My friend and former colleague Anthony Harris, who has died aged 86, was a most distinguished financial journalist and one of the last of the great Fleet Street eccentrics.

He was born in London, the only son of Adela (née Jacobs), who hailed from Patagonia, and Edwin Harris, a south London GP. After attending Bryanston School in Dorset, he went on to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he studied history and economics.

Anthony spent six years on the Oxford Mail before joining the Financial Times as assistant features editor in 1959. He kept open house with extraordinary generosity in all the places he lived, first in Oxford and later in Barnsbury, in the 1960s, where he was among the first colonisers of an area of north London that became so associated with the media.

He held a variety of FT posts, writing many a penetrating article demonstrating his passionate interest in British industry, especially the declining motor sector.

He left in 1968 to become The Guardian’s economics editor in a section run first by him and later by Andreas Whittam Smith, who went on to found The Independent.

Whittam Smith recalls that it was hit or miss whether Anthony would deliver his copy, so he always ensured that there was enough material to cover. His instructions to the rest of the staff were: “But if Anthony does deliver, it will be brilliant and must go straight in.”

In 1973, Anthony returned to the FT as an economics and financial commentator. Former colleagues recall his brilliance, but also his distant relationship with punctuality and a rather erratic memory for honouring diary engagements.

He could easily forget a lunch with the Chancellor and once, when covering economic affairs in Washington, he failed to turn up to interview Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan.

The young FT leader writer Ed Balls shared an office with Anthony when he was chief economics leader writer, and recalls how Harris would disappear for a walk round the block and a cigarette, returning, while panic stations were setting in, to produce a brilliant leader at the last moment, in phenomenally quick time. “He had thought through every word before approaching his desk,” says Balls.

Anthony retired from the FT in 1994, but he proceeded to write a column for The Times until his second retirement in 2000.

He was a very kind man: when the future FT editor Lionel Barber was suffering from repetitive strain injury while in Washington, Anthony volunteered to become his amanuensis for a veritable volume of copy to be sent to London.

Anthony was a great family man. He loved sailing and bridge. In his latter years he loved revisiting his east coast sailing territory and the wondrous views of the Blyth estuary. He kept abreast of news and current affairs, and showed an intellectual’s curiosity in the strange world of daytime television. He is survived by his second wife, the publisher Liz Fidlon, by three daughters from his first marriage, and by his sister.

• William Keegan is senior economics commentator at The Observer. This

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