Peregrine Worsthorne - at The Sunday Telegraph

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. 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".

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:

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.

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 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"), 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.