Books, Arts & Manners: Dilemma of Socialism

The Socialist Myth By Peregrine Worsthorne Weybright & Talley, 256 pp., $6.95 Peregrine Worsthorne, Deputy Editor and chief columnist of the London Sunday Telegraph, is one of the most graceful and intellectually entertaining of English political writers today. I first met him many years ago, when he used to write occasional articles for a magazine called Time and Tide, of which I was editor. Unfortunately the proprietor, Lady Rhondda, came to frown on him, because she thought he had written something favorable about Roosevelt.

In vain I tried to persuade her that this was most improbable, since he was a convinced, romantic conservative. It still seems improbable, but not impossible, for Mr. Worsthorne’s judgment is occasionally erratic. With courageous honesty he reprints, in his book The Socialist Myth, an article he wrote in 1964, when Harold Wilson first came to power, saying that he found the prospect “positively exciting,” because he expected Mr. Wilson to prove “a formidable premier, the first passionately radical leader this country has ever experienced in peacetime.” That his expectation was totally wrong, he freely admits: but, for me, the significant point is the frivolity with which he welcomed a political prospect that on principle should have appalled him. He is not, in other words, a completely serious commentator. He is too fond of paradox for its own sake.

AL

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Anthony Lejeune

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The Socialist Myth By Peregrine Worsthorne Weybright & Talley, 256 pp., $6.95 Peregrine Worsthorne, Deputy Editor and chief columnist of the London Sunday Telegraph, is one of the most graceful and intellectually entertaining of English political writers today. I first met him many years ago, when he used to write occasional articles for a magazine called Time and Tide, of which I was editor. Unfortunately the proprietor, Lady Rhondda, came to frown on him, because she thought he had written something favorable about Roosevelt.

In vain I tried to persuade her that this was most improbable, since he was a convinced, romantic conservative. It still seems improbable, but not impossible, for Mr. Worsthorne’s judgment is occasionally erratic. With courageous honesty he reprints, in his book The Socialist Myth, an article he wrote in 1964, when Harold Wilson first came to power, saying that he found the prospect “positively exciting,” because he expected Mr. Wilson to prove “a formidable premier, the first passionately radical leader this country has ever experienced in peacetime.” That his expectation was totally wrong, he freely admits: but, for me, the significant point is the frivolity with which he welcomed a political prospect that on principle should have appalled him. He is not, in other words, a completely serious commentator. He is too fond of paradox for its own sake.