Philip Roy Wilkinson OBE (born October 1948)[1] is a retired British Army officer who has served as the
Wiltshire Police and Crime Commissioner since August 2021. He was re-elected in May 2024.
Wilkinson was educated at
Sandhurst, from where on 25 July 1969 he was commissioned into the
Royal Regiment of Artillery.[2] He was a Major in that regiment by 1982[3] and later served in the Commando and Parachute Brigades and the Special Forces. He retired from the British Army in 1998[4] and was awarded an
OBE.[5]
Wilkinson continued to work in security roles, and by 2020 was working in
Somalia for the Minister for Internal Security. This was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and he returned to Wiltshire and began to write a book of memoirs, Sharpening the Weapons of Peace,[6] while becoming a senior research fellow at
King's College London.[7]
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ab"Lieutenant Colonel Philip Roy Wilkinson, M.B.E. (487603), Royal Regiment of Artillery." in The London Gazette, 15 June 1998, Supplement 55155,
p. 6