it very well." He wrote an article "When Treason Can Be Right" in the Sunday Telegraph on 4 November 1979, in which he said that he would accept a request to work with the CIA to undermine a Labour Government in the UK. A quote from this article appears in some copies of the novel A Very British Coup, in which the main conspirator is named Sir Peregrine. Editor and later responsibilities (1986–91) After Conrad Black's holding company gained 80% of the company stock in 1986, Worsthorne was finally able to become editor of The Sunday Telegraph, though in the end only for three years. In 1989 the Telegraph titles briefly became a seven-day operation under Max Hastings, with the bulk of The Sunday Telegraph edited by Trevor Grove. Worsthorne's responsibilities were reduced to the three comment pages by the editor-in-chief Andrew Knight, who sacked Worsthorne as editor over lunch in Claridge's. The lofty ethos of the comment pages, with contributors including Bruce Anderson, was captured in their nickname, 'Worsthorne College'. This arrangement continued until September 1991 when Worsthorne's commitments were reduced to his weekly column. In January 1990, Worsthorne was the defendant in a libel case brought by Andrew Neil and The Sunday Times, over a March 1989 editorial "Playboys as Editors" in The Sunday Telegraph which claimed that as a result of Neil's involvement with Pamella Bordes, he and The Observers Donald Trelford (also involved with Bordes) should not serve as editors of their titles. (The Independent on Sunday, the other British quality Sunday, did not begin publication until January 1990.) The Sunday Telegraph had accused Neil of knowing that Bordes was a prostitute, which according to Roy Greenslade, he certainly did not know, a fact which the Telegraph had accepted by the time of the court case, but still defended the two articles (one was not by Worsthorne) as fair comment. Neil won the defamation case, being awarded damages of £1,000, and his paper won its then cover price of 60p. Earlier, in March 1988, Worsthorne had said Neil was a "brilliant editor", according to an entry in the diary of his friend, Woodrow Wyatt. "The job of journalism is not to be scholarly", Worsthorne commented in 1989. "The most that can be achieved by an individual newspaper or journalist is the articulation of an intelligent, well-thought-out, coherent set of prejudices – ie, a moral position." Worsthorne