Peregrine Worsthorne
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Sir Peregrine Gerard Worsthorne (born December 22, 1923) is a conservative British journalist, writer and broadcaster. He was educated at Stowe public school, Peterhouse, Cambridge and Magdalen College, Oxford University. 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, including his "Kind of Blue" opinion column for the online daily magazine The First Post.[1]
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[edit] 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 Reyntiens, an English Roman Catholic and the grandaughter 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 would soon marry Sir Montagu Norman, a prominent Governor of the Bank of England. 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.[1]
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 (Worsthorne (1977) p90-91), an accusation that Melly has 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 the Italian campaign with the philosopher Michael Oakeshott,[2] 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 homosexuality in 1999 caused Worsthorne to reminisce on his own experience while at Cambridge (though he had mentioned it before in his 1993 biography).
[edit] Early journalistic career
Worsthorne entered the newspaper industry as a sub-editor on the Glasgow Herald in 1946, on a two-year training program for Oxbridge 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"(Worsthorne (1999) 117).
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-climatic, 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" (quoted in Saunders 204, also summarised in Worsthorne (1993) 161-62). More recently he favourably compared a post-war America which "put its faith in the [intellectual elites]" over a Britain dedicated to the "masses".[3]
[edit] 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 Post. 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.[4] Of the Six-Day War in 1967 he wrote an article titled 'Triumph of the Civilised': "last week a tiny Western community, surrounded by immensely superior numbers of the underdeveloped peoples, has shown itself able to impose its will on the Arabs today almost as effortlessly as the first whites were able to do on the Afro-Asian native in the imperial heyday".[5] 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" (quoted in Greenslade 234).
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.[6][7] In 1965 though, he had defended the declaration of UDI by the white-minority government of Ian Smith. In an article on the Sunday following the declaration, Worsthorne wrote:
- Just as in the light of history Lord North has been judged wrong for refusing to give independence to the white slave owners in America, so will Mr Harold Wilson be for refusing to give it to the white supremacists of Southern Africa. (quoted in Worsthorne (1993) 236)
Unlike many, 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 (Greenslade 293). 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",[8] 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 utter the f-word, 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. [9] 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…" (quoted in Honderich 67). He defended the conduct of Pinochet's forces in the 1973 Chilean 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 (as quoted in Beckett[10][11]).
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" (quoted in Greenslade 362).
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 (Worsthorne (1993) 256). 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".[12] 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 became 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 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". [13] At the time of the debate over Section 28 in 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". [14] [15] 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" [16] and even argued that Conservatives should embrace political correctness as a form of modern courtesy.[17]
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 £1000, and his paper won 60p, its then cover price.
[edit] Recent years
Worsthorne's column in the Sunday Telegraph was discontinued in 1997 during the editorship of Dominic Lawson. 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 June 19, 2006[18] 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."
On the changing Britain, he has said that, "this is not a country I recognise or am particularly fond of any more",[19] and that he no longer views himself as a nationalist.[20] Worsthorne has embraced the Euro federalist option for Britain's future.[21]
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?". [22]
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". [23]
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 him as "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 The Guardian and Cameron is not shared by them.
[edit] Private life
Peregrine Worsthorne married Claudie Bertrande Baynham (née Colame) in 1950, with whom he had a daughter and step-son. He later had several affairs. Claudie died in 1990. In 1991 he received a knighthood and married the architectural writer Lucinda Lambton. The couple live in Buckinghamshire.
[edit] References
- Andy Beckett (2002) Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile's Hidden History , Faber
- David Cannadine (1998 [2000(3)]) Class in Britain, Yale University Press [Penguin]
- Roy Greenslade (2003 [2004]) Press Gang: How Newspapers Male Profits from Propaganda, Pan
- Ted Honderich (1990 [1991]) Conservatism, Hamish Hamilton [Penguin]
- Frances Stonor Saunders (1999 [2000]) Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Granta (US edition: The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, 2000 The New Press)
[edit] Bibliography
- Mary Wilson (et al) (1977) The Queen, Penguin [contributor]
- Peregrine Worsthorne (1958) Dare democracy disengage?, Conservative Political Centre [pamphlet]
- Peregrine Worsthorne (1971) The Socialist Myth, Cassell
- Peregrine Worsthorne (1973) Edwina Sandys, Crane Kalman Gallery [exhibition catalogue introduction]
- Peregrine Worsthorne (1977) "Boy Made Man", in George MacDonald Fraser (ed) The World Of the Public School (pp. 79-96), Weidenfeld & Nicolson /St Martins Press (US edition)
- Peregrine Worsthorne (1978) "Too Much Freedom", in Maurice Cowling (ed) Conservative Essays, Cassell
- Peregrine Worsthorne (1980) Peregrinations: Selected pieces by Peregrine Worsthorne, Weidenfeld & Nicolson
- Peregrine Worsthorne (1987) By the Right, Brophy Educational [selections from his Sunday Telegraph columns]
- Peregrine Worsthorne (1988) The politics of manners and the uses of inequality: Autumn address, Centre for Policy Studies [pamphlet]
- Peregrine Worsthorne (1993) Tricks of Memory: An Autobiography, Weidenfeld & Nicolson
- Peregrine Worsthorne (1999) "Dumbing Up" in Stephen Glover (ed), Secrets of the Press: Journalists on Journalism Allen Lane pp. 115-24 [published in paperback as The Penguin Book of Journalism: Secrets of the Press Penguin 2000]
- Peregrine Worsthorne (2004) In Defence of Aristocracy Harper Collins [published in paperback as Democracy Needs Aristocracy Perennial 2005]
| Media Offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by John Thompson |
Editor of The Sunday Telegraph 1986 - 1989 |
Succeeded by Trevor Grove |
