N.M. Gwynne’s diary: Old names worth dropping

As I get older (and my 74th birthday is now close), I get deeper and deeper into nostalgia. I do not fight this, because nostalgia seems to me to be rational as well as agreeable. Things really aren’t what they once were. ‘But people have always said that,’ is often the response. Yes, and for the most part, I maintain, people have always been right. So it is that, whenever I leave my present home in Ireland for a visit to England, what I most enjoy there is seeing the most elderly of my friends. Having been around for so long, they have so much to talk interestingly about. Indeed, I rather wonder whether anyone anywhere could be more interesting — or, as it happens, more name-droppable — than those whom I called on during my recent visit.

First, this time: Perry Worsthorne, now aged 91. As the public’s memory of him fades, it is worth recalling that in his day he was the leading serious journalist in Britain, with, if my memory serves, no rival within sight. From the moment that my interest in politics started, his articles were influencing me, and indeed are responsible for views that I still hold today. That this beacon and I should end up becoming close friends was of course unimaginable. He was a real conservative at a time when the Conservatives had already ceased to be conservatives. ‘England’s problems began with the 1832 Great Reform Bill,’ was his typically pithy summary to me the other day — deliberately extravagant in its wording, of course, but certainly not unseriously intended. In his career, he got to know just about ‘everyone’. For what someone of renown was really like, from President Kennedy to Evelyn Waugh, he is easily my most interesting source.