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 active as a contributor to various publications and a website.
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[edit] Early life and career
Peregrine Worsthorne was the son of a Roman Catholic parents, a Belgian father (born Alexander Koch de Gooreynd), who had anglicised the family name following the birth of their first son (Simon Towneley who became Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire from 1976–1996), but before Worsthorne was born, and an English mother (Priscilla Reyntiens). The boys were baptized as Roman Catholics, but did not attend denominational schools.
Peregrine Worsthorne's parents divorced when he was five years old, and the family butler effectively raised him for several years. Priscilla Reyntiens, his mother, was the granddaughter of an Earl. She then married Sir Montagu Norman, who was Governor of the Bank of England in the 1930s. Worsthorne's father reverted his name to Koch de Gooreynd in 1937, and lived in what was then Rhodesia for some years; Worsthorne discovered in the early 1960s that a half-brother had been born during this period.
While at Stowe, Worsthorne wrote that he was 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. Worsthorne was educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, from 1942, having won an exhibition to read History. The master of Peterhouse at that time was the Conservative academic Herbert Butterfield. He was called up for war service after three terms, as was normal practice; Worsthorne was rusticated during the last term. However, in army training he injured his shoulder, and, after being admitted to a hospital in Oxford, he was able to persuade Magdalen College to admit him for a term.
He saw active service in the Italian campaign with Conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott,[1] 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 lower second. Michael Portillo's admission of youthful homosexuality in 1999 caused Worsthorne to reminisce on his own activities while at Cambridge, although according to modern terminology, he could be described as having been situationally gay [2]; Worsthorne had previously referred to this history in his autobiography published in 1993.
[edit] Early journalistic career
Worsthorne entered the newspaper industry as a sub-editor on the Glasgow Herald in 1946, on a two-year training scheme initiated for the benefit of Oxbridge graduates. He then worked for The Times from 1948 on the Foreign Desk, again working 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 then editor William Casey. He has written that Casey gave him a gentle put-down: "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 move 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).
On McCarthy, in an article titled "America: Conscience or Shield?" in November 1954, he put forward the view that America's flaws were something the British would have to accept for their own benefit on the basis that: "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 has 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.
As an imperialist, Worsthorne mourns the loss of the British Empire; he once argued that the public's acceptance of decolonisation was paralleled by their acquiescence to socialism.[4] He was often blatantly offensive to liberal and left-wing sensibilities. Of the Six-Day War in 1967 he wrote in an article entitled '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)
He was, however, shrewd enough in 1956, after the Suez war, to see that "a social system that seemed right and proper while it produced a nation capable of leading the world will look very different when that nation is in decline… what is the point of maintaining a Queen Empress without an empire to rule over. Everything […] about the British class system begins to look foolish and tacky when related to a second class power on the decline" (quoted in Cannadine 189).
Unlike many on the right, such as Powell, he initially came to accept entry to 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 (quoted in Greenslade 293). By the time of the Single European Act in 1992 he had adopted a Eurosceptic faith, "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 BBC Television's teatime Nationwide programme in March 1973, he was the second person on the nation's television to utter the f-word, when he was 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. http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1141095,00.html] Improbably, Worsthorne was preceded by Kenneth Tynan (in 1965) and followed by the Sex Pistols in (December 1976) in breaking this particular taboo. However 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's belief in authority and hierarchy led him to argue 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). His respect could morph into a condoning of authoritarianism. He defended the way Pinochet's forces had conducted the 1973 coup in Chile (where reports of torture and worse were common) and hoped the army would launch a coup in Britain if a radical minority socialist government should ever enter power (as quoted in Beckett[9][10]).
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 his core sensibilities pre-dated the development of capitalism itself. He wrote just before Thatcher's election the next year 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 was ambivalent about the Thatcher era and came to criticise it quite strongly later on; his reference to what he saw as Thatcher's "bourgeois triumphalism" resulted in Worsthorne and his paper being "out of favour" at Number 10 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".[11] For Worsthorne the elite should "keep a country recognisably the same" (Honderich [his italics] 2). On July 23, 1995 though, he was arguing in an article entitled "A Police State Beats a Welfare State" that: "I am not suggesting that we are going to have to move straight from the welfare state to the police state, but such a suggestion is far nearer the mark than all the alternative systems of welfare"[12] and that "welfarism is an idea whose time has passed.... For many of 'our people,' life in the late 20th and in the 21st Century will be repulsive, brutal, and short as well."[13]
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, when the Telegraph titles briefly became a seven-day operation under Max Hastings, with the bulk of the Sunday Telegraph being edited by Trevor Grove. Worsthorne's responsibilities were reduced to the three comment pages by the Telegraph Group's Editor-in-Chief Andrew Knight. The lofty ethos of the comment pages, with contributors including Bruce Anderson, was captured at the time by the nickname of Worsthorne College. This arrangement continued until September 1991 when Worsthorne's commitments were reduced to his weekly column.
Despite his public school and Cambridge University experiences, Worsthorne had a long history of criticising homosexual activity, castigating Roy Jenkins in particular, in an 1982 editorial, for his tolerance of "queers". [14] At the time of the controversy 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". [15] [16] Worsthorne also claimed on the programme that not being gay was "a close-run thing" for some of his contemporaries.
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, as a result of Neil's involvement with Pamella Bordes, that "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[17] 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",[18] and that he no longer views himself as a nationalist.[19] Worsthorne has embraced the Euro federalist option for Britain's future.[20]
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?". [21] He also now accepts the possibility of same sex marriages, believing they allow gay people to form "stable relationships" [22] and even argued that Conservatives should embrace political correctness as a form of modern courtesy.[23]
Although he remains 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". [24]
In the Athenaeum Club speech cited above (published as Liberalism failed to set us free. Indeed, it enslaved us) he saw the emergence of David Cameron as Conservative leader positively, 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 Melanie Phillips, but his pragmatic acceptance of The Guardian and Cameron is not shared by them
He currently writes a regular on-line column for The First Post[25]
[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. He remarried in 1991, the same year that he was knighted. Worsthorne's second wife is the architectural writer Lucinda Lambton and 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]
[edit] External link
| Preceded by: John Thompson | Editor of The Sunday Telegraph 1986 - 1989 | Succeeded by: Trevor Grove |
