Sir Peregrine Gerard Worsthorne (22 December 1923 – 4 October 2020) was a British journalist, writer, and broadcaster. He spent the largest part of his career at the Telegraph newspaper titles, eventually becoming editor of The Sunday Telegraph for several years. He left the newspaper in 1997.
Worsthorne was a conservative-leaning political journalist, who wrote columns and leaders for many years.
Early life, school and military service Worsthorne was born at Cadogan Square in Knightsbridge, London, the younger son of General Alexander Louis Koch Worsthorne (né de Gooreynd), a Belgian banker who had served his country in World War I, and Priscilla Reyntiens, an English Roman Catholic and the granddaughter of the 12th Earl of Abingdon.Bruce Anderson "Peregrine Worsthorne at 90: still colourful and indiscreet", Telegraph.co.uk, 22 December 2013 The family name was anglicised following the birth of Worsthorne's older brother Simon Towneley, who from 1976 to 1996 was the Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire.Adrian Room Dictionary of Pseudonyms: 13,000 Assumed Names and Their Origins, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, p. 514, citing an article in Punch, 26 October – 1 November 1996 by Nigel Dempster The two boys were baptised Roman Catholic, but mostly did not attend Catholic denominational schools.
Worsthorne's mother divorced his father when he was five years old, and shortly afterwards married Sir Montagu Norman, then the Governor of the Bank of England. As a consequence of the split, the family butler all but 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 recalled, commenting on the tradition of public duty and service so prevalent in his family and his family's social circle.Worsthorne, Peregrine (2004), In Defence of Aristocracy, Harper Collins. 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 was educated at Stowe School, where, he wrote, he was once seduced on the art room chaise-longue by George Melly, a fellow pupil who was later a jazz singer and writer; Melly always denied it happened. One other pupil, Colin Welch, became a lifelong friend.Worsthorne (1977), p. 90–91. Welch also had a career in journalism, and persuaded Worsthorne to apply to Peterhouse, Cambridge.Richard West Obituary: Colin Welch, The Independent, 29 January 1997 He began his studies at the college 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; he was rusticated during the last term. In army training with the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, he injured his shoulder and after being admitted to a hospital in Oxford was able to persuade Magdalen College, Oxford, to admit him for a term.
After receiving his commission on 4 June 1943, Worsthorne saw service in GHQ Liaison Regiment (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.
Early career in journalism Worsthorne entered the newspaper industry as a sub-editor on The Glasgow Herald in 1946, on a two-year training programme 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 he was called into 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), p. 117.
He became a correspondent in Washington (1950–52), where his advocacy of 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.Greenslade (2003 ), p. 525. Despite moving to a newspaper more suited to his politics, Worsthorne left The Times with some regret, feeling that working for any other title in Fleet Street could only be anticlimactic 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 (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 1999 , p. 204, also summarised in Worsthorne (1993), pp. 161–62. Later 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 Deputy editor (1961–76) 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 expressed 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. 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".
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 (2003 ), p. 234. In common with his friend the journalist Paul Johnson, he advocated the recolonisation of former colonies. In September 1991, he advocated "a new form of imperialism directed against the countries of the Third World" intended to create an "anti-barbarian alliance" to control the use of weapons by "primitive peoples." In his view nothing could be done about famines "without the advanced countries re-exerting political control – i.e., a return to colonialism."
In 1965, he defended the declaration of independence by the white minority government of Ian Smith in Rhodesia. Worsthorne, in an article on the Sunday following the declaration, 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), p. 236.
Worsthorne initially accepted Britain's entry into the European Economic Community. 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 (2003 ), p. 293. By the time of the imminent Single European Act of 1992, however, he wrote in The Sunday Telegraph of 4 August 1992 that: "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.Howse, Christopher, "A four-letter word on teatime television", The Telegraph website, 13 November 2008 Worsthorne said in 2013 that "There's a possibility it wasn't spontaneous. Apparently I took advice about it before in El Vino's. I don't remember. To the best of my knowledge, it was the mot juste."Harry Mount "'The pure pleasure of annoying people' – Peregrine Worsthorne at 90", The Spectator, 14 December 2013. Swearing on television cost him the opportunity to edit The Daily Telegraph, as its owner, Lord Hartwell, strongly objected to Worsthorne's comment and was persuaded to bar him from appearing on television for six months. Worsthorne was promoted to associate editor in 1976.
Associate editor (1976–86) 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".Peregrine Worsthorne "Too Much Freedom", in Maurice Cowling Conservative Essays, London: Cassell, 1978, pp.140–54, 149, 148, 147, 140, 154 He was critical of Margaret 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 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.
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"). 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 (2003 ), p. 362. "We put too much emphasis on Mrs. Thatcher forming a government", Worsthorne said on the BBC's election night programme late on 3 May 1979 as the results were about to come in. "It will really be Conservative ideas and Conservative policies that have formed a government. I don't think that she's articulated it very well." He wrote an article "When Treason Can Be Right" in the Sunday Telegraph on 4 November 1979, in which he said that he would accept a request to work with the CIA to undermine a Labour Government in the UK. A quote from this article appears in some copies of the novel A Very British Coup, in which the main conspirator is named Sir Peregrine.
Editor and later responsibilities (1986–91)