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British newspaper columnist

Michael Wharton (19 April 1913 – 23 January 2006) was a British newspaper columnist who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple in the British Daily Telegraph. He began work on the "Way of the World" column with illustrator Michael ffolkes three times a week in early 1957, and wrote the column four times a week for a lengthy period ending in 1987. On 13 May 1990 he began a weekly Peter Simple column in the Sunday Telegraph, before returning to the Daily Telegraph as a weekly columnist on 8 March 1996. He remained there until his death, aged 92, in 2006, his last column appearing on 20 January 2006.

Wharton was born as Michael Bernhard Nathan, the son of a businessman of German Jewish origin, at Shipley, in the West Riding of Yorkshire ("Wharton" was the maiden name of his mother). Wharton was educated at Bradford Grammar School and Lincoln College, Oxford. His career at Oxford was undistinguished, partly because he spent his time writing Sheldrake, a novel that had little success when published in 1958. After Oxford, Wharton served in the Royal Artillery from 1940 to 1946, rising to the rank of Major (acting Lieutenant Colonel), "but", in his own words, "only in Intelligence". He then worked for the BBC as a producer and scriptwriter, but left in 1956. His two volumes of quasi autobiography, The Missing Will and A Dubious Codicil, combined his fantasy world with the mundane reality of the life as a jobbing journalist. Wharton married three times. His daughter and literary executor, Jane Wharton, works as a psychotherapist.

The column satirised what Wharton saw as modern, fashionable ideas, and readers often claimed to recognise his invented characters in real people. Not fictional was the column's presiding spirit, Colonel Sibthorp, an eccentric and reactionary Victorian Member of Parliament, about whom Wharton made a BBC radio documentary in 1954 and then a "centenary celebration" the following year.

Wharton wrote four columns in a week for the last time from 25–28 August 1987. After Wharton expressed his desire to write less often, Way of the World was written initially three times a week, and subsequently twice weekly until the spring of 1990, by Christopher Booker under the name Peter Simple II, with Wharton continuing to write the column once a week initially on Fridays, but then on Thursdays until 3 May 1990. In 1990 the Peter Simple column and the Way of the World column became fully separate entities, and for the next ten years (7 May 1990 – 16 December 2000) the Way of the World column was written by Auberon Waugh, who died in January 2001. It was then written by the satirist Craig Brown until he left the Telegraph late in 2008. A. N. Wilson began to write a column also under the title Peter Simple II in The Sunday Telegraph on 26 February 2006, but it did not last long.