OBITUARY : Viscount Watkinson

Harold Watkinson was trained as an engineer and, applying a mind which was rigorous and well-defined, entered parliamentary politics in the general election of 1950 as Conservative MP for Woking. He was, already, a highly successful businessman and, like many before and after him (the late John Davies and today Sir James Goldsmith spring to mind), believed that businessmen could handle government far more efficiently and effectively than could politicians. He found out, however, that politics was an art of its own, and that the methods of man management that he had evolved for himself in business were ineffective when applied to the emotional, and often tortuous, handling of political affairs.

Although a highly competent manager, Watkinson never developed the sheer skill and sure-footedness manifested by his main patron, Harold Macmillan. The peak of his political career (and the metaphor is apt, for he was an enthusiastic mountaineer) was attained when Macmillan made him Minister of Defence in 1959: he held the post until 1962, when the Prime Minister decided that Watkinson-style management was not to his liking. Watkinson left politics for ever in 1964. For years, however, he continued to write about military matters, most often in letters to the Times.

Watkinson was born in 1910 and educated at Queen's College, Taunton, and King's College London, where he read Engineering. Before the outbreak of the Second World War he had been courting a beautiful young lady, Vera Langmead. Once war began he - already a keen sailor - signed up with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve; but he also suggested to Miss Langmead that they get married promptly "because", he said later, "I could not work out how long the war would last, nor whether I would survive it. Therefore, I concluded that we should get some marital bliss in first." Many young men then married thus in haste, and repented later. Watkinson did not have to repent; but he married his Vera in November 1939.

He became Tory candidate for Woking, and won the seat in the 1950 general election, which election marked the dying fall of the Attlee government first elected in 1945. It was, however, more than a year before Churchill resumed office. In 1951 Watkinson became Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation. After a stint at the Ministry of Labour, he returned to his old department as its head, in 1955.

As he rose through relatively junior ranks Watkinson earned a well-deserved reputation as a superbly competent organiser. In 1959, therefore, Macmillan made him Minister for Defence. This was a somewhat anomalous job, created for himself by Churchill in 1940, in order to take power from the three Service ministries. But it was, until 1959, a job really only made for such a man as Churchill. It was not made for a non-political politician.

Macmillan, moreover - who had served, briefly, as Minister of Defence himself - had a particular dream for the department. It was, essentially, to reduce the power and the status of individual Service ministers, and to make the senior minister the senior man. Watkinson, he thought, was the ideal individual to bring about such a revolution.

Two difficulties presented themselves. Charm was needed to persuade the Service chiefs to agree to re-organisation: Watkinson did not have the necessary charm. And, then, Watkinson's ideas of management were very different from those of the Prime Minister. Watkinson thought that the best way of proceeding was to find the soldiers, sailors and airmen best suited, technically, to their jobs, and to let them get on with things. Macmillan's idea was to impose a visionary concept of a united service organisation on the suspicious and often captious individual forces. By 1962 he concluded that Watkinson was not the man for the job. Instead, he employed Duncan Sandys, with his fearsome reputation as a hatchet man, and then Peter Thorneycroft, who was equally ferocious. The First Sea Lord, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, was employed to do the charming. Macmillan had no illusions about this. "Poor Dickie," he wrote, "talks all the time and has (with all his charm) a very limited mental capacity."

Watkinson was rewarded (this was Macmillan's own way of man management) with a Companionship of Honour, and a peerage. He was never fully consoled, but he made for himself a glittering and lucrative career in the business world becoming, among many other things, managing director of Schweppes, executive chairman of Cadbury Schweppes, and a director of the Midland Bank.

He also found time for a host of good causes, for his remarkable energy sustained him until nearly the end of his life. He was a bluff man, who did not suffer fools. But he was out of place in a political world which was coming ever more to rely on a style which he did not possess, rather than a substance which he undoubtedly did.

Patrick Cosgrave

Harold Arthur Watkinson, politician and businessman: born 25 January 1910; MP (Conservative) for Woking 1950-64; PPS to the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation 1951-52; Parliamentary Secretary to Ministry of Labour and National Service 1952-55; PC 1955; Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation 1955-59; Minister of Defence 1959-62; CH 1962; group managing director, Schweppes Ltd 1963-68, chairman, Cadbury Schweppes Ltd 1969- 74; created 1964 Viscount Watkinson; President, CBI 1976-77; Chairman, Council, BIM 1968-70, President 1973-78; married 1939 Vera Langmead (two daughters); died 19 December 1995.