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'He would rather be laughed at than ignored'

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne with his wife, Lucinda Lambton - David Harrison
Sir Peregrine Worsthorne with his wife, Lucinda Lambton - David Harrison

A game that used to be played at certain country house weekends was called by some Adverbs. It entailed a player performing actions chosen by others in the manner of an adverb that they would have to guess. Peregrine Worsthorne, a former editor of The Sunday Telegraph, who died last week aged 96, chose, it seemed to me, to live his life flamboyantly.

This is not to denigrate him, for it enabled him to benefit this paper, which he joined as deputy editor at its foundation in 1961, by putting conservative ideas in entertaining dress. But flamboyant he was. Tall, blue-eyed, beaky-nosed, not given to flab, he wore his wavy hair artistically long. I don’t know how widely he was attractive to women, but he was attracted to them.

He was a dandy. In old age he acted as a model for Boden clothes. About 30 years ago he had a suit made with fold-back cuffs, which I thought too much like the Scarlet Pimpernel. He was perfectly aware that the vulgar herd might think his dress silly, for at prep school he was mocked when fitted for a tweed knickerbocker suit his mother had ordered for him.

That story must have originated with him, like most of the disobliging stories about him. He would rather be laughed at than ignored. It was he who claimed to have been seduced by the future jazz man George Melly on the art-room sofa at Stowe. Melly denied it.

There was the tale of his arrival at the Glasgow Herald in 1946 as a sub-editor. Many outside journalism think sub-editors a sort of deputy editor, rather than the pasty-faced dogsbodies of reality. Perry, also expecting a job grander than it was, announced to the commissionaire: “I am the new sub-editor.” To which the commissionaire, hardly looking up, gestured, “Just sit over there, laddy.” “But ... I am the new sub-editor.” “Aye, just sit there and wait.” That story didn’t come from the commissionaire.

Perry, as he was known even to sub-editors, excelled in writing about social embarrassments by which he was not embarrassed. Annoyed by someone eating  a burger next to him on the Underground, he retaliated, he wrote, by breaking wind. He was even prepared to stymie his own progress by setting himself up as the fall guy. Visiting his new owner Conrad Black in Toronto, he was unable to find his way in through the gates, so climbed the high fence in the snow and snagged his trousers.

The ne plus ultra of such self-defeating clowning was when he used the F-word on television, in 1973.

He meant it as a joke, hatched in a taxi with Philip Hope-Wallace, the Guardian music critic. Asked what he thought the British public made of Lord Lambton resigning as a minister after visiting prostitutes, Perry said to the camera: “I shouldn’t think they give a f––.”

This might sound funny in El Vino’s which he and Hope-Wallace frequented, along with cerebral journalists such as Paul Johnson, Colin Welch or Alan Watkins. But for it to be beamed to a million firesides did not amuse Lord Hartwell, the Telegraph’s proprietor. Nor did it help that a story emerged from a party conference at Brighton that Perry had swapped shirts in a crowded Wheeler’s restaurant with Vanessa, the beautiful wife of Nigel Lawson.

Those inimical to Perry said that he was not serious. But when another man was appointed editor of The Sunday Telegraph in 1976 and a friend hoped he was not bitter, Perry replied: “I am extremely bitter. I have every reason to be. I have been absolutely reliable, never drunk or anything like that, and this is the reward I get.”

It is true that he was not drunk. Many journalists were then, often. If anything, Perry was shy with his social inferiors, who were the majority of his colleagues. His mother, the grand-daughter of an earl, married as her second husband Montagu Norman, the governor of the Bank of England, just after Perry’s ninth birthday. Norman did not care for children of any kind, so Perry and his brother, two years older, lived in a separate house with its own servants. He was much influenced by James the butler.

One day when Perry dropped in to the pub nearest the Telegraph in Fleet Street, he met a sort of class hostility. That evening the diplomatic correspondent, notorious for clicking into a monster of abuse after a critical volume of whisky, launched into a tirade against Perry, who, he said, belonged in a St James’s club.

“You're a hollow man,” he snarled. “You’re a tinsel king on a cardboard throne.” According to the columnist Michael Wharton, who witnessed the scene, Perry, who must have been feeling low, sat there as the abuse washed over him till tears rolled down his cheeks. “Look,” cried the diplomatic correspondent. “I’ve made him blub!”

It might have taken Perry back to the term at his prep school near Dorking when he was bullied and ran away. Even then, he wasn’t taken seriously, for he stopped off at Waterloo to see a film at the cartoon cinema.

But a lack of seriousness was the golden key to his success. He worked at the Telegraph, Daily and Sunday, from 1948 to 1997. His achievement was to get political ideas of the moderate Right talked about as thinkable alternatives. He did so by paradox and contrariness, by making mischief and finding the  moment to pierce sensibilities. He did not originate the ideas. Indeed someone was paid to talk to him each week to keep them coming. At Cambridge he had been influenced by Michael Oakeshott,  as he was later by Maurice Cowling.

For all his expensive schooling and conviviality at the Garrick, he was an outsider. That was even true of his Catholic religion. His knighthood in 1991 was deserved but seemed lucky, since he remained more court jester than courtier. His great good fortune was to be married for his last three decades to Lady Lucy Lambton.