A Polemicist In The Pink

The former newspaper editor and dandy Sir Peregrine Worsthorne is 93 – and he’s never been happier. Valerie Grove met him at his beautifully ramshackle Old Rectory home.

‘How lucky I am, beyond all measure or desert.’ So Peregrine Worsthorne ended his memoirs, Tricks of Memory, in 1993. That luck has lasted for a quarter of a century for the former editor of the Sunday Telegraph, a journalist since 1946.

The pink-bow-tied, flamboyantly coiffed polemicist and dandy is now 93, with snow-white whiskers, seated by a log fire at the Old Rectory in his elegant dressing-gown. For his daily walk – more of a shuffle – he clamps on a scarlet fedora. Wherever he appears, he is unmistakable, especially in his bright pink Crocs, which add to the gaiety of the nation. Let us reprise the earlier incarnation of Mr Peregrine Worsthorne, as seen in that autobiography. He had, in 1989, relished writing an arrogant leader in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘Editors as Playboys’, denouncing his rival Sunday paper editors, Andrew Neil and Donald Trelford, for their respective dalliances with Miss Pamella Bordes.

So unbecoming, he huffed, so vulgar, so unworthy of their office. Editors should be dining on Oxbridge high tables (as he, who went to both Ox and Bridge, did). Neil sued for libel. Worsthorne, after nine hours’ cross-examination in the High Court, wrote of the crushing experience of being in the dock, feeling like a helpless schoolboy, hearing himself described as ‘a hypocrite and a humbug, pompous, sanctimonious and malicious’. (‘Being a defendant in a libel action knocks the smile, and still more the sneer, off a journalist’s face’.)

Neil won the libel case, receiving damages of £1,000.