received a knighthood in the 1991 New Year Honours for services to journalism. Views concerning homosexuality Worsthorne long criticised homosexual activity, castigating Roy Jenkins in particular in a 1982 editorial for his tolerance of "queers". At the time of the debate over Section 28 in January 1988 he appeared on BBC Radio Three's Third Ear programme and persistently referred to gay men as "them", which caused the other interviewee, Ian McKellen, to come out by saying, "I'm one of them myself". Worsthorne also said on the programme that not being gay was "a close-run thing" for some of his contemporaries. In a 2011 article for the London Evening Standard, in reference to the 1930s, Worsthorne said "I think more boys would have gone gay if there hadn't been such a price to pay for it." He later accepted the possibility of same sex marriages, believing they allow gay people to form "stable relationships" and argued Conservatives should embrace political correctness as a form of modern courtesy. Worsthorne also claimed to have been seduced by Jazz musician George Melly. Later life and career (1993–2020) In 1993, Worsthorne criticised the legacy of Margaret Thatcher's government; during the 1980s, his ambivalence to what he saw as her "bourgeois triumphalism" resulted in Worsthorne and the Telegraph being out of favour at 10 Downing Street for some time. In 2005 he argued that Thatcher's "utterly un-Tory ideological excesses left such a bad taste in the mouth of the English people as to make Conservatism henceforth unpalatable, except as a last resort in the absence of a less dire alternative". He added: "For many of our people, life in the late 20th and in the 21st Century will be repulsive, brutal, and short as well." His weekly article in The Sunday Telegraph was discontinued in 1997 during the editorship of Dominic Lawson, who said that Worsthorne's column had run its "natural lifespan". From that point, Worsthorne became critical of Conrad Black's wife, Barbara Amiel, and Black himself for his newspapers' uncritical support for Israel and the foreign policies of the United States. In 1997 he criticised the "great and irreversible changes in society" and said of a changing Britain that "this is not a country I recognise or am particularly fond of any more". In 1999, Worsthorne said that only a federal Europe can stop the abolition of Britain, arguing that "the European Right (and Left