So why, when I was charged with shepherding Watkins into print at the Independent on Sunday from 1993 to 1996 – first as Deputy Editor, then as Editor – did we fail so badly to hit it off? I spent much of those three years in a state of disgruntlement and disillusion with Watkins. Indeed, I toyed occasionally with idea of dispensing with his services entirely and once even checked his contract to see how much notice was required. I had not realised the extent to which Watkins reciprocated these feelings until I consulted the index to this delightful book. There I found references to “Wilby, Peter, A. W.’s relations with” stretching over five pages, thus giving me the same degree of attention as the better-known and more substantial figures of Crossman, R. H. S. and Cole, John, both of whom had enjoyed equally troubled relations with A. W. as respectively editor of the New Statesman and Deputy Editor of The Observer. Watkins, I should make it clear, pays me several compliments in this memoir of his career in journalism. He supported my candidacy for the IoS editorship and our social relations remain cordial, though not intimate, to this day. We have had arguments, but never rows. (Watkins is very particular about the distinction). Nevertheless, he makes it plain that over our three years as colleagues, I consistently niggled him: about his pronouns, about his language (I once decreed that he could not describe an African dictator as “a dusky despot”), about his subject-matter, about his general approach to politics. He compares our relationship, rather oddly, to a sexual one where the partners, superficially suited to each other, somehow fail to get on. When I was eventually sacked, he “was not sorry to see a change”.

The reasons for this unhappy episode may be thought to lie in the personalities of the two protagonists and therefore to be of little interest to anybody else. No doubt that is largely true. But they also, I think, say some things of wider importance about the relationships between editors and star columnists. I have discovered that it is not unusual for editors to be vaguely disgruntled with and uneasy about a columnist that everyone else admires. The first point is that star columnists are expensive. When I was there, Watkins’s freelance contract costs the Independent on Sunday £60,000 a year and for this he was required to write one column of about 1,200 words, 46 weeks a year. I know that, against what some big names command, this was a mere snip. Nevertheless, the IoS was and is a cash-starved paper. It operates essentially as a bodiless head since, while it has a full complement of editors for home and foreign news, arts, books and so on, it is expected to draw its writers largely from the daily paper’s staff. For Watkins’s money, I could have easily doubled my fulltime reporting staff. Moreoever, Watkins also expected us to pay his expenses which involved daily journeys by taxi. These latter were recorded in algebraic form – N1-SW1; WC2-EC4; SW1-EC1; WC2-N1, and so on – and, I quickly realised, represented Watkins’s daily peregrinations between his home in Islington, the House of Commons, the Garrick Club, the New El Vino’s at Blackfriars and the IoS offices, then in City Road. I took particular exception to N1-SW1 and N1-EC1 since, as I pointed out to Watkins, it was unusual for employers to reimburse journalists for what, in effect, were their journeys to work, and even more unusual for such journeys to be taken by taxi. To be fair, he agreed to moderate his expenses but they remained substantial.

Disappointment

The third point about editors and star columnists is, I think, the most important. Editors want to….well, edit. This is not a matter, as Watkins seems to think, of their wishing to re-write copy to their own preconceptions. Rather, their role has been well compared to that of orchestral conductors: a little more brass here; a touch more wind there; now a slower tempo; now a faster one. They do not want to seize the instrument off the lead violinist; but they would rather the violinist didn’t play from an entirely different score. The best columnists, however, have their own agenda. They are idiosyncratic, egotistic, unpredictable. That is what makes them good columnists. They prefer to write about their own passions of the day or week, not their Editor’s. The Editor may be anxious that such-and-such a subject be covered on the comment pages, and think the columnist the obvious person to do it, only to find the columnist has quite different ideas.

This was the nub of my difficulty with Watkins and, I learn from this book, also of Crossman’s. As Watkins correctly notes, I became irritated with him because I thought he “had chosen the wrong subject for the week, or had gone about it in the wrong way.” Watkins always rang me on Thursdays to tell me his proposed subject in order, as he put it, to prevent “overlap.” It soon became clear to me that this exercise was to stop other people overlapping with Watkins, not vice versa. Moreover, Watkins, while anxious to avoid duplication, had no interest in helping to avoid omission: he was not susceptible to suggestions that he should cover a subject – a new Tory row over Europe, say – because the readers would expect some comment on it and we had no space for it elsewhere. (His biggest row with Crossman was in 1970 over Watkins’s failure to make adequate comment in his column on a Tory reshuffle). Still less was he interested in suggestions about what readers would want to know. The result often seemed to me quite exasperatingly perverse. For example, during Tory leadership crises (and they came along about once a month during those years), Watkins would insist on devoting most of his column to a tedious (in my view) repetition of the precise rules for removing a Tory leader and electing a new one.

I repeat: no journalist has given me greater pleasure than Alan Watkins, though others may have given me more intellectual stimulation. He is the prince of political columnists, having elevated his craft almost to an art form. Our poor working relationship was most probably my failure, not his, though it might have been better if each of us had had some experience of the other’s role. But so far as I know, Watkins has never aspired to an executive role on a newspaper. Brilliant columnists rarely become editors and, when they do – think of Simon Jenkins and Andrew Marr – they are often judged unsuccessful. (Ex-editors often become columnists, but not brilliantly). Perhaps they must always suffer from mutual incomprehension.