second person on the nation's television to say "fuck", when asked if the general public were concerned that a Conservative Government minister Lord Lambton (his future father-in-law) had shared a bed with two call girls. Worsthorne said in 2013: "There's a possibility it wasn't spontaneous. Apparently I took advice about it before in El Vino's. I don't remember. To the best of my knowledge, it was the mot juste." The use of the swear word on television cost him the opportunity to edit The Daily Telegraph, as its then owner Lord Hartwell strongly objected to Worsthorne's comment and was persuaded to bar him from appearing on television for six months. Worsthorne was, nevertheless, promoted to associate editor in 1976. Associate editor (1976–86) Worsthorne argued in 1978 that the possible advance of "socialism" created an "urgent need ... for the state to regain control over 'the people', to re-exert its authority ..." in the context of Britain "being allowed to spin into chaos". He was critical of Margaret Thatcher's connection of domestic socialism with the form in the Eastern Bloc as he did not perceive this as being in line with the experiences of most of the population (the "untalented majority"). He saw "the needs and values of the strong" as something which "should obsess the popular imagination" of "all healthy societies". He defended the conduct of Pinochet's forces in the 1973 Chilean coup, and wrote that he hoped the British army would launch a coup in Britain if a radical minority socialist government should ever enter power. In 1978 Worsthorne did not see the potential for elements of his views (the end of socialism as an alternative in Britain) to be reflected in the forthcoming change of government (in what the political scientist Andrew Gamble came to call "the free economy and the strong state"). In the year before Thatcher's election he wrote that her government "is not going to make all that much difference [...] Her proposals amount in effect to very little: a controlled experiment in using market methods to improve the workings of social democracy". "We put too much emphasis on Mrs. Thatcher forming a government", Worsthorne said on the BBC's election night programme late on 3 May 1979 as the results were about to come in. "It will really be Conservative ideas and Conservative policies that have formed a government. I don't think that she's articulated