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Famous Like Me > Actor > W > Peregrine Worsthorne

Profile of Peregrine Worsthorne on Famous Like Me

 
Name: Peregrine Worsthorne  
   
Also Know As:
   
Date of Birth: 22nd December 1923
   
Place of Birth: London, England, UK
   
Profession: Actor
 
 
From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia

Sir Peregrine Gerard Worsthorne (born December 22, 1923) is a British Conservative journalist, writer and broadcaster. He was educated at Stowe public school, Peterhouse, Cambridge University and Magdalen College, Oxford University. Worsthorne spent the largest portion of his career at the Telegraph newspaper titles, eventually becaming editor of The Sunday Telegraph.

Early life and career

Peregrine Worsthorne was the son of a Belgian Catholic father (born Alexander Koch de Gooreynd), who had anglicised the family name two years before his son was born, and an English mother. His parents divorced when he was five, and the family butler effectively raised him for several years. Priscilla Reyntiens, his mother was the grand daughter 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.

While at Stowe, Worsthorne claims that he was seduced by a fellow pupil, the jazz singer and writer George Melly on the art room chaise longue, an accusation which Melly has always denied. He is any case several years Worsthorne's junior. Worsthorne went up to Peterhouse in 1942, having won an exhibition to read History. The Conservative academic Herbert Butterfield was among his tutors. He was called up for war service after three terms, as was normal practice. However, in army training he injured his shoulder, and, as he had been 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 Conservative 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 lower second. Michael Portillo's admission of youthful homosexuality in 1999, caused Worsthorne to admit to his own same-sex activities while at Cambridge, though in modern terminology, he could only be described as having been situationally gay.

A rather grand newspaperman

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. Unfortunately for Worsthorne he developed a habit of getting facts wrong, and he was called in to the office of the newspaper's then editor William Casey. He has written that Casey gave him a gentle putdown, "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 (some sources suggest 1955) he joined the Daily Telegraph. At this time he also contributed articles to the magazine Encounter, which was then covertly funded by the CIA.

On McCarthy 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). 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".

At The Sunday Telegraph

Worsthorne was appointed as the first deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph when the newspaper was founded in 1961. In due course, he became a leading columnist on his newspaper, taking a right-wing High-Tory stance on the world around him.

An imperialist, who mourns the lose of the British Empire, he argued that the public's acceptance of decolonisation was paralleled by their acquiescence to socialism. He could be blatantly offensive to liberal 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". 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.

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 (then) EEC. After the publication of the Heath Governments 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", 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 had shared a bed with two call girls.

Improbably, Worsthorne is thus between Kenneth Tynan (in 1965) and the Sex Pistols, (December 1976) in helping to break one particular taboo. It was though, 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, however, 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 in to 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).

Worsthorne though 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 sensibilies 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).

In 2005 he argued that Thatcher's "bourgeois triumphalism" and "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". For Worsthorne the elite should "keep a country recogisably 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" 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."

When Conrad Black's holding company had 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, his responsibilities were reduced to the three comment pages. This continued until September 1991 when his obligations were reduced to his weekly column.

Despite his experiences, Worsthorne had a long history of being critic of homosexual activity, castigating Roy Jenkins in particular, in an 1982 editorial, for his tolerance of "queers". At the time of the controversy over Section 28 in 1988 he appeared on the BBC Radio Three's Third Ear programme and persistently referred to gay men as "them", which had the effect of the other interviewee, Ian McKellen coming out by saying, "I am one of them". 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.

Recent years

Worsthorne's column in the Sunday Telegraph continued until 1997, when he was unwillingly retired. From then, Worsthorne became critical of Black for his newspapers unsparing defence of Israel and the foreign policies of the United States.

Worsthorne has modified some of his previous views. Indeed he has gone as far as to say, relating to the changes in British society that "this is not a country I recognise or am particularly fond of any more", and no longer seeing himself as a nationalist.

He has also modified 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?". He also now accepts the possiblility of same sex marriages, believing they allow gay people to form "stable relationships"., and even advocated that Conservatives should embrace political correctness as a form of modern courtesy.

Worsthorne regularly contributes book reviews to the New Statesman, although his place on the political right remains. In 2005 Worsthorne's expressed the opinion in his book on the aristocracy that, "A commitment to goodwill is what is missing today in all walks of life, public and private" should take the place of aspirational objectives that may be mere greed. "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".

Private life

Peregrine Worsthorne married Claudie Bertrande Colame in 1950, with whom he had two daughters. Claudie died in 1990. He remarried in 1991, the same year he was knighted. Worsthorne's second wife is the architectural writer Lucinda Lambton and they live in Buckinghamshire.

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Peregrine Worsthorne