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

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.