Prof Anthony King, one of the undisputed giants of postwar British political science and a familiar face in the BBC’s live coverage of general election night results, has died aged 82.
Born in Canada, King arrived in Britain as a Rhodes scholar in the 1950s. He taught in the school of government at the University of Essex for half a century and never officially retired. After early collaborations on studies of the 1964 and 1966 general elections with David Butler, King replaced Butler as a fixture in the BBC’s television coverage of general elections from 1983 to 2005.
A born populariser and teacher, King reported on and analysed Gallup opinion polls for the Daily Telegraph for years, but his private political sympathies, though always carefully hidden, were never those of his employers.
King’s many books included the semi-official history of the Social Democratic party, which split from Labour in 1981, written with Ivor Crewe, his close friend and later vice-chancellor of Essex. The two joined forces again in 2013 for the bestselling study, The Blunders of Our Governments.
King was a member of several significant public bodies, including the Nolan committee on standards in public life in 1994 and the Wakeham commission on the future of the House of Lords in 1999. In 2005 he chaired an inquiry on drugs policy for the Royal Society of Arts.
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