DIARY
Talking about the CPS, I really do think --t that young David Willetts, its director of studies, should take a bit more care, in his Both the Sunday Times and the Obser- ver referred to me last week in fairly rude terms, thereby making my Sunday, since it is flattering to be noticed, albeit critically. But I do wish that it was not so often simply my name that provoked comment. `I laboured under the delusion that Pereg- rine Worsthorne was a village in Sussex,' wrote John Naughton, the Observer televi- sion critic, before going on to describe my views as those which might have been held by a pre-war Polish cavalry colonel with political leanings. Now I do admit that my by-line could scarcely have failed to pro- voke a bit of mockery when it first appeared in 1955 in an article in an early Encounter — George Scott had a go at it in the now defunct weekly Truth at the time — but surely after more than 30 years of regular exposure in a wide variety of magazines and papers the name is by now not all that comical, at least for the sophisticated kind of people who read the Observer. (Americans either think I must be a woman or re-write the name into something more familiar like Wortelheim.) The reference in the Sunday Times leader was scarcely less old-hat. It dismiissed my views on social class as `antediluvian' another point which George Scott also made in Truth all those years ago. In fact my views on social class are not at all antediluvian. They are extremely up to date, as I hope to demonstrate in the Centre for Policy Studies lecture which I have been invited to give at the Conserva- tive Party conference this year. My prop- osition will be as follows: that there is rapidly coming into existence a largely new and very wide stream of wealthy people who, for the first time since the war, are going to be allowed to pass on their wealth to their children. So once again we are going to have the makings of a new hereditary upper class. All through my lifetime, hereditary wealth has felt it pru- dent to keep a low profile so as to avoid giving offence to the egalitarian spirit of the age. The new lot feel no such guilt or fear, and the question is — or should be how society can put this new-found confi- dence to some constructive purpose. The point is that hereditary inequality is coming back and unless we are careful we will get all the bad side of this state of affairs without any of the good. These are not so much the ravings of a romantic reactionary as the yearnings of a realist who has all his life been arguing that since inequality is inevitable, a sensible society is well advised, if not to lie back and enjoy it, at any rate to make the best of it. PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE innumerable television performances, to avoid implying that `le centre, c'est moi'. Brilliant and personable as he certainly is — specialist adviser, we are always told (whatever that may mean), to Mrs Thatch- er — he is only one of a particularly formidable team led by the distinguished historian Hugh Thomas and including Oliver Knox (who commissions the pam- phlets which are the centre's real contem- porary claim to fame, rather than Mr Willetts's television performances). It is all a question of manners. I have known quite as many ambitious young men ruin their careers by bad manners as by drinking too much.
arbara Wootton, who died last week at a great age, was a heroine of mine, in spite of being a radical social reformer of enormous influence who championed all the suspect progressive causes for well over half a century. I only met her once, in my mother's house, shortly after she had taken her seat in the House of Lords, on which occasion she had caused consternation by running her hand through the hair of several elderly peers as she made her way to her seat on the back benches, muttering endearments into their ear trumpets more suitable for a maison de rendezvous than an upper house. In her case this was no mere act of feminist bravado or iconoclas- tic exhibitionism. She simply liked men even noblemen — particularly if they had curly locks. But that was not my reason for heroine-worshipping her. At our meeting I mentioned that I had been invited to give a talk at the annual conference of the National Association of Social Workers and took the opportunity of picking her expert brains as to what to say. She referred me to her classic work, Social Science and Social Pathology, which came out in 1958, in which I found such sticks of dynamite as: 'The suggestion that complex problems of personal unhappiness and defiance of social standards can be re- solved by a young woman with an academic training in social work is difficult to take seriously', or, `In a very few years practically the whole profession has suc- ceeded in exchanging the garments of charity for a uniform borrowed from the practitioners of psychological medicine', or again, 'Admittedly, the past few decades have seen a great improvement in the standard of manners and courtesy which social workers think it proper to observe in their dealings with those whom they now call their "clients". But the price of these advances has been the erection of a fantas- tically pretentious facade . . .' and, best of all, 'Modern definitions of social casework, if taken at their face value, involve claims to powers which verge upon omniscience and omnipotence: one can only suppose that those who perpetuate these claims in cold print must . . . have been totally deserted by their sense of humour.' So, to get my lecture off to a good start I fired off these aphorisms at the assembled ranks of social workers giving the impression that I had coined them myself. Uproar ensued, of course, which soon subsided to sullen silence when I pointed out that their true author was none other than the great socialist guru Barbara Wootton. I know that this is the oldest parliamentary trick in the world, but it always works.
Nirad Chaudhuri, whose fascinating and immensely erudite article on the Glo- rious Revolution appeared in The Specta- tor last week, has been living in Oxford for many years without a single college, I am told, offering him dining rights, in spite of his being a scholar of international renown. It is true, of course, that he describes himself in his magnificent autobiography as `an unknown Indian'. But I rather suspect that the real reason for this discourtesy is that he is an admirer of an older England which far too many dons enjoy denigrat- ing.
Igather that John O'Sullivan, until recently a Prime Ministerial aide, is lun- ching with Mrs Thatcher in Downing Street one day this week, then jumping on Concorde so as to reach Washington in time to join a small private dinner party given by President Reagan in the White House. Any offers from Mr Gorbachev?
Peregrine Worsthorne is the editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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