ALAN WATKINS OBITUARIES

Alan Watkins revelled in what he called 'the silver age of Fleet Street' before the journalistic diaspora of the 1980s.

THE GUARDIAN

Michael White, Sunday 9 May 2010

Political columnist with a bloody-minded independent streak

Alan Watkins, who has died aged 77, was a political columnist on newspapers and magazines around old Fleet Street for more than 50 years. He was distinguished as an erudite pundit, a writer of stylish prose and a lively phrasemaker. "Young fogey", "chattering classes" and the Tory "men in suits" were all attributed to him. These qualities, combined with a bloody-minded streak of independence, ensured a professional longevity rare in his ephemeral trade, especially among those who drank seriously. Watkins did.

He wrote his last column, on the party leaders' first television debate, on 18 April. It opened in characteristic fashion: "From the acres of opinion on display on Friday, I seem to find myself in a minority of one ..." Looking back on this stamina in old age gave him great satisfaction. "There's only Keith Waterhouse, William Rees-Mogg, Philip French and me left now," Watkins would say when another rival gave up a column or died, as Waterhouse did last September. "Of course, only Philip has a proper job," he would add, on the grounds that French always had to venture out and see several new films before writing his weekly article.

Watkins's technique was very different. In his youth he might lunch a politician, a Harold Wilson, a Tony Crosland (CAR Crosland in Watkins-speak) or Denis Healey. As likely, he would delve into the background of his week's chosen topic, often consulting dusty memoirs in libraries, his own long memory or a half-forgotten white paper. The result was sharp and witty insights into controversies of the day that readers of the Sunday Express (1959-64), Spectator (1964-67), New Statesman (1967-76), Observer (1976-93), and latterly the Independent on Sunday, expected from him. He would also review books and write columns on other enthusiasms.

For his main column, Watkins would visit the House of Commons, but spend as much time in its bars as in the press gallery. He kept up, but did so via Hansard, or from the sofa at home once the parliamentary TV channel opened: "Our man in Islington with a large drink and a colour television," as he put it. Cable TV was a rare concession to newfangled technologies, one that helped him to spot winners well into old age. By such means did he conclude, against most predictions, during the Labour deputy leadership contest of 2007, that Harriet Harman would beat Alan Johnson. Cameron will be PM, he said before his death.

"You've never been a proper journalist," the Guardian's Ian Aitken would teasingly remind his friend, by which he meant that Watkins never trundled on the hamster wheel of daily deadlines. Watkins seemed genuinely respectful to those who did, but what he did – year in, year out – was at least as demanding. Occasionally it would deliver a real scoop; thus a telegram craftily dispatched to Michael Foot confirmed Watkins's hunch that Foot would run for the newly vacant Labour leadership. The columnist had calculated that "the old bibliophile" (Watkins's description) would be too polite not to answer. His hunch led the paper.

Even in 1980, a telegram was becoming archaic. But Watkins was a man of settled habits who spent most of his working life (apart from a short stint in New York in 1961) in the triangle between Islington, Westminster and Fleet Street. A young journalist once seeking to impress her visiting parents took advantage of the fact. "Do you see that man in the creased blue suit emerging from the Daily Express building? He will cross Fleet Street at that crossing, turn right and go into the wine bar on the left," she predicted.

Watkins duly obliged en route to El Vino's, a haunt he discovered in 1959. Along with the Garrick Club, also within the Watkins triangle, he remained loyal to El Vino's for the rest of his life (not least to cash his cheques, for he mistrusted cash machines), long after it ceased to be packed with the famous journalists of the period, among them Henry Fairlie, George Gale, Paul Johnson, Peregrine Worsthorne, Anthony Howard, the Guardian's Philip Hope-Wallace and Peter Jenkins. In what Watkins called "the silver age of Fleet Street" – before the 80s diaspora – there was a great deal of boozing and fighting. For such a respectable family newspaper, Watkins noted with amusement, the Telegraph's staff was then particularly notorious, its pub, the King and Keys, in frequent uproar.

His settled character and views became part of his performance, outdated phrases deliberately deployed in his articles and conversation. Modelling his column stylistically on PG Wodehouse, he deployed anachronisms for comic effect. For many years his New Year political review was penned like an 18th-century letter as "Master Alan Watkins' Almanack". Watkins's photograph was adorned with a wig for the occasion.

As for means of 20th-century communication, his daughter, Jane, made one last attempt to introduce him to the convenience of a laptop and the joys of the internet in his mid-70s. But he made little or no attempt to use either, being unconvinced that he was missing much. Nor did Watkins have a mobile phone.

Instead he continued to write his columns, usually between 1,100 and 1,300 words, in small, neat handwriting, using a proper pen with black ink on lined foolscap paper. He would then dictate his week's contribution to someone at his current publication (Watkins was a committed freelance) before taking a taxi to the office to check the proofs. By the time old Fleet Street died of strikes and new technology in the 1980s, few got away with such behaviour.

Watkins was born in the Carmarthenshire village of Tycroes, north of Swansea , the adored only child of teachers, themselves clever offspring of mining families. His mother, Violet, spoke no Welsh, but his father, David John (DJ) Watkins, did not read English until he was 12 and was not always easily understood when visiting London . But he was highly erudite, largely self-taught and sceptical of worldly pretence.

As such he would warn his son against Keynes ("living beyond your means, any damn fool in the pub can tell you that. [Alfred] Marshall was a sounder economist"). Watkins Sr had worked as a mines labourer before qualifying to teach, and suffered a professional calamity when he lost his headship for some unspecified offence. It embittered him. But young Alan grew up in a bookish household, Carlyle and Macaulay on the shelves, the News Chronicle and Observer through the letterbox, encouraged to talk public affairs as well as watch rugby with his father. On matters of grammar and taste, though, he deferred to his mother. After she died at 92, he felt ashamed that he had not rescued her from an old people's home.

Apart from books (he wrote eight), drink and rugby were lifelong enthusiasms. Champagne ("a little of the sparkling wine of north-east France , if I may" he would say at the bar), claret and armagnac were his staple tipples. He disapproved of New World wines ("you can't drink them every day"). He came to see rugby in terms of its modern game as dominated by players who were much heavier, but also stupider, than they were in his youth. He may well have felt the same way about politics in the age of Blair and Brown. He respected politics more than he did most politicians.

After Amman Valley grammar school, Watkins read law at Queens' College, Cambridge (1951-55), to which he would have been awarded an exhibition, had he needed one. But he had already obtained a county scholarship. Active in both Labour and Cambridge Union politics, Watkins was married young ("I was virtually a child bridegroom") to Ruth Howard, sister of his future colleague, Anthony Howard. They lived in a converted stable in the garden of the eminent philosopher GE Moore OM. Watkins later included a portrait of Moore in his collection of contemporary Brief Lives (1982), along with other famous men he had known, including Lord Beaverbrook, Anthony Powell, Kingsley Amis, Malcolm Muggeridge and many politicians.

Inevitably, he did his national service in the education corps, conveniently stationed at RAF Duxford, a 12-mile scooter ride from home – which allowed him to avoid many of the "ridiculous dinners" which aspiring barristers were expected to eat at Lincoln 's Inn before being called to the bar. Though Watkins later worked as a research assistant to Professor William Robson at the London School of Economics, he had decided by this time that neither the law, nor academic life, was his vocation.

In his anecdote-rich memoir, A Short Walk Down Fleet St ("the finest account of journalism I have ever read," declared Brian Walden), Watkins recalls contemplating two admired careers, glamorous Mr Justice Lawton, then a rising legal star, and louche Henry Fairlie, brilliant columnar meteor. Which would he rather be? Fairlie, he decided.

Watkins's luck was in. Though he had written little undergraduate journalism, an article for Socialist Commentary had praised John Junor, editor of the Sunday Express, who had got in trouble with MPs for suggesting that they got special petrol rations during the Suez crisis. Watkins would not have chosen the Sunday Express, but his stint writing the then influential Crossbencher column proved to be a passport to the higher reaches of columnar journalism which he sought.

Despite having been briefly a Labour councillor in Fulham (1959-62), Watkins was recruited by the Spectator shortly after the Tories lost office in 1964 and the cerebral Iain Macleod moved from the cabinet to become editor. Macleod would rarely interfere ("Must you say that about Ted [Heath]? … Well, if you must, I suppose you must").

When Nigel Lawson, another future Tory chancellor, took over, nor did he. This mattered to Watkins, who resisted editorial interference by owners ("I do not favour sucking up to proprietors") or by editors such as Dick Crossman at the New Statesman or John Cole ("like many dissenters he did not tolerate dissent") at the Observer . "My principal object was, as it remains, to have control of my copy," he explained.

When Crossman tried to dictate topic or content he resigned, though later patched things up. At the Observer he argued often with Cole, who was then deputy editor and who held more respectful views of leading politicians. At the Independent on Sunday, his final berth, Watkins left Peter Wilby in a frequent state of "disgruntlement and disillusionment". He once resisted the editor's protest that "dusky despot" was no longer an acceptable way to describe an African dictator. For Watkins, as for Wodehouse, it was merely a joke. He got the phrase into the paper under Wilby's successor, Rosie Boycott.

During Lawson's editorship, Watkins had his first serious brush with authority when, in 1967, he published two D (for defence) Notices in his column – hitherto secret documents warning newspapers what they could (not) print on security grounds. There was a row and an inquiry under Lord Radcliffe.

The Spectator was condemned, but Watkins was unrepentant. Among later controversies, his most alarming was the costly three-week high court libel action brought against Watkins and the Observer in 1988 by the Labour MP Michael Meacher, whom the columnist had accused of embellishing his working-class credentials. Meacher lost and Watkins, who had spent three days in the witness box, wrote a book: A Slight Case of Libel (1990).

In 1967 he moved to the New Statesman, then edited by Paul Johnson, where he remained until 1976, first under the editorship of Crossman, another ex-cabinet grandee, later that of Watkins's brother-in-law, Howard, whom the journalists' chapel chose to succeed him. It was a pioneering idea, later adopted by the Guardian.

In each job he kept his own counsel. By 1969 he reached the conclusion that the Wilson/Castle trade union reforms, In Place of Strife, would neither work nor be accepted by Labour MPs. He was right. In 1975 he argued the case, less successfully, for a No vote in the European referendum. In the 90s he urged the renationalisation of water.

Such views were hard to pigeonhole. As a teenager watching wartime newsreels at the Palace cinema, Ammanford, Watkins had joined in boos for Churchill – no hero in south Wales – and cheers for Stalin's Soviet generals. Watkins became, and remained, a Bevanite on foreign policy, opposed to Nato and the cold war (for which he blamed Bevan's near namesake, Ernie Bevin), suspicious of the US and war in general.

"I'm just against activists, I'm an old-fashioned Whig," Barbara Castle's Diaries quote him as complaining over lunch. This outlook would be reflected in his disdain for the Iraq invasion of 2003 – and most wars in between. Unlike many friends he did not regard Europe as an article of political faith either. As a Welshman, he favoured small nations.

On domestic politics he took his cue from Crosland's Labour 60s revisionism, though he retained his father's suspicion of do-gooder, busybody politicians of all stripes – and their motives. Margaret Thatcher could be treated as a figure of fun, but as Watkins got older Blair – "the young warmonger," he would call him – was more often a source of irritation. Last Monday he cast a postal vote for the Lib Dems. Insofar as Watkins had heroes in politics, Crosland was probably number one, though his column's tone was usually that of amused detachment, punctuated with bursts of understated outrage.

When he finally arrived at the Observer in 1976 it was the fulfilment of his youthful ambition: the Observer's Hugh Massingham (1905-71) had been an early hero; Watkins was never drawn to the Guardian, whose takeover of the Observer in 1993 led to a row over pay and his departure. He had fought the New Statesman board's decision to sell the valuable freehold of its HQ at Great Turnstile and would later oppose Rupert Murdoch's takeover offer for the Observer. Watkins did not seek trouble, but nor did he walk away from it.

Watkins's private life was marred by misfortune. Before he and Ruth separated in 1974, she had attempted to kill herself. In 1982, she succeeded and the following year their daughter Rachel, who had found her mother, did the same. As in much else, Watkins remained adamantly libertarian on the individual's right to commit suicide. By this stage he was living with his son, David, in Islington, his flat in the same house as those of the Times/Telegraph columnist Frank Johnson, a close friend, and fellow sports writer, Matthew Engel, now of the FT. Also important in his later life were the art curator Fanny Butlin and her husband, Martin, the former keeper of the British collection at the Tate.

Increasingly oppressed by failing kidneys, he struggled unsuccessfully with dialysis and took to his bed last month. On Saturday David was about to read him Simon Hoggart's election sketch when he noticed his father had slipped away.

He is survived by Jane, David and his two grandchildren, Roy and Harry.

Alan Rhun Watkins, journalist, born 3 April 1933; died 8 May 2010

 

DAILY TELEPGRAPH

Published: 09 May 2010

Alan Watkins, who died on Saturday aged 77, was a political journalist whose crumpled bulk was a contrast to his punctilious prose. Although nominally a man of the Left he was by temperament an elitist who enjoyed the company in London clubland and mocked the blandishments of Labour modernisers.

His column, in The Observer and later in The Independent on Sunday , was for many years the best weekly review of political events, depicting the Westminster landscape via detailed disclosure. Paunched and bottle-worn though he might appear, Watkins had a sharp ear for the biographical nugget, the intricate trait that betrayed a parliamentarian's character.

He relished such foibles, not only in politicians but also among colleagues in Fleet Street's bibulous heyday. Despite a façade of frayed indolence he was, from the mid-1960s to the 1980s, one of the Westminster lobby's better-informed journalists and shrewdest commentators. Suspecting that politics had broadly generational cycles and could therefore be understood through historical anecdote. No Watkins column seemed complete without reference to the days of "Mr Harold Wilson and Mr James Callaghan".

In 1984 he ignited a memorable libel case when he accused a public school-educated, socialist MP, Michael Meacher, of exaggerating the modesty of his background. "Mr Meacher likes to claim that he is the son of an agricultural labourer," wrote Watkins. Meacher père had in fact trained as an accountant.

The class-conscious MP sued. Four years later the case reached the High Court and Watkins won the day, ending a long run of libel defeats for the Press.

Alan (Rhun) Watkins was born on April 3 1933, the son of a rugby-playing Carmarthenshire schoolmaster. Alan was the only one of three Watkins children to survive infancy. His mother, Violet, also a teacher, loved him "extravagantly" and imbued in him a respect for correct English and a suspicion of blowy Welshness. Even after her death at the age of 92, Watkins would halt his fountain pen over awkward sentences and wonder: "would Mama approve of that?" His columns were always composed by hand.

He was educated at the Amman Valley Grammar school and early on leaned towards the law, which he read at Queens', Cambridge . He retained a lawyer's mind, as he showed during the Meacher trial some 30 years later.

Watkins appreciated the opportunity afforded him by the Grammar school and watched in dismay as Labour, gripped by egalitarian zeal, destroyed selective schools in favour of comprehensives. He even attributed the decline of Welsh rugby to the disappearance of the Grammar.

At Cambridge he chaired the university's Labour club and was active in the Union , where contemporaries included Michael Heseltine, Tam Dalyell, Douglas Hurd and John Biffen.

After a sedentary National Service in the RAF Watkins was called to the Bar but never practised. One Friday in 1956, heading by train towards a Lincoln 's Inn dinner, he was enjoying Henry Fairlie's political column in the Spectator . Watkins silently asked himself if he would rather be Mr Justice Devlin, the most glamorous judge of the day, or Henry Fairlie. He found that he would prefer to be Fairlie and decided to become a journalist.

After a dry spell as a research assistant at the London School of Economics Watkins submitted an article to a journal called Socialist Commentary . Its subject was Parliament's high-handed treatment of the Sunday Express editor, John Junor, who had been summoned to the Commons to apologise for criticising MPs.

The Socialist Commentary piece, sympathetic to Junor, secured Watkins a job on the Sunday Express . From features he moved to the Crossbencher diary column and then became political correspondent, securing weekly audiences with the Leader of the Opposition, Harold Wilson. He liked Wilson but did not fall for him completely. Watkins was a hard man to impress.

A brief tour of duty in New York followed, where he had frequent contact with Lord Beaverbrook. His tasks included accompanying the Express 's ageing proprietor on walks round Central Park, with strict instructions from London not to get lost (one Express man, unfamiliar with the geography, had kept Beaverbrook out in the cold for several hours).

In 1964, with Beaverbrook dead and Junor tinkering tiresomely with his copy, Watkins left to become political columnist of the Spectator , thrilled to fill the seat, only six years after having set out in journalism, once occupied by his idol Fairlie.

His flair for controversy became apparent when, during an intelligence row between the Government and the Press, Watkins used his Spectator column to publish the "D" Notices with which officialdom had prevented the fourth estate printing sensitive information. He and his editor, Nigel Lawson, argued that "there is no D Notice on D Notices" but the episode earned the Spectator a severe reprimand from Whitehall . It did Watkins's career no harm however, and in 1967 he was poached by the New Statesman .

The offices of the Statesman were handily sited for El Vino, a dusty wine bar at the junction of Fleet Street and Fetter Lane to which, at dusk and often earlier, a bookish crowd of journalists would proceed like elephants to a Serengeti watering hole. Watkins, along with such men as Peregrine Worsthorne, Paul Johnson and Peter McKay, was to be found there most evenings.

Champagne was his drink. In dress and hygiene he exuded mouldiness but in wit he was agile. Beneath the air of tolerance lurked stubborn intellectual resolve. Asked how he came to be so fastidious about the English language, he replied that he considered it his duty, seeing as he spoke no other tongue (save some childhood Welsh). Indeed Watkins was not a good traveller, finding little abroad to compensate for the melancholy reassurances of home.

In 1974, having separated from his wife after 19 years of marriage, he moved to a small flat in Islington, north London . It was chosen for its proximity to Arsenal Football Club, which Watkins's son supported. Another neighbour was The Daily Telegraph 's parliamentary sketchwriter Frank Johnson. The two became friends and, over sausages one day, started to use the phrase "chattering classes" to describe fashionable, media-savvy bien-pensants.

When Watkins introduced his readers to the phrase it soon entered the language. It was not meant altogether unkindly. Watkins enjoyed gossip. He just made it sound more elevated. Watkins would also develop the term "Young Fogey" to describe a certain type of young man prevalent in the early 1980s. Although he credited the term to Terence Kilmartin, Watkins was certainly its populariser.

Shortly before Christmas 1975 Watkins nearly left the New Statesman to rejoin the Spectator , which was under the new ownership of Henry Keswick. The deep-pocketed Keswick had offered Watkins £6,000 per annum, £1,300 more than he was being paid at the Statesman . Watkins expected the Statesman to match the Spectator 's offer and was miffed when it did not.

Watkins's New Statesman editor (and brother-in-law), Anthony Howard, was not to be defeated easily, though. He persuaded The Observer to hire Watkins at an even higher price. The Statesman may have lost him, but so did its rival. As for Watkins, his salary had practically doubled in three days.

The Observer column quickly became a hit, and within a couple of years many people bought the paper simply to read Watkins. He made politics sound civilised, yet he was an elegant mauler of reputations. One such victim was the controversial Conservative, Edward du Cann. "Talking to Edward du Cann," wrote Watkins, "was rather like walking downstairs and somehow missing the last step. You were uninjured but remained disconcerted."

By now much of his research was being done at the bar of the Garrick. Labour had lost power and the days of long briefings from the Shadow Cabinet were gone. When Neil Kinnock became Labour leader Watkins found little to attract him to the party, Kinnock being just the sort of Welsh windbag his mother had taught him to avoid. Tony Blair later held equally little attraction; Watkins preferred well-read men.

Towards the end of the week he could, by this stage, sometimes be found in a heap of sleep at his desk. Visitors would pause at his office door and be shown a figure snoring like a walrus. "That," a guide would whisper, "is Mr Alan Watkins composing his Sunday column."

It paid not to underestimate him, though. During the Meacher libel trial that mistake was made by Meacher's barrister, Gordon Bishop:

Bishop: This is a serious matter, Mr Watkins.

Watkins: I rather doubt that. I rather doubt whether it is a serious matter.

Bishop: You doubt if it is serious?

Watkins: I doubt whether it is serious.

Bishop: You think that we are here because of one of your little jokes, do you?

Watkins: I think that you are here because you have got into something which you probably wish you had got out of.

Afterwards, Watkins described his victory fully in A Slight Case of Libel (1990). Other books included Brief Lives (1982), comprising sketches of his Westminster fellows, and the autobiographical A Short Walk Down Fleet Street (2000).

A Conservative Coup (1991), which detailed the toppling of Margaret Thatcher, was one of his great later flourishes. But New Labour filled him with little joy. He had as little time for the management of The Guardian , which had bought The Observer , as he did for Peter Mandelson. Indeed Watkins moved almost immediately to The Independent on Sunday , which gave his copy the respect it deserved.

From 1959 to 1962 he had sat on Fulham Borough Council in the Labour interest and was credited with a decision to ban old people from huddling in public libraries. He argued that libraries should be places of learning, not simply places where pensioners could keep warm.

He was, variously, a columnist for the Evening Standard , rugby correspondent for The Field , and drink columnist for The Observer Magazine .

Long after the newspapers departed Fleet Street, Watkins could still be found alighting creakily from taxi cabs to step swollen foot inside El Vino. Among the bar's modern clientele of City thrusters Watkins made a doleful sight as he stared at his champagne with basset hound eyes. Often he would be alone.

He continued to write with distinctive elegance until last month, when his final column described the first televised debate between the party leaders and noted that "Mr Clegg is adept at the soft answer that turneth away wrath." He would have surely appreciated the chance the write on the political situation in which the country now finds itself. Following his death the leaders of all three major political parties paid tribute to his talents.

Alan Watkins married, in 1955, Ruth Howard, who died in 1982. They had one son and two daughters, one of whom predeceased him.

 

Alan Watkins

Sunday Times, 16 May 2010

Alan Watkins, who died on Saturday aged 77, was a political journalist whose crumpled bulk was a contrast to his punctilious prose. Although nominally a man of the left, he was by temperament an elitist who enjoyed the company in London clubland and mocked the blandishments of Labour modernisers.

Despite a facade of frayed indolence he was, from the mid-1960s to the 1980s, one of the Westminster lobby's better-informed journalists and shrewdest commentators.

Champagne was his drink. In dress and hygiene he exuded mouldiness but in wit he was agile. Beneath the air of tolerance lurked stubborn intellectual resolve. Asked how he came to be so fastidious about the English language, he replied that he considered it his duty, seeing as he spoke no other tongue (save some childhood Welsh). Indeed Watkins was not a good traveller, finding little abroad to compensate for the melancholy reassurances of home.

Long after the newspapers departed Fleet Street, Watkins could still be found alighting creakily from taxi cabs to step swollen foot inside El Vino. Among the bar's modern clientele of City thrusters Watkins made a doleful sight as he stared at his champagne with basset hound eyes. Often he would be alone.

He continued to write with distinctive elegance for the Independent on Sunday until last month, when his final column described the first televised debate between the party leaders and noted that “Mr Clegg is adept at the soft answer that turneth away wrath”.

 

The Independent

Alan Watkins: A tribute to a voice without peer

The Independent on Sunday, 9 May 2010

He dabbled in politics, but the elder statesman of political commentary made his distinctive mark in a more permanent way, by writing, says colleague and friend Anthony Howard.

As a prose stylist, Alan Watkins was without a peer among contemporary political commentators. His weekly contributions to this paper, until his last illness, appearing regularly on these pages since 1993, amounted just as much to a literary essay as to a political column. As a writer, he admitted to two pre-eminent influences, the novelists P G Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh, and he brought to the writing of his weekly column just the same gifts of directness and simplicity that characterised the style of each of his novelist mentors. Among those who pursued his own calling, he never ceased to acknowledge his debt to Hugh Massingham, whose "London Diary" (as it was somewhat misleadingly called) surfaced each week in The Observer between the mid-1940s and the early 1960s. His last article, on leaving the New Statesman to join The Observer in January 1975, was a brilliant piece entitled "Hugh Massingham and the Craft of Political Journalism".

It was typical of Watkins that he saw himself first and foremost as a craftsman (nor did he ever stand any nonsense about journalism being a profession: to him it was always a trade – mostly, to borrow one of his own favourite phrases, "a funny old" one). But it was still a trade in which trouble needed to be taken. That was something that Watkins himself always did, burnishing and polishing what he had written until he was satisfied that it could hold the reader's attention right from the very first paragraph to the last. This thoroughness was probably something he owed to the nature of his Welsh background: the only son and sole child of two Welsh primary school teachers (who took the old News Chronicle on weekdays and The Observer on Sundays) he retained something of that Celtic, but never Calvinist, inheritance all his life.

Like the much younger Neil Kinnock, he was the first member of his family "in a thousand years to attend a university". Watkins in 1952 won a place from Amman Valley Grammar School to Queens' College, Cambridge . In his four years there he read law (taking an LL.M as well as a BA), while also becoming chairman of the University Labour Club and being elected to the committee of the Cambridge Union. His initial ambition was to go the Bar and he qualified as a barrister in 1957 (hence, his more irreverent friends always thought, his occasional "Buzzfuzz" pieces on the law and the constitution).

In the 1950s, though, there was little prospect of any young man making even the barest living in his early years at the Bar. So Watkins, who had married at the age of 22, took an academic job instead, becoming a research assistant at the LSE. It was in this phase of his life that he first dipped his toes into the rougher waters of political journalism, contributing an article to the then Gaitskellite monthly, Socialist Commentary, criticising the way in which the House of Commons had, in his view, exceeded its powers by seeking to discipline a national newspaper editor. That editor, who had been forced to apologise at the Bar of the House for "a contempt of Parlament" (sic), was the young John Junor. Perhaps not surprisingly, the piece appealed to him sufficiently for him to offer the then 26-year-old Watkins a job on The Sunday Express. Whether Junor realised it or not, he had set Watkins on his course for life.

Five years on The Sunday Express – including a six-month spell as that paper's New York correspondent and a rather longer period as author of its once-feared Crossbencher column – were brought to an end only by a surprise invitation from the former Conservative Cabinet Minister, Iain Macleod, then in exile from the Tory front bench as editor of The Spectator, to join that periodical as political columnist. There, not wholly predictably, Watkins and Macleod hit it off, and his weekly contribution, together with the editor's own column signed Quoodle, became one of the highlights of the mid-1960s' Spectator. Yet relations with Macleod's successor, the young Tory speechwriter and former city editor, Nigel Lawson, did not prove quite so easy and in 1967 Watkins accepted, with some relief, an offer from Paul Johnson to do a similar job on the New Statesman.

These were the New Statesman's lush days, when it regularly outsold The Spectator by a margin of at least two to one. His new home also provided a more natural setting for someone of Watkins's own political leanings. He had served as a Labour councillor on Fulham Borough Council between 1959 and 1962, and at that stage actively considered trying to make a life in active politics. But the truth probably was that he was altogether too free an ideological spirit to adapt easily to the constraints of party discipline (he soon gave up his membership of the Labour Party and became especially proud of having voted in contrasting ways at succeeding general elections). But at least in the late 1960s he managed to rub along peacefully enough with Paul Johnson, not of course then the right-wing firebrand that he subsequently became.

The sparks only began to fly when an ex-Labour cabinet minister moved in to replace Johnson and take charge of the New Statesman after Harold Wilson's electoral defeat in 1970. Dick Crossman and Watkins, though they had known each other for a number of years the way that lobby journalists and politicians do, soon proved to be chalk and cheese, the former secretary of state for health vainly seeking to impose his will on his recalcitrant contributor (Watkins had abandoned his staff status to go freelance at Crossman's request in 1971).

A period of relative calm descended in the following year ,when I succeeded Crossman, and it was not long before Watkins – freelance or not – became the first worker-director of the paper. In the boardroom he was not just a tower of strength but a pillar of good sense, effectively seeing off one of the earliest moves to persuade the paper to sacrifice its most valuable asset (its freehold property on the north-east corner of Lincoln 's Inn Fields) to a property developer. Journalistically, however, he continued to plough his own individualistic furrow, urging a No vote in the 1975 European referendum while the paper editorially backed the case made by Roy Jenkins and others in favour of Britain remaining within Europe .

This was a period, though, that witnessed some of Watkins's finest writing, and not only about politics. He had begun to spread his wings, contributing successively as a general columnist to the Sunday Mirror and the Evening Standard. Even in the New Statesman he by no means always stuck to his political last, publishing a particularly evocative, lengthy piece entitled "My Days with Beaverbrook" in 1973, and a couple of years later producing a wonderfully comic account of a dialogue overheard during a party conference while on a Blackpool tram. (Watkins always had an acute ear for the strange things people say and could, I often reflected, easily have turned himself into a novelist or playwright).

Instead, he chose to put his energies into slight – and sometimes not so slight – political books that got better and better as he grew older. His first hardback production, The Liberal Dilemma, published as long ago as 1966, was a bit pedestrian but he gradually found his characteristic tone of voice in such later works as A Conservative Coup (1991) – the definitive account of Mrs Thatcher's Downing Street defenestration – and with his classic fragment of autobiography, A Short Walk Down Fleet Street , published in 2000. Mention should also probably be made of his A Slight Case of Libel, vividly recording his legal triumph over the then Labour frontbencher Michael Meacher, in the law courts in 1988.

Like many of the best journalists, Watkins tended to be something of a loner (his wife, from whom he was separated, died in 1982, as did, later that year, his elder daughter, leaving him with one adult son and a second then almost grown-up daughter). Towards the end of his life, he ventured out less and less from his Islington home. Until well into his seventies he went every Friday to the offices of The Independent on Sunday to fine tune his copy, and would also make regular weekly visits to the Garrick Club, but that – apart from the devoted support of a longstanding woman friend – was about the extent of his social life.

He had, however, a host of admirers and wellwishers, most of them much younger than himself. Although in his later years he was seen there fairly seldom, he had developed into one of the institutions of the " Westminster village", and could certainly claim to have transformed the modern political column into a contemporary literary art-form. There are, as he himself might have said in his understated way, many more depressing sorts of memorial than that.

Date this page last updated: August 23, 2010