for that matter) has no fear of the strong state, no hang-ups about individual liberty, which is why it is as willing to use the power of the state to curb the excesses of free speech and a free media, as of free enterprise or free trade". In the early 2000s, in reference to nuclear weapons and the possibility of nuclear war during the Cold War, he said "would some historian emerging centuries later from the post-thermonuclear war Dark Ages have judged (pressing the button) morally justified, or so evil as to dwarf even the most monstrous inequities of Hitler, Stalin and Mao? ... How could we have believed anything so preposterous?". In 2004 he released a book called In Defence of Aristocracy. In a speech at the Athenaeum Club on 19 June 2006, titled "Liberalism failed to set us free. Indeed, it enslaved us", he criticised liberalism and aspects of meritocracy; as well as the "liberal triumphalism" of the "West's victory in the Cold War left liberalism as the only ism still backed by a world superpower". In the 2000s he regularly contributed book reviews to the New Statesman, and was still a subscriber to the magazine in the 2010s. He told Jason Cowley of the New Statesman in a 2016 interview: "I've always thought the English aristocracy so marvellous compared to other ruling classes. It seemed to me that we had got a ruling class of such extraordinary historical excellence, which is rooted in England almost since the Norman Conquest." In his Athenaeum Club speech in 2006 he noted the emergence of David Cameron in a positive light, seeing in him "the return of the English gentleman." By December 2013, having met Cameron only once, he was more sceptical: "Cameron fits into that gentlemanly tradition but he's very embarrassed and awkward about it." Bruce Anderson observed of Worsthorne, "my dear friend and master", on his 90th birthday in December 2013: "Throughout his career, Perry defended conventions, while also defying them." Private life and death Worsthorne married Claudie Bertrande Baynham (née de Colasse) in 1950, with whom he had a daughter (Dominique) and stepson (David Anthony Lloyd Baynham). Claudie died in 1990. In 1991 he married the architectural writer Lucinda Lambton. A portrait of the couple, by Denis Waugh, is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London. As of 2013, the couple lived in Buckinghamshire. Worsthorne publicly