Eminentoes / A Top Dog
Reid, Stuart
A Top Dog by Stuart Reid p eregrine Worsthorne. What a name! Say it loud and there's music playing; say it soft and it's almost like praying. It is not a name that these days opens many doors at...
...If the mood of the forties had been reactionary, he would no doubt have become a socialist...
...Just before he returned home, unable to think of anything sensible to say, he suggested to the woman that she look him up sometime in London...
...Since 1961 he has written a weekly column for the Sunday Telegraph, and was editor of the paper from 1986 to 1989...
...S till, Perry took vice in stride...
...There was no question of any (legal) impropriety, but the police were nonetheless tipped off, the flat was raided, and Perry, putting on his trousers with as much nonchalance as the circumstances allowed, spent several hours answering sneering questions from vice-squad officers...
...For I've got the nicest little lay in town right next door...
...Perry grabbed his revolver and opened the door...
...Tell you something, Mr...
...So much the worse for the Guards, in that case: the move did him nothing but good...
...His charm is irresistible...
...True, he supported Reaganism-Thatcherism, especially When blood was being spilled, but he has never been able to share the enthusiasm of movement conservatives for the market...
...1-800-423-4525...
...Life on both sides of the Atlantic these past forty years would have been the poorer without him...
...To his dismay she followed him back, and took a flat in Eaton Square...
...p erry has always shown a tender concern for what he invariably refers to as "top dogs," but this habit is balanced by his sympathy for bottom dogs...
...in the autumn, the London publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson brought out Perry's long awaited autobiography, Tricks of Memory, an elegant, entertaining, and Stuart Reid is assistant features editor at the London Sunday Telegraph...
...He is a brilliant anti-establishment journalist who yet likes to see himself as a member of the establishment: he was never good at interviewing cabinet ministers because he thought it undignified for one toff to cross-examine another...
...Like his mother, he is a rebel...
...Here he is on the delights of New 48 The American Spectator March 1994 York in the distant days before Dinkins and Giuliani: When Americans like Henry James came to London at the turn of the century, they were enchanted by how much more civilized our social life was than theirs...
...that those who defend traditional values for a living often lead dissolute lives...
...not for the dregs of society, to be sure, but for outsiders...
...Snooping neighbors noticed that she entertained men friends, among them Perry...
...gentleman, knocked on the door of the room in which Perry was being consoled...
...In December he celebrated his seventieth birthday...
...He was convinced in the immediate postwar years that the United States was the seat of civilization...
...I felt I was entering a superior world— more sophisticated, better mannered, less vulgar, than anything I had ever experienced before...
...he was about to say something quotable about the future of Asia...
...In 1991, he caused outrage among liberals and conservatives alike by siding with Gorbachev when he sent troops into Lithuania...
...His trips abroad provided his new readers with entertaining, not to say racy, digests of world news, for in pursuit of a story Perry was ready to betray what most people would consider a confidence...
...it was the wall sheet of the establishment...
...In so many respects New York in the 1950s had preserved more of the old social customs, courtesies, and rituals than had my native city...
...The story does not get any more edifying...
...This is not the place to go into mucky details, but one story is worth repeating here, to illustrate a cardinal truth about English conservatism: that things are not as they seem...
...Hence his support for Taft and McCarthy...
...Back in his native city he was spotted by Irving Kristol, who was then editing Encounter with Stephen Spender and began commissioning pieces from Perry...
...In the last days of the Soviet Empire he began to question some of the most cherished global assumptions of the anti-Communist right...
...To his credit, Perry did not shine in the pages of the Times...
...Thatcher's resignation honors list—is known to readers of The American Spectator as an occasional (and explosive) contributor and a distinguished member of the editorial board...
...In 1953, frustrated by his lack of progress, he accepted a job at the Daily Telegraph...
...When an idea becomes too popular, or successful, Perry tends to ditch it...
...no one there objected to his pro-American, anti-Communist conservatism...
...Perry was much more discreet in the case of President Johnson...
...He stood there for some moments looking down and I thought that...
...Certainly, like Buckley, he had a good Cold War...
...He is perverse, and capricious...
...Perry recalls how Oakeshott's essay, "Rationalism in Politics," published in 1947, changed his life...
...after the war, the Democratic ascendancy in the United States...
...In the 1950s it was quite the other way around...
...He went to Stowe, a rather thuggish public school, where he was mocked as a dandy, and passed through the usual pouting pansy phase...
...He quit the staff in 1991 and retired to the country with a fax machine and a second wife, the irrepressible Lady Lucinda Lambton (his first wife, the inimitable Claudie, died in 1990...
...He was never in combat, but he saw quite a bit of action...
...Perry is England's most celebrated and sensational conservative pundit...
...A broad smile then passed over the President's face and he put an avuncular arm around my shoulder...
...In October 1985, for example, in a hefty article in these pages, he attacked the neoconservatives for overestimating the strength of the Soviet Union...
...In those days, of course, nearly all English anti-Communists were pro-American (the same is by no means true today), but Perry's fondness for America was based on more than geopolitical considerations...
...In occupied Hamburg he found consolation in the bed of baroness...
...What Perry overlooks in confessing now to his unwonted restraint is that in the 1960s the Sunday Telegraph did not run stories about men "laying" women, even when those women were their wives...
...indiscreet work.' It is also sexy and scandalous, in a way, one trusts, that a Buckley autobiography would not be...
...Who will not warm to a man who in moments of distraction calls male colleagues "darling...
...So brave was he in the field of combat, so indifferent to his own comfort and safety, that he once risked the wrath of liberal prudes everywhere by declaring that he would gladly spy for Washington if a far-left government ever came to power in London...
...by Trafalgar Square Publishing, North Pomfret, VT 05053...
...Worsthorne, I sure wish I could join you down there for a night on the tiles...
...When in 1951 Perry was posted to Washington, he took the side of the Republicans and, even more shocking, warmed to Robert Taft and Joseph McCarthy...
...I read it over and over again, returning to the library day after day to do so...
...Ladybird was changing for that night's banquet...
...Perry has been blessed, and he knows it...
...of England, and that seems a suitably elaborate simplification...
...Towards the end of last year, in a piece headlined "When liberalism is the lesser evil," he bitterly denounced the "vulgar right-wing populism, with distinctly fascist undertones" of some sections of the Conservative Party...
...Distributed in the U.S...
...In those pre-Murdoch days, it was not a newspaper...
...No other piece of political writing has influenced me more," he writes...
...The Telegraph was his natural home...
...New World, indeed...
...Sir Peregrine Worsthorne—he was knighted in Mrs...
...I don't truly envy you your night on the tiles...
...He does not like to be on the winning side...
...he rejected his own left-liberal milieu and became a romantic High Tory...
...She, a beautiful aristocrat, rejected her privileged background and devoted herself to left-liberal causes...
...Compared to post-war London, where social life was in such a state of flux, it seemed marvelously settled in its ways...
...In the eighties he coined the phrase "bourgeois triumphalism" to condemn the unacceptable face of Thatcherism...
...Worsthome," he said...
...The paper might even have been reluctant to do so under Perry's own editorship...
...Perry decided not to include this line in the story he sent back to London, but even if he had it would never have been published...
...One night the baron, who had been serving on the Eastern Front and had lost a leg, arrived home unexpectedly and, being a 1290 pages, $39.95...
...even old fashioned...
...van der Byl, then a minister in Ian Smith's cabinet, he came across an open copy of Mein Kampf in German on van der Byl's drawing room table, and duly reported the fact in the Sunday Telegraph...
...Michael Oakeshott was a formative influence...
...Oakeshott taught him that all political theories—Hayekism as much as Marxism—were rubbish, and that only the half-educated felt the need for ideologies or political doctrines...
...The last sentence of his autobiography reads: "How lucky I am, beyond all measure and desert...
...It is not a name that these days opens many doors at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but it will immediately ring bells in the homes of the few, the proud, the literate...
...This is how he recalls an occasion when he interviewed LBJ in Manila: LBJ led me across [his] room to the balcony which had a magnificent view of the neon-lit city...
...In the mid-1950s Perry had an adulterous fling with a woman in New York, but his infatuation did not last as long as hers...
...During the war he was a subaltern in the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry...
...Time magazine once described Perry—it is always Perry—as the William F. Buckley, Jr...
...It was not until 1961, however, when he joined the Sunday Telegraph, that Perry's byline became a major draw...
...His editorial-page column soon became essential reading for anyone with two ideas to rub together...
...Instead, he said, "Christ, Mr...
...Perry is no prude—how could he be?—but as editor in such a case he might well have decided that it was more important to protect the dignity of the president than to make his readers laugh...
...In Rhodesia, for example, when staying as the guest of P.K...
...The move, he said later, was "like leaving the Brigade of Guards and joining the Royal Warwickshire Regiment...
...Before the war, it backed appeasement...
...When the Wall came tumbling down, Perry rejoiced as much as anyone, but he was one of the first to warn of the dangers of anarchic nationalism in the East...
...Gad, sir, but he makes people mad...
...Consensus scares him the way garlic scares Count Dracula...
...The baron stared sadly at the young English officer, and at his gun, and limped away...
...Perry was never an ideologue...
...Among his colleagues he has always inspired anger and loyalty in equal measure...
...In London after the war, he worked as an editorial writer for the Times, and made rackety friends, among them Henry Fairlie, whom he regarded as an intellectual and who ended his days sleeping on the floor in the offices of the New Republic...
...No hint of these "fascist" sympathies was ever permitted in the Times...
...Before I had time to think what to say in reply there were loud rustlings and hangings from the suite's bedroom where...
...0 The American Spectator March 1994 49...
...Van der Byl still complains good-naturedly about this abuse of hospitality...
...Tradition was the only guide in politics...
Vol. 27 • March 1994 • No. 3
