LETTERS Crossing the street
Sir: When I told Peregrine Worsthorne in his office last 19 September that I was stepping aside as Chief Executive to make room for Conrad Black, he said: 'I am very, very sad. I am so very sorry.' He said it with evident feeling which anybody who knows Perry will recognise. I said how moved I was to hear what he said, after all the pain I had caused him earlier in the year.
He replied: 'Yes [it was painful] — but it has been a marvellous three years. I wouldn't have had them without you. I am sad. We all shall miss you.' I wrote this down at the time because it meant much at a moment of great distress for me as I quit.
Perry is the person I enjoyed most on the Telegraph, and whom it was most worth defending (with firm support from Con- rad), and indeed appointing, against a management that did not always under- stand editorial well enough to see his worth. He did a magnificent job as editor until the Sunday Telegraph, largely through lack of cohesion on management's part, was outgunned.
I shall find it easier to recall this Perry's than Sunday Telegraph profile about me be- cause the latter, in his own admission on this page last week, was so obviously Prompted by a 'burning sense of grie- vance'. It discredited the discreditors.
I understand the 'outrage' — though Perry's reason for it is confused. The debate which preceded the Sunday Tele- graph decision nearly a year ago was so open as to be public property not only inside the Telegraph but in other newspap- ers also. All the options being considered, in writing and in meetings, were dreadfully open and blatant. So were the swirl of different advocates around me from among which, in the end, I had to choose.
In such a debate about life and death, there is a great tendency to avert one's eyes from the scaffold. I think Perry did this, and it's hard to blame him. The approaching disillusion horrified me too I have never enjoyed a poached egg less. In general, I am flattered by the fear of my crossing the street. The fear — and the flattery — are overdone.
Andrew Knight 15 Well Road, London NW3
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