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David Johnson

OBITUARY The Rev David Johnson obituary Colourful and quixotic rector who liked to write spoof letters, chastise American tourists and make mischief wherever he roamed

Wednesday May 06 2020, 12.01am, The Times

The Rev David Johnson was a uniquely troublesome “whisky priest” such as Graham Greene could have conjured, only without the illegitimate child.

Often quite exasperating to know, at times he was as if possessed by a talent that could not be properly channelled and so had fallen into the habit of mischief. The result was that apart from his many speeches, squibs, sketches and skits, his main contribution to literature was The Spiritual Quest of Francis Wagstaffe (1994), a funny iteration of the Henry Root letters to a variety of dignitaries in the Church. These lampooned various ecclesiastical trends, as well as individuals and their pretensions.

His personal style resembled that of a 1920s “high and dry churchman” who regularly “went to town”. He was, in fact, often high, but almost never dry. The appurtenances of his lifetime of performance art included theatrical pipe-smoking, silk stocks, high starched (“Roman”) collars and an array of garments for events requiring clerical morning and evening dress, including stockings (“I have good legs”), buckled shoes, frock coats, shovel hats and straw boaters.

His actual beliefs tended to the Anglo-Catholic, even through the troubled years when the ordination of women was being debated, and he would often warn of the dangers of succumbing to “Roman fever”. However, he was thrilled to meet Cardinal Ratzinger, whom he interviewed and thought “really very good news”. A convinced Eurosceptic, he would even send out signed copies of Ratzinger’s book on the future of Europe with approval.

An inveterate attention-seeker and exhibitionist, as well as a compulsive dresser-up, he was profoundly interested in the superficial, but would say that the little things would illumine the big.

David William Johnson was born in Ponteland, Newcastle, in 1953, to a civil servant father and Scottish mother, and with a sister to whom he was never close. After attending Dame Allan’s School he went up to Selwyn College, Cambridge, to read divinity. He seemed to think that taking the cloth could open interesting possibilities where vocation rather than background might provide the key to unlock what Evelyn Waugh called “that low door in the wall”. He was both ashamed and proud of his northern background, and oblivious of the effect his diminutive stature and stratospherically strangulated way of speaking had on others. He attempted to ascribe the latter to his mother having taught elocution.

His Cambridge years were for him a finishing school, though he never really grew up there. When Archbishop Donald Coggan visited his college he hung the organ scholar’s underwear on a washing line between the chapel towers by way of a greeting. His election to the presidency of the Cambridge Union in 1976 was, nevertheless, his crowning moment. He quickly adapted to the union style and became a scintillating speaker in his own right (though, in truth, a less than rapier-sharp debater). It was for his speaking and his words that he rightly became known.

He would arrest attention, beginning with thunderous countenance and haughty, shatter-glass tones: “Mr President, it is not only a great privilege to be here . . . but also . . . highly inconvenient.”

Another gambit was apparently to read out a portentous message of greeting and sermonising from a foreign potentate in an impenetrable and totally fabricated tongue: “And Madam President, I think we can all agree that those words are as true today as they ever were!”

Women were regarded as generally getting in the way of his male friendships, with occasional exceptions such as Christine Hamilton and Benazir Bhutto (who would always be breathing “Ah, Daaaaavid . . .” to him, at least in his fond recollection). He later married not Christine Hamilton, as he claimed to have wished, but Neil and Christine Hamilton.

His alcohol consumption as an undergraduate began an ultimately sad, exponential trajectory that, in the absence of family, career demands or anything else to anchor him, never looked back.

From Cambridge he went to Cuddesdon Theological College (newly merged with Ripon Hall) to train for the priesthood. On ordination, he moved to London as a curate at St Etheldreda’s, Fulham. It was during this time that he produced a satirical edition of The Church Times. Coming only months after the excitement of the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer at St Paul’s Cathedral, the frontpage of his Not The Church Times breathlessly proclaimed the arrival of Graham Leonard to the capital’s see and adorned it with a picture of Heinrich Himmler, captioned “London’s new Bishop”. It amused many but did not go down well in all quarters.

In 1982 he took up a post at Church House as communications secretary to the Church of England board of mission and unity, officially on ecumenical relations. This period, too, soon dissolved into high jinks, which were also indulged at the bohemian Chelsea Arts Club, which he had joined.

During this period he also became a priest-vicar of Westminster Abbey, an honorary position. In this role he would make a point of marching up to unsuspecting American tourists in baseball caps and barking: “Hats off in church!”

He was encouraged in some ways by Sir Derek Pattinson, then secretary-general of the Church of England. He was a key influence on Johnson at this time, acting as both establishment father-figure manqué, but also something of a lord of misrule. They shared a love of gossip and alcohol.

The Church (if not priesthood) had perhaps been a route for Johnson to plough his own furrow and make his way in life within a comparatively loose, not overly competitive, structure. It soon became clear that this would never work, in part because the ground had already shifted under him. Inside and outside Church House, the modernising church of the early 1980s (this was the time of Faith in the City) was vastly different from that of 1960, or even 1970.

Johnson’s church was the church of the Book of Common Prayer, not Common Worship; of livings and squires, and thus of a sense of place; but preferably all with smells and bells and proper Latin cassocks. His politics were almost wholly reactionary, including an array of Monday Club views, though he also had a curious ability to be colour-blind if he thought people interesting and worthwhile. His social or intellectual snobbery could then overcome any tendencies to casual racism.

After Church House, he was given his first parish in 1987, as rector of Gilmorton with Peatling Parva in the Leicester diocese. This was not a success, but took a while to unwind, in slow motion. He later became rector of Cogenhoe, Northamptonshire, in 1991, which was worse. (“Pronounced Cook-no,” he would say, “spelt F***!”)

His parishioners were treated to some extraordinary visitors who were invited to preach, such as Enoch Powell. Typically, his style was to adapt his parish to his conception of how to order things, rather than adopt a more traditional pastoral manner.

He was fortunate in that wherever he was sent he managed to fall under the care of some of the more ostensibly sympathetic bishops. Yet he still alienated them in time, partly due to his inability to see that they were endeavouring to be on his side, but also because he could not help but mock those in authority. He would cross the street to bite the hand that fed, but he never seemed to repent.

He had, however, admired Mervyn Stockwood when he was Bishop of Southwark, though they never had to work together. The bishop’s socialism was forgiven on the grounds that he had once been a member of the Cambridge University Conservative Association and still was known to wear its tie.

In 1994 Johnson’s highly amusing ecclesiastical riff on the Henry Root letters to famous men and women was published, co-authored with the Rev Toby Forward, a north country cleric. This kind of thing did not help his cause, but it gave pleasure and mirth to many clergy and laity up and down the land.

In several memorable conceits, Francis (affecting to be the leader of an Anglican offshoot church) writes to princes of the church asking them to intervene to send him tickets for the royal enclosure at Ascot and royal garden parties, as well as to provide advice to “my nephew, Colin” about sexual matters. In one case, Johnson wrote to the canon of Coventry Cathedral, and adviser on evangelism to the archbishops of Canterbury and York, to ask if it was true that he really had a sofa “with a dip in the middle” due to his sexual exertions before seeing the light.

Another conceit was to try to get the support of the Bishop of Norwich for a new television programme based on Baywatch, only to be called Beach Mission. “I was a Group Scout Leader for several years . . . Scouting is not what it was, I regret to say, and there are many petty jealousies which can lead to unpleasant rumours!” The idea, which was not taken up by the bishop, though over a number of letters Francis insisted that it had been, was that: “Young evangelists could patrol the beach in their skimpy costumes, attracting young viewers, then when they had got their interest, they could slam home the gospel message.”

Johnson was in unlikely demand during this period as an after-dinner speaker at rugby club events, appearing in full clerical evening dress to unleash a slightly risqué routine laced with the odd, surprising common touch, which was then greeted with delighted, shocked surprise by those present. They were even more shocked when they realised that he was, indeed, not a vaudeville act but a serving priest.

By 1995 Johnson had used up his nine lives for a succession of derelictions and the church authorities decided to retire him with “a house for life” (this, in fact, became a subject of some pride) and a pension. He remained “licensed” but his permission to officiate at services was for a time revoked.

In later life he moved to Oxford, having “done” Cambridge, seeking perhaps to recreate past glories in a new yet familiar setting, and he became in his fifties a committee member of the Oxford Union and dean of the University Conservative Association. To these roles he then added that of chaplain at Stringfellows, London.

Johnson was unmarried but not, despite the rumours, ever unfrocked.

The Rev David Johnson was born on December 5, 1953. He died of undisclosed causes on April 22, 2020, aged 66

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne: The Times

OBITUARY Sir Peregrine Worsthorne obituary Sunday Telegraph editor and columnist who was one of the most flamboyant, contrarian and High Tory journalists of his generation Sir Peregrine Worsthorne wrote as flamboyantly as he dressed

Monday October 05 2020, 12.00pm, The Times

It was said of Sir Peregrine Worsthorne that he wrote as he dressed, with style and flamboyance. His bow ties, spongebag trousers and Leander socks were combined with wavy, collar-length silver hair, giving him the appearance of an aesthete on his way to the Athenaeum Club. To complement his exhibitionist tendencies he had an amused, fluting voice and, unusually for a High Tory Fleet Street editor, he was considered something of a flaneur and a bohemian. He was also a man whose engaging recklessness was, on occasion, his undoing.

As a commentator he could be salty, moralistic, reactionary, contrary and even, on occasion, self-contradictory, but he was rarely, if ever, boring or predictable. On Desert Island Discs in 1992 he chose as his luxury item a lifetime supply of LSD. His columns, meanwhile, were less formal argument than a series of assertions, often enough strikingly original and elegantly expressed, but sometimes merely silly, or so outrageous as to disturb even his most unflinchingly right-wing readers. For much of his career he longed for an editorial chair as well as a polemicist’s pulpit; when it finally came, its sweets were short-lived.

Born in 1923, Peregrine Gerard Worsthorne came from an opulent background. His father, Colonel Alexander Koch de Gooreynd, came from a Belgian family settled in England, where he went to Eton, joined the Irish Guards, and married Priscilla Reyntiens (whose own mother, Lady Alice Bertie, was daughter of the Earl of Abingdon and gave Worsthorne a small dose of English blood). She bore him two sons, and then abruptly left him.

When standing as a parliamentary candidate, Koch de Gooreynd had thought his unusual name a handicap, and briefly adopted the name Worsthorne, from a village in Lancashire. He reverted to his patronymic, but his sons were left with his capricious choice of surname; the elder later changed his name yet again, and became Sir Simon Towneley, lord lieutenant of Lancashire.

The boys were brought up by their mother, who remarried to Montagu Norman (Lord Norman) the well-known if widely disparaged governor of the Bank of England. They were brought up by her, moreover, to deplore their father, a wastrel who ran through a substantial fortune; “she was shocked by his indolence, passivity, lack of interest,” in Peregrine’s words.

In the event, he reacted against his coldly detached mother — an upper-class Mrs Jellyby, who devoted herself to good works while emotionally neglecting her own sons — and warmed to his father. Worsthorne later saw that his father was, as well as being idle, “kind, charming and intelligent — all important qualities which my mother tended to underestimate”.

One upshot of his mother’s remarriage was that Worsthorne, his father, mother and elder brother all ended up with different surnames. It seemed appropriately quixotic.

Perry, as he was always known to his friends, and even foes, was educated at a prep school where he formed a great dislike of Edward Boyle, later an eminent Tory “wet”, and then at Stowe where he was ill at ease in “a very unsmart house, full of boys from lower middle-class homes in northern England”. Apart from such adventures as being seduced on a sofa by George Melly (though the latter disputed the details of this), he met his lifelong friend Colin Welch, and the two were for long inseparable.

They both went from Stowe to Peterhouse, Cambridge (Worsthorne as an exhibitioner), and joined the army together. Both hoped for commissions in the Coldstream Guards, but, after training, were tactfully told that they might be happier in other units. In 1942 the dandyish Worsthorne was commissioned instead into the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, whose uniform he admired. While in the army, he achieved the unusual feat of being educated at Oxford as well as Cambridge: recovering from an injury, he was taught for a while by CS Lewis at Magdalen College.

He transferred to Phantom, the special reconnaissance unit, alongside “very jolly people”, including the actor David Niven. After demobilisation (and also after an adventure with a welcoming baroness in Hamburg), he returned to Cambridge. University soon palled, however, and he left in 1946 with an abbreviated degree to work on The Glasgow Herald, where his arrival was blighted by a misunderstanding: he thought a sub-editor, his first job, was second to the editor.

In 1948 he joined The Times and was sent to Washington. His enthusiasm for Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign was, however, ill-received at Printing House Square. Offered what he thought a derisory posting to Canada, he moved in 1954 to the Daily Telegraph.

In 1961 he became deputy editor of the newly founded Sunday Telegraph, a post he was to hold for the next 15 years (complementing Welch, who was deputy editor of the daily from 1964 to 1980). He was then associate editor until 1986.

He wrote in the first edition of the paper and, in some ways, thereafter became its personification. The values he was to espouse in his political columns for the next 36 years were not for the faint of heart: they were to include an argument that voluntary repatriation was the answer to Britain’s supposed immigration problems, for example, as well as a vigorous defence of Ian Smith’s white minority government in Rhodesia. His views on homosexualists, as he was wont to call them, could seem especially unpalatable. Despite his experience at his public school, Worsthorne castigated Roy Jenkins in one editorial for his tolerance of “queers”.

It became clear that the editorship he was waiting for would never come as long as Lord Hartwell was proprietor. Hartwell admired Worsthorne as a controversialist but did not think him staid or reliable enough for the editorial chair. There was some evidence for this view, in his professional and also in his private life. He had married in 1950 Claudia Bertrand de Colasse, a Frenchwoman previously married to an RAF officer. Yet, as he described with remarkable candour in his 1993 autobiography Tricks of Memory, it was far from a conventional marriage, and he was far from a faithful husband, with many liaisons, prolonged or casual. They had a daughter, Dominique, who is married to the potter Jim Keeling.

The Worsthornes mixed in a notably raffish set, including the journalists Henry Fairlie, George Gale and Paul Johnson and the dons Michael Oakeshott and Maurice Cowling. By some of these friends’ standards Worsthorne was temperate — an early bout of jaundice made heavy drinking impossible — but his life was chequered with comically untoward incidents. Over dinner in a Brighton restaurant, he and the late Vanessa Lawson, then the wife of Nigel Lawson, later of AJ Ayer, decided to exchange shirt and blouse while sitting at their table, an episode reported back to the proprietor by a mauvaise langue among his colleagues.

When appearing on an early-evening programme in 1973 to discuss the abrupt resignation of Lord Lambton from the government, he became the second man, after Kenneth Tynan, to use a well-known monosyllable on television, lightly remarking that the public did not “give a f***” about the affair. This brought a period of suspension from the paper’s pages.

In print, Worsthorne was almost as unpredictable. He was no dialectician, no scholar, indeed, and (despite his aspirations) no intellectual. His attempts at serious political thought were repetitious but persuasive even at column length, still more so in his one book in this vein, The Socialist Myth (1971).

But he was a wonderfully readable columnist, with a feline knack of puncturing specious arguments, of seeing through humbug with a single memorable phrase. He once argued ingeniously that the advertisements in newspapers were in a sense more truthful than the news pages. In the news, houses burn down and aircraft crash, killing and bereaving. In the ads, families live securely and happily in their homes, while flights land on time reuniting loved ones, a far more accurate reflection of everyday life. And it was Worsthorne who described the mood of the Thatcherite 1980s as “bourgeois triumphalism”, a phrase which has lasted longer than most coined by the left.

His leaders apart, Worsthorne was at his best writing Spectator diaries where he could be as irresponsible and malicious as he chose, or long chronicles of his travels abroad, in a persona once described as a mixture of Lord Curzon and Mr Pooter. Some of these were collected in Peregrinations (1980).

In 1986 the Telegraph was acquired in stealthy but decisive stages by the Canadian entrepreneur Conrad Black. He made two surprising appointments, prompted by Andrew Knight, chief executive of the Telegraph Group: Max Hastings as editor of the daily newspaper and Worsthorne as editor of the Sunday edition, at last. Lord Hartwell collapsed on the table at the Telegraph board meeting when Knight (with the support of Hartwell’s son Adrian Berry) levered Worsthorne’s appointment through.

Worsthorne enjoyed himself immensely as editor, and the whole paper became as capricious as he. One week the front page was led by a bizarre story about the treatment of Filipino servants (with an irrelevant and defamatory photograph of Antonia Fraser, whom Worsthorne consistently baited). His leader page became a signed leading article with serious consequences. In one leader, Worsthorne denounced two fellow editors of Sunday newspapers, Andrew Neil at The Sunday Times and Donald Trelford at The Observer, for their unseemly frivolity and insisted that an editor’s place was at high tables rather than cavorting with women in nightclubs. Neil sued for libel and won a pyrrhic victory with small damages. It had in any case been a curious argument coming from Worsthorne, who had cavorted with the best of them in his time.

In Tricks of Memory he wrote about his lifelong fear of coming second — no Eton for him, no Coldstream Guards. He did not include it in his list, but there was to be no Daily Telegraph either, a prize for which all Sunday Telegraph editors long. Three years after he had been appointed, Worsthorne was relieved. Knight sacked him over breakfast at Claridge’s. He had just started on his favourite dish, two poached eggs, when the news was delivered. As both men recalled, he “spluttered”.

Another editor appeared under the editorship-in-chief of Hastings. For a while a clumsy arrangement persisted by which Worsthorne was responsible for the comment pages, where he conducted a guerilla war against his editor and editor-in-chief. The pages became known, a little mockingly, as “Worsthorne College”.

His wife of 40 years, Claudie, had died after protracted cancer in 1990. Soon afterwards, feeling miserable, Worsthorne met Lady Lucinda Lambton (architectural writer and extrovert daughter of Lord Lambton about whom he had once spoken profanely before the cameras). She was 19 years his junior. “The thing I most admired about him, from the beginning, was his elegance of mind and manner,” she recalled. “When he actually said, ‘Will you marry me,’ I was so excited that I ran across the room and jumped into his lap, and as I weigh 13 stone, I expect his knees cracked.” They were married in the spring of 1991, in the week when he learnt that his executive connection with the Telegraph had finally been ended. The blow was softened in advance by his knighthood; among the last of Margaret Thatcher’s honours.

As one of his writers, Bruce Anderson, recalled: “He had never been famous for guarding secrets. We were all surprised when he did keep quiet about his knighthood. In general, if you wanted to disseminate a piece of gossip around London, you told it to Perry before lunch, in strictest confidence.”

He continued writing a Sunday column for Charles Moore, but was then summarily relieved of it by the next editor, Dominic Lawson, who reckoned that Worsthorne rarely believed what he was writing. After that, Worsthorne was often waspish about his old paper.

He retired to an old rectory in Hedgerley, Buckinghamshire, where, in an interview with the Spectator in 2013, he declared that old-fashioned Conservatism was killed off by Thatcher. “It’s a bit of a mystery why she gave me a knighthood,” he said. “I was never a Thatcherite.” He added that he admired the way she took on the unions but found her “a terrible bore”.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, journalist, was born on December 22, 1923. He died on October 3, 2020, aged 96

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne: Daily Telegraph

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne Brilliant, restless, irreverent journalist who edited The Sunday Telegraph and strove in his articles to avoid ‘consensus opinion’

SIR PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE, who has died aged 96, was among the most unpredictable and provocative columnists of his generation, as well as the most stylish.

Often, during his brief but brilliant editorship of The Sunday Telegraph in the late 1980s, “Perry”, as he was universally known, would tell his staff that unless they could make their readers splutter over their breakfast cereal the work was no good; and no one caused more splutterings, whether from the Left or the Right, than Worsthorne himself.

Sir Worsthorne was among the most provocative columnists of his generation He had come to The Daily Telegraph from The Times as a leader writer in 1953, but he much preferred signed articles, in which he could go against the political grain of his paper when he felt like it.

“Nothing gives me more pleasure,” he wrote once, “than to come across a new argument ... Having always been a Tory, there is no nook or cranny of Tory philosophy that I have not thoroughly explored ... Nothing to excite me there.”

So he liked, as he put it, “from time to time to travel Leftwards” – and neither his readers, nor, one suspected, he himself, could be sure from week to week where these excursions would lead him. Excitement was what he was after.

His great value to the apparently conformist Telegraph was that he was not a party man. “A proper understanding of ideas,” he wrote in a 1980 piece on the business of being a columnist, “requires a willingness to search for affinities.” He told Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs that his aim was “to avoid anything that might be mistaken for consensus opinion” (he also told her that his luxury would be a limitless supply of hallucinogens).

In 1989, in an attack on The Guardian, he declared that it was the Left and not the Right that was “reactionary”, since the Left’s contempt for the institutions of authority would in the end lead back to tyranny. Such paradoxes delighted him.

Time and again he repudiated the conventional categorisations, such as that which made equality the ideal of the Left and freedom that of the Right. Of Margaret Thatcher, after a student demonstration against her, he wrote: “Not only has she trampled on genuine ideals with deep roots in our national history but enjoyed doing so … The Tory Party should take stock.”

And he questioned the “almost messianic bigotry” with which the Thatcherite revolution had been espoused by its supporters. She, nevertheless, knighted him in the resignation honours which followed her departure.

Worsthorne had wanted an editor’s chair since the 1950s. But when the chance came in 1960, from the board of the Yorkshire Post, he turned it down. It was a decision he would regret, for he was to be twice passed over as editor of The Sunday Telegraph, which he joined at its foundation in 1961.

Nor was he happy when the paper’s founding editor, Donald McLachlan, ordered him to write high-level political exclusives, a task quite unsuited to his talents. McLachlan in due course relented and allowed him the freewheeling opinion pieces which were to make his name.

It was not until more than a quarter of a century had passed, and his old master Lord Hartwell had resigned the editorship-in-chief, that he got the editorial chair he wanted. But then his new proprietor, Conrad Black, decided to merge the daily and Sunday papers, and he lost it again. His three years as editor of The Sunday Telegraph had been, he said, the best of his life.

The rumour was that his failure to get the editorship of The Sunday Telegraph under Hartwell was due to a television discussion in which he purposely let slip the F-word, infuriating not only Hartwell (and even more his wife), but also the then editor, Brian Roberts, who complained indignantly that this sort of thing had an adverse effect on a newspaper’s circulation.

Worsthorne afterwards expressed his contrition, first by word of mouth and, much later, in his own paper. But it was not the dread word that kept him out of the chair. The truth was that his views were too eccentric, even perhaps too smart, for his conventionally minded proprietor, who said he would rather have him as a columnist than directing editorial policy. In any case, Worsthorne’s dislike of writing leaders, and his obvious lack of interest in anything to do with the technicalities of newspaper production, made him an unlikely candidate.

But when, early in 1986, the Telegraph’s new Conrad Black-appointed chief executive, Andrew Knight, gave him the job, Worsthorne showed that he thoroughly understood the duty of a serious newspaper editor, and he attacked the task with a nervous energy which surprised those who had seen only the languid public figure. (On television he was not impressive, seeming not to worry if for a few seconds – a long time in television journalism – he found himself at a loss for a word.)

He quickly cut himself loose from the constraints of leader-writing by the device of the signed leader, a deft reversal of traditional Telegraph thinking, demolishing Hartwell’s old objections at a stroke. But it was his restless interest in the startling or the new which put zest into the paper.

An idea for an article, perhaps discussed enthusiastically over lunch with a like-minded friend, was unlikely to get into the paper if it turned out to be less than startling after all: the professional instincts usually prevailed in the end.

As editor, Worsthorne made some unwise appointments, since he was not always able to distinguish between friends and enemies, and he was a poor administrator. His frequent changes of mind infuriated his staff, as did his uncertain temper when things went wrong. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, in a Guardian profile, described working for him as “like living in the court of the Mad Emperor, where no one ever knew what the next strange move would be or off with whose head it was that day”.

But the circulation rose, much to his personal credit, until Knight decided to support The Daily Telegraph by transferring the Sunday’s colour magazine to Saturday, a move which lost the Sunday an immediate 50,000 copies.

A few months later, at the merger of the two papers, Worsthorne found himself in charge of only four “Comment” pages, an enclave known in the office as “Worsthorne College”, where his distinctive voice could still be heard. The college’s most important alumnus was probably Frank Johnson, the dazzlingly witty parliamentary sketchwriter and much else besides.

Peregrine Gerard Worsthorne was born on December 22 1923. His father was a Belgian expatriate, Colonel Alexander Koch de Gooreynd, who had changed his name to Worsthorne (after the village in Lancashire) two years earlier.

Worsthorne recalled that at the family home in Cadogan Square he was taught by a governess from the age of six, and rooms allocated to his absent father remained untenanted. His father’s name was never mentioned, and his mother lived there alone, except for a large staff of servants.

But by the time Perry was 10 his mother, Priscilla (née Reyntiens), had left his father and married Montagu Norman (later, as Lord Norman, to be Governor of the Bank of England). His stepfather seemed not to be particularly interested in Perry, or in his brother Simon (many years later his mother wrote that “Perry was nearly always antagonistic, even at the breast”).

Much of his childhood was consequently spent in the company of his grandmother’s butler, James Burton, to whose “acute sense of hierarchy” Worsthorne was to pay tribute years later in an article in the Independent Magazine. Burton was a corporal in the Home Guard when the 16-year-old Perry was a private in the same corps, a reversal of roles which the butler carried off with aplomb. “He was an authentic hero of inequality,” Worsthorne concluded approvingly.

Young Perry was sent to a progressive prep school at Abinger in Surrey and thence to Stowe on the insistence of his mother, who had thought that Stowe was also a progressive school; he was said to be annoyed not to have been sent to Eton. Educational theories at Abinger had not taught him much, and it was some time before Stowe realised that it had a clever little boy on its hands and moved him up from the bottom form.

Already he showed immense style and elegance. Traditions differ as to the exact cut and colour of the tweed suit which he ordered for himself and for which, to the glee of schoolmates, he was discovered having himself fitted.

He kept his dignity when subjected to the usual brutal humiliations at the hands of the thugs of Grafton House, one of the more philistine houses at Stowe at that time; and by the end, partly because of a witty tongue, partly a natural presence, he had achieved complete mastery over them.

He later insisted, in a collection of essays about people’s schooldays, that when at Stowe he had been seduced on a sofa by George Melly, a story the jazz musician denied.

From Stowe he went to Peterhouse, Cambridge. One of his supervisors there was the historian Herbert Butterfield, whose famous distrust of political enthusiasms seems to have struck a chord in his pupil. At school and at Peterhouse he began a lifelong friendship with Colin Welch, who would be deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph from 1964 to 1980. The two of them were the brains in papers which were in some respects solid rather than brilliant.

At Cambridge he continued his career, begun at Stowe, as a bold, glamorous grandee with a flair for the unexpected. When war came he was turned down by the Coldstreams and found himself in the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry, then joined Phantom, the Intelligence outfit attached to Montgomery’s 21st Army Group. It was in Phantom that he met and was under the command of the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who became an abiding influence on him.

Injured on an assault course while training, he was sent to the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford and spent six months recuperating, during which he became a temporary member of Magdalen College. He returned to Peterhouse after the war to finish his degree, then went to the Glasgow Herald as a sub-editor.

On his arrival there, much to his embarrassment and the contempt of the commissionaire, he found he had mistaken the humble post of sub-editor for that of deputy editor, which suggests that what he lacked in experience he at least made up for in self-assurance.

Two years later he joined The Times and stayed there for five years, including a stint in Washington (though his pro-Republican stance and his approval of Senator Joseph McCarthy found little favour in Printing House Square), before joining The Daily Telegraph under Colin Coote.

Part of Worsthorne’s charm, which was almost formidable, came from his outrageous good looks: the bright blue eyes and – until they turned an elder-statesman silver – golden locks, slightly feminine mouth and penetrating drawl ensured that his entrance into most company was immediately noticed.

But it also came from an engaging frankness which could be positively foolhardy. His voice could often be heard, not merely at private dinner tables but also in more populous places such as the Beefsteak or the Garrick, giving his opinions of colleagues or reports of conversations with others.

He enjoyed telling stories against himself, such as his rebuff by a grim-faced Australian prime minister on one of those travels which, written up in the form of diaries, produced his best journalism; or his visit to Conrad Black in the latter’s Canadian demesne, when he failed to find the entrance: he had ignominiously to climb a wall, and arrived at the front door, as he told it, “looking like a drowned rat”.

The foreign diaries are a happy mixture of the grand and the self-demeaning. In California he admits his annoyance at having to turn down an invitation to meet the film star Merle Oberon because of a previous engagement with an earnest political journalist. “An evening with Merle Oberon might have been more fun,” he writes, “but perhaps not so enlightening, at least about public affairs.” His colleague Alan Watkins of The Observer sagely described the itinerant Worsthorne as “a combination of Mr Pooter and Lord Curzon”.

When he complained in one of his Spectator diaries that The Times had failed to notice his birthday, readers were puzzled: could he possibly be serious – presumably not, or he would not have mentioned the subject? Friends put his frankness down to innate modesty, enemies to an unshakeable self-regard. The fact was that keeping his mouth shut was simply not in his nature.

He was by no means as conceited as he sometimes seemed. Only a few weeks before he lost his job as editor of The Sunday Telegraph he received written assurances from Andrew Knight that the paper’s identity was safe, which encouraged him to send a letter to all its journalists confidently denying rumours of a merger and attaching Knight’s letter to him. His subsequent unexpected dethronement made him, he wrote in The Spectator, “sick with indignation and shame”.

WHEN KNIGHT LEFT to join Rupert Murdoch’s News International he wrote: “We all felt bitterly disillusioned about Mr Knight’s good faith; disillusion which would have been even greater if we had guessed at the time that Mr Knight was about to desert the ship that he had done so much to sink, and desert it, moreover, to take command of the enemy.”

Worsthorne wept when a junior colleague commiserated with him for his loss of the editorship: he had not realised how much his staff, or at least some of them, had liked him. These were not the tears of a complacent man.

It is true that he had always had an exhibitionist streak, evident in his sharp way of dressing (he liked scarlet socks and shirts with the broadest stripes). In Brighton during a Tory party conference in the early 1970s he swapped shirts with the then Mrs Nigel Lawson (the former Vanessa Salmon, a famous society beauty), an exchange which shocked some fellow diners at Wheeler’s restaurant; but this may have been due less to exhibitionism than to a simple desire to test the theory that some shirts, in the words of a well-known advertisement, Looked Even Better on a Man. It is not certain that he noticed that anyone else was present.

In the spring of 1989, in a high-flown Sunday Telegraph leader, he belaboured the editors of The Sunday Times and The Observer for irresponsibility and abuse of privilege. Both had been seen with a beautiful adventuress, Pamella Bordes: Andrew Neil, the Sunday Times editor, had met her in Tramp nightclub and had subsequently had an affair with her. This was not, said Worsthorne, the place for editors of responsible national newspapers, who ought to be testing the political temperature in less frivolous venues.

In a celebrated libel case, which was often written about as New Britain vs Old Britain (with Worsthorne happy to be the standard-bearer of Old Britain), Neil and The Sunday Times sued Worsthorne. Neil was awarded £1,000 and his paper an even more derisory 60p. In court Neil described Worsthorne as a member of “the Garrick Club mafia”, and some press comment suggested that he was a quaint survival from the past; but Worsthorne had meant that leader: he really did care about the duties of an editor.

Much of his thinking dated from the wartime meeting with Michael Oakeshott. It was Oakeshott who confirmed him in his habit of questioning accepted propositions. “At the risk of sounding pretentious,” Worsthorne wrote, “I would like to suggest that a political columnist’s approach to ideas ought to be more that of political philosopher – however unsuited to the task he may be – than that of practical politician.”

This was a typical Worsthorne sentence. He was always ready with a disclaimer if he foresaw that his readers might accuse him of being pompous or perverse.

IT WAS Oakeshott again who, early in Worsthorne’s newspaper career, persuaded him to despise political ideologies and programmes of social reform. “Oakeshott had taught me,” he was to write in his memoirs, “how to feel superior not only to socialism, or even to what passed for Conservatism at that period, but, in effect, to the modern world.”

He was constantly misunderstood by the Left, which put him down as a knee-jerk Tory, a wildly inaccurate judgment. He had a certain sympathy, admittedly cerebral rather than emotional, for the Left wing of the Labour Party as it saw the ideal of a truly working-class government dissolve under the dominance of middle-class intellectuals.

His argument was that socialism, having begun as an attempt to politicise the labouring class, was bound to end with the workers seizing the chance to get out of it; and that since it required a “bossy” administration to make it work, it would inevitably spawn a new elite with powers never enjoyed under laissez-faire Conservatism.

The need for a strong ruling class was a recurring theme in his weekly columns and in his book The Socialist Myth (1971). For despite all the paradoxes and the eager search for something new, Worsthorne’s political stance showed a lifelong consistency. He yearned for a stable society in which the rights of the lower orders and the duties of the higher were clearly defined in a strong nexus of mutual regard.

His autobiography, Tricks of Memory, was published in 1993. In it he claimed that it was not until he joined The Daily Telegraph in 1953 that he began to think of journalism as a serious profession rather than as an agreeable hobby for a man about town with a taste for philandering.

But he never lost his taste for high living, for old silver, linen napery, cut glass and good champagne. His description of the meals he enjoyed with Lady Pamela Berry at the Berrys’ house in Cowley Street verges on the ecstatic. “Anybody’s spirit would rise,” he wrote, “at sitting down at such a lunch table and when the first course turned out to be eggs florentine, a favourite dish, mine almost exploded with pleasure and excitement.”

In a notable contribution to the Sunday Telegraph magazine in 1986, under the headline “My Country Right or Wrong?”, he wrote: “My patriotism owes more to the past than the present and smacks heavily of nostalgia.” He felt surrounded by aliens on the London Underground: “King’s Road, once my neighbourhood, is now like a nightmare vision of hell.” Punks made him feel sick; “Guardian women” disgusted him. And he deplored the “revisionist historians who tell us that all our British heroes had feet of clay”.

In 1950 he had married Claude Bertrand de Colasse (known affectionately as Claudie), who died in 1990, and to whom he soon afterwards paid an almost unbearably moving tribute in his weekly column for The Daily Telegraph.

He was knighted in 1991, and in the same year he married Lady Lucinda Lambton, one of the daughters of Lord Lambton, who survives him with his daughter, Dominique. He then gave up editing The Sunday Telegraph Comment section and settled down with his new wife at her house in Buckinghamshire, whence for several years he continued to send a weekly column to his old paper – not so much now about the affairs of the day as about his occasional travels or domestic doings. In 2004 he published In Defence of Aristocracy.

His marriage to Lucy Lambton was a great love match. Worsthorne spent the last five years frail and confined to bed, latterly suffering loss of mental sharpness, and she looked after him beautifully.

Whether the reader agreed with Peregrine Worsthorne or was maddened by him, his clear, relaxed, discursive style was always compelling; and whatever his disappointments he never lost sight of his aim – “genuinely original, iconoclastic, irreverent journalism”. It is for this, if for nothing else, that he will be remembered.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, born December 22 1923, died October 4 2020

The filioque started it

Church Times]], 19 August 2011
Causes of the Crunch
The filioque started it

Peter Day reads The Crisis Behind Our Crisis Alexander Boot St Matthew Publishing Ltd £8 (978-1-901546-38-5) Church Times Bookshop £7.20

THE great economic disruption that began four years ago is not yet over, and may get worse. But its perilous unfolding has already permitted a stream of books and commentaries to catch up with it. Not many of them inject into their analysis of what has gone wrong with society anything about theology, let alone a reference to the filioque. Alexander Boot does. He brings into his ample frame of reference the at-least-1000-year-old disagreement between the Churches of East and West over whether or not the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as from the Father. The East-West schism that eventually resulted from this, Boot argues, begat a related division in the attitudes to economic activity: it loosened the grip of religion on men’s souls, and allowed them to pursue happiness unimpeded. This is but one step on the road to the Credit Crunch crisis of 2008, but this observation gives some sense of this book as a whole, crammed as it is with observations that are metaphysical, political, social, and historical, attempting to make sense of the mess we are in, and the folly that has caused it.

Boot is a lively and informed writer, and an odd one. He was born in Russia, fled from the attentions of the KGB to the West, and eventually settled in Britain. After a long business career, he is now a full-time writer. His previous books include God and Man According to Tolstoy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and How the West was Lost (I. B. Tauris, 2006). This latest carries back-cover recommendations from the Revd Dr Peter Mullen and Dr Theodore Dalrymple. The book is dedicated “to Peter”, and thanks Dr Anthony Daniels (alter ego Dr Dalrymple) for first suggesting that Boot should write books.

As you might expect from the clubbable Right, this is in part the thoughts of a grumpy old man: on the iniquities of FDR’s New Deal, on overseas aid, taxes, Europe, and homosexuality. Boot’s proposals for tackling our current malaise include a smaller state, self sufficiency, a move towards restoring the monetary rectitude of the gold standard, and a limited electoral franchise: no votes for people deriving more than half their earned income from the Government, for example. But if this is fanciful, then, in its defiance of what the modern world has become, this book has an intriguing argument: that the actual (Christian) reality of the West was gradually replaced through the Renaissance onwards by a virtual reality of economic activity and individuality from which we are now suffering. “It is not surprising that we now live on virtual money,” Boot writes. In other words, this is not an economic crisis, but something much more profound.

Peter Day is the presenter of In Business on BBC Radio 4 and Global Business on the BBC World Service.