Peter Worthington and the politics of horizontalism

I’ll miss Peter Worthington, Canada’s archetypal right-wing journalist, who died this week at 86. I say that without irony or subtext. I’ll just miss him. When we did public events together we were always positioned as left vs. right. But I couldn’t conceal my delight at seeing him. CBC’s Michael Enright, who hosted one panel, said: “Would you two stop acting like long-lost brothers?”

We’d written against each other before we met. I was specially irked by his impulse to meddle, through his connections at agencies like the RCMP security service. In retrospect, though, I’m not sure that’s much different from what leftish writers like myself would call activism: putting your beliefs into practise. Worthington saw himself as an active Cold Warrior in that conflict’s heyday.