Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1992,

and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a journalist with his flowing white hair and his aristocratic

deportment he belongs to the old school of newspaper writing the son of a Belgian

colonel and an English baroness, he started his career on the Glasgow Herald.

He moved to the Times and then to the Telegraph.

He might have expected to become editor of the Sunday Telegraph,

but after using a four letter word on early evening television,

he was denied this post by the proprietor Lord Hartwell.

He eventually got the job in 1986.

His opinions are right wing, his style colourful, thoughtful but contradictory,

he believes that a newspaper columnist is there to supply opinions for those who haven't

much time to think. He is Sir Perigrin-Wirthorn.

So comment columns such as the ones you've been writing for 30 years are really simply a public

convenience, are they?

I think that it's useful for readers to have, who haven't got, who are doing other important

or in a case, other jobs, to have somebody who thinks about the common market for them and suggests

opinions that they can either like or dislike and if they dislike them therefore they are

forming an anti-opinioncy or provoking opinion and this is how in fact people reach

their decisions in a democracy I think without strong opinions there can be no

debate and without debate there can be no political freedom so I think that we do play a

...