Ferdinand Mount

Raise a glass to Alan Watkins

Ferdinand Mount mourns the passing of his friend and colleague — and a former Spectator columnist — whose wit, humour and clarity of expression remain unrivalled

Ferdinand Mount mourns the passing of his friend and colleague — and a former Spectator columnist — whose wit, humour and clarity of expression remain unrivalled

As Alan Watkins lay dying last Saturday, his younger grandson Harry recited to him the passage from Macbeth he had just learnt at school. It was an apt send-off for the most enchanting political commentator of his day, as meanwhile in Downing Street Birnam Wood was inching closer to Dunsinane (though to be fair to Macbeth he did not claim that he was merely ‘securing a progressive coalition’). To those who professed to be shocked by the shenanigans of the past few days, Alan would surely have rolled his great bloodhound eyes and sighed, ‘politics is a rough old trade, you know’.

The pity of it is that he did not stay long enough to give one of his meticulous and irresistible blow-by-blow accounts as he did of the fall of Margaret Thatcher in A Conservative Coup. As it is, we had to content ourselves with the last column he wrote for the Independent on Sunday three weeks ago, after he had given up the kidney dialysis (a sort of DIY Dignitas). There he declared himself to be in a minority of one in refusing to be dazzled by the first TV debate between the party leaders. Mr Cameron’s Big Society was, he thought, a nightmarish vision ‘reminiscent of nothing so much as J.J. Rousseau’s work The Social Contract whose notion of the active citizen foretends some of the worst excesses of the French Revolution’. Mr Clegg was adept at the soft answer that turneth away wrath, but ‘he did not have anything to teach Mr Cameron, still less poor Mr Brown, who chews gum even when he does not have anything to chew’.

I first met Alan in the gloomy basement dining room of the old Spectator offices in Gower Street in the mid-1960s.

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Written by
Ferdinand Mount
Ferdinand Mount was head of the No. 10 policy unit under Margaret Thatcher. He is author of a number of books, including ‘The New Few: Power and Inequality in Britain Now’.

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