Sir Peregrine Worsthorne obituary

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, the former editor of the Sunday Telegraph, who has died aged 96, was one of the last columnists of the high Tory school, ploughing for many years an increasingly idiosyncratic furrow in support of deference, hierarchy, empire and aristocracy. He preferred the term “romantic reactionary”.

If eventually he mellowed in old age to the extent of pondering the low quality of modern Conservatism and even the possible social virtues of gay marriage, the conversion – if such it was – came long after he was abruptly sacked from his column by fax by the then editor Dominic Lawson in 1997, despite his 36 years on the paper.