PeregrineWorsthorne Editor
SIR PEREGRINE Worsthorne, who has died at 96, was a newspaper editor, Conservativeleaning columnist and frequent contributor to ITV’s Weekend World and other staples of the Sunday political output.
He spent much of his career at the Sunday Telegraph, becoming deputy editor in 1961 and then associate editor before occupying the editor’s chair for five years from 1986.
However, in his autobiography he said he had regretted turning down an invitation to become editor of The Yorkshire Post.
He gained some short- term notoriety in 1973, when, having been invited on to the BBC’s early evening magazine Nationwide, following – it was said – a protracted lunch at the wine bar El Vino in Fleet Street, he became only the second person, after the critic Kenneth Tynan, to utter a four- letter obscenity on TV.
He had been asked whether the public would be concerned that the junior defence minister Lord Lambton had been caught by a Sunday tabloid in bed with two prostitutes. In a sign of the changing times since the Profumo scandal of 10 years before, Worsthorne ventured that not many were likely to be greatly concerned by the minister’s indiscretion.
His choice of words was said to have ruined his chances of an earlier editorship, though he went on to marry Lambton’s daughter, the architectural
writer and broadcaster Lucinda Lambton.
Worsthorne’s most controversial views were reserved for his weekly columns, however. He considered himself a “romantic reactionary” and was sceptical about Margaret Thatcher’s brand of Conservatism. She nevertheless knighted him in her resignation honours list.
His views mellowed somewhat in later years, and he even reconciled himself to the law on gay marriage.
His column continued until 1997, when he was controversially fired in a fax message from the Sunday Telegraph’s then editor, Dominic Lawson, son of Mrs Thatcher’s former Chancellor.
Worsthorne married twice, first to Claude Bertrand de Colasse in 1950, with whom he had a daughter. Following his