Worsthorne was born at Cadogan Square in Knightsbridge, London, the younger son of General Alexander Louis Koch Worsthorne (né de Gooreynd), a Belgian banker who had served his country in World War I, and Priscilla Reyntiens, an English Roman Catholic and the granddaughter of the 12th Earl of Abingdon.

[1][2][3] The family name was anglicised following the birth of Worsthorne's older brother Simon Towneley, who from 1976 to 1996 was the Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire.

[1] Worsthorne's mother divorced his father when he was five years old, and shortly afterwards married Sir Montagu Norman, then the Governor of the Bank of England.

After receiving his commission on 4 June 1943, Worsthorne saw service in GHQ Liaison Regiment (Phantom) during the Italian campaign with the philosopher Michael Oakeshott and was part of the occupying force in Hamburg for three months in 1945.

[11][5] He became a correspondent in Washington (1950–52), where his advocacy of Senator Joe McCarthy's pursuit of communist subversion in the United States government eventually led to a split with the more circumspect Times and in 1953, he joined The Daily Telegraph.

[14] Worsthorne mourned the loss of the British Empire; he once argued that the public's acceptance of decolonisation was paralleled by their acquiescence to socialism.

Of the Six-Day War in 1967 he wrote an article titled "Triumph of the Civilised", "Last week a tiny Western community, surrounded by immensely superior numbers of the underdeveloped peoples, has shown itself able to impose its will on the Arabs today almost as effortlessly as the first whites were able to do on the Afro-Asian native in the imperial heyday".

[15]The following year, after Enoch Powell's speech in April 1968 on the perceived threat of non-white immigration, he argued that voluntary repatriation was the "only honest course".

In September 1991, he advocated "a new form of imperialism directed against the countries of the Third World" intended to create an "anti-barbarian alliance" to control the use of weapons by "primitive peoples."

After the publication of the Heath Government's 1971 White Paper, he wrote in a Daily Telegraph column that the "Europeans" deserved to win in the battle over British entry.

[19] By the time of the imminent Single European Act of 1992, however, he wrote in The Sunday Telegraph of 4 August 1992 that: "Twenty years ago, when the process began, ... there was no question of losing sovereignty.

On the BBC's Nationwide programme in March 1973, he was the 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.

[3] 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".

[23] 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").

[24] 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".

"[26] 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.

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 Observer's Donald Trelford (also involved with Bordes) should not serve as editors of their titles.

[39] At the time of the debate over Section 28 in January 1988 he appeared on Third Ear a Radio 3 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".

[47] 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".

[48] 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".

[22] 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".