Too nice to like
From Sir Peregrine Worsthorne
Sir: In my memoir, Tricks of Memory, published as far back as 1992, after expressing regrets for that unfortunate Sunday Telegraph profile on John Julius Norwich, I tried to explain my reasons for having commissioned it. ‘What stuck in my throat about John Julius,’ I wrote, ‘was that he had lived in public life through years of Britain’s decline without making enemies.’ My objection was the same as the one Flaubert made of George Sand: ‘a lack of hate’.
For rather similar reasons, the Sunday Telegraph under my editorship also carried a comparably disobliging profile of Isaiah Berlin, another bien-pensant public figure who had managed to remain bland and charming throughout those dreadful years. John Julius, as Petronella says in her Spectator Diary (29 October), was and is ‘a genuinely delightful man’. Quite so — too nice, too bland, too, in a word, tolerant. So of course I never told her that John Julius was ‘the most evil man in the world’. If she thinks I did, she really did get hold of the wrong end of the stick.
Likewise with her suggestion that my recent review of John Julius’s father’s diaries was part of a personal vendetta. True, John Julius is not my cup of tea, but that is no more reason to conclude that my unfavourable review in the New Statesman was based on personal antipathy than that Philip Ziegler’s very favourable review in The Spectator was based on personal affection.
Incidentally, a few weeks ago, Petronella, on behalf of the notoriously mischievous ‘Ephraim Hardcastle’ gossip column in the Daily Mail, rang me in search of the lowdown on quite another matter. So perhaps her claim that doing my bidding all those years ago was ‘the only journalistic work of mine of which I am truly ashamed’ should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Peregrine Worsthorne Hedgerley, Buckinghamshire
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