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 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.
Read more about this topic: Peregrine Worsthorne
Famous quotes containing the word years:
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