‘The pure pleasure of annoying people’ – Peregrine Worsthorne at 90

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne isn’t much looking forward to his 90th birthday on 22 December. ‘It’s awful,’ he cries. ‘It makes me so angry Diana Athill writing about the joys of old age. My eyes, teeth, heart — everything starts to go. Keeping alive becomes a full-time job. I’m so lucky to have a much younger wife. If I was on my own, I’d crumble. But as they say, it’s better than the alternative.’

Worsthorne is speaking in the high Gothic drawing room of the old rectory in Hedgerley, Buckinghamshire, where he lives with his second wife, the architectural writer Lucy Lambton. Over lunch, he says to Lucy, ‘My brain isn’t working!’ His brain seems highly functional to me, as he reels off anecdotes going right back to the 1920s. The former editor of the Sunday Telegraph, and a journalist since 1946, Worsthorne has been at the heart of things since his pre-war childhood, when his stepfather, Montagu Norman, was Governor of the Bank of England. He still remembers Lord Reith’s rage at being sacked as Director-General of the BBC in 1938. Reith heard the news in Worsthorne’s parents’ house. ‘He was at dinner when we turned on the radio to find Churchill had sacked him. He was absolutely furious, beside himself with rage. Churchill hated Reith because during the General Strike he wouldn’t allow him to harangue the public about not siding with the strikers.’

Worsthorne has remained the Zelig of the age into the 21st century, keeping a close eye on modern Conservative politics. He once saw the return of the English gentleman in David Cameron. But no longer. ‘The gentleman has gone,’ he says. ‘Cameron fits into that gentlemanly tradition but he’s very embarrassed and awkward about it. I only met him once at a fundraising thing at Stoke Park, a stately home near here.