Perry Worsthorne: a man incapable of dullness

I had known Perry Worsthorne for several years before I went to work for him in 1986 (horrifying how time passes). Then again, everybody knew Perry. He was one of the most colourful figures in London. Elegant, silver-haired, always amusing, regularly original and frequently provocative, he was a triumphant refutation of the idea that conservatism is a dull creed, based on worship of the Gods of the Copybook Headings. Perry was incapable of dullness.

He also felt ambivalent about Margaret Thatcher. At moments, he would acknowledge that she had saved the country from decline. But on one famous occasion, he accused her of ‘bourgeois triumphalism’. I remember arguing that to revive the animal spirits of the middle classes — an essential component of national recovery — a certain amount of that was essential. Better bourgeois triumphalism than bourgeois defeatism. He was unconvinced. Perry was too much of a romantic, too much indeed of a Tory anarchist, to be at ease with Thatcher’s people, except on certain occasions. I remember once running into him after a lunch at which Ian McGregor, the head of the National Coal Board, had been the guest of honour, not long after the defeat of Scargill and the militant miners. But at the end, Sir Ian was left on his own. No one rushed up to congratulate him and shake his hand. A furious Perry thought that this was hideous hypocrisy on the part of people who would have had so much to lose if the strikers had prevailed.

Apropos Mrs Thatcher, Perry was an early recipient of a handbagging, though he barely noticed. It was at a meeting of the Conservative Philosophy Group. She had only recently become leader of the opposition. Although she was the first Tory leader to use the word ‘-intellectual’ as a term of unqualified approval, she was not at ease in that group.