Peregrine Worsthorne

Sir Peregrine Gerard Worsthorne (''né'' Koch de Gooreynd; 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 in Chelsea, the younger son of General Alexander Louis Koch 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 Anderso
"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 Roo
''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 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 effectively 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 would later recall, commenting on the tradition of public duty and service so prevalent in his family and his family's social circle. 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, but Melly always denied it happened. One other pupil, Colin Welch, became a lifelong friend. Welch also had a career in journalism, and persuaded Worsthorne to apply to Peterhouse, Cambridge. 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, however, 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 active service in 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 program 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".

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''. Despite moving to a newspaper more 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-climactic, 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).

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". Later he favourably compared a post-war America which "put its faith in the ntellectual 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".

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.

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.

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
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