes
Pamella Chaudry Singh , known during her marriage as Pamella Bordes is an Indian-born photographer and former Miss India who briefly hit the headlines in the United Kingdom in 1988 and 1989 as the mistress and escort of several notable individuals, including arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi...
, "playboys" should not be editors. Neil won the defamation case, but with relatively derisory damages of £1,000, and his paper won 60p, its then cover price.
Recent years
Worsthorne's column in the Sunday Telegraph was discontinued in 1997 during the editorship of Dominic LawsonDominic Lawson
Dominic Ralph Campden Lawson is a British journalist.-Background:Educated at Westminster School and then Christ Church, Oxford, he is the elder son of a former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Lawson and socialite Vanessa Salmon, heir to the Lyons Corner House empire, who died of...
. From that point, Worsthorne became critical of Black for his newspapers' unsparing defence of Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
and the foreign policies of the United States. In a speech at the Athenaeum Club
Athenaeum Club, London
The Athenaeum Club, usually just referred to as the Athenaeum, is a notable London club with its Clubhouse located at 107 Pall Mall, London, England, at the corner of Waterloo Place....
on 19 June 2006 he asserted that: "The liberal argument for the importance of a free press was that it gave voters the necessary information on which they could vote intelligently. Of all British newspapers today, only The Guardian even tries to do that." The previous year Worsthorn complained that the Telegraph was becoming a "a cloned new version of the Daily Mail which represents English conservatism at its very nastiest".
On the changing Britain, he has said that, "this is not a country I recognise or am particularly fond of any more", and that he no longer views himself as a nationalist. Worsthorne has embraced the Euro federalist option for Britain's future.
He has also changed his view of the acceptability of the nuclear deterrence: "would some historian emerging centuries later from the post thermonuclear war Dark Ages have judged (pressing the button) morally justified, or so evil as to dwarf even the most monstrous inequities of Hitler, Stalin and Mao?... How could we have believed anything so preposterous?".
Although on the political right, Worsthorne regularly contributes book reviews to the New Statesman
New Statesman
New Statesman is a British centre-left political and cultural magazine published weekly in London. Founded in 1913, and connected with leading members of the Fabian Society, the magazine reached a circulation peak in the late 1960s....
. In his 2005 In Defence of Aristocracy, he commented that, "a commitment to goodwill is what is missing today in all walks of life, public and private." He goes on to say that this commitment should take the place of aspirational objectives that may be excuses for mere greed, and that "there will be no revival of the Tory cause until once again it can be associated with noble ideals in all walks of life, high as well as low".
In the Athenaeum Club speech cited above (published as Liberalism failed to set us free. Indeed, it enslaved us) he noted that the emergence of David Cameron
David Cameron
David William Donald Cameron is the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, First Lord of the Treasury, Minister for the Civil Service and Leader of the Conservative Party. Cameron represents Witney as its Member of Parliament ....
in a positive light, seeing in him "the return of the English gentleman." His criticism of modern liberalism mirrors some of the concerns of a younger generation of conservative journalists such as Peter Hitchens
Peter Hitchens
Peter Jonathan Hitchens is an award-winning British columnist and author, noted for his traditionalist conservative stance. He has published five books, including The Abolition of Britain, A Brief History of Crime, The Broken Compass and most recently The Rage Against God. Hitchens writes for...
and Melanie Phillips
Melanie Phillips
Melanie Phillips is a British journalist and author. She began her career on the left of the political spectrum, writing for such publications as The Guardian and New Statesman. In the 1990s she moved to the right, and she now writes for the Daily Mail newspaper, covering political and social...
, but his affinity for The Guardian and Cameron is not shared by them.
He writes a regular opinion column called "Kind of Blue" for the online newsmagazine
Newsmagazine
A news magazine is a typed, printed, and published piece of paper, magazine or a radio or television program, usually weekly, featuring articles or segments on current events...
The First Post
The First Post
The First Post is a British daily online news magazine based in London. It was launched in August 2005. It publishes news, current affairs, lifestyle, opinion, arts and sports pages, and it features an online games arcade and a cinema featuring short films, virals, trailers and eyewitness news...
.
Private life
Peregrine Worsthorne married Claudie Bertrande Baynham (née Colame) in 1950, with whom he had a daughter (Dominique) and stepson. Claudie died in 1990. In 1991 he received a knighthood and married the architectural writer Lucinda LambtonLucinda Lambton
Lady Lucinda Lambton, Lady Worsthorne is a British writer, photographer and broadcaster on architectural subjects, born 10 May 1943, in Newcastle upon Tyne.Her father was the Conservative government defence minister Lord Lambton She is married to the journalist Peregrine WorsthorneShe left school...
. The couple live in Buckinghamshire
Buckinghamshire
Buckinghamshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan home county in South East England. The county town is Aylesbury, the largest town in the ceremonial county is Milton Keynes and largest town in the non-metropolitan county is High Wycombe....
.
His daughter, Dominique, is married to the potter Jim Keeling and they have five children and two grand-children.