Alan Watkins


Alan Rhun Watkins was for over 50 years a British political columnist in various London-based magazines and newspapers. He also wrote about wine and rugby.

Life and career

Born in Tycroes, Carmarthenshire, to David John Watkins, a teacher, from a mining family, and Violet, also a teacher, daughter of Dr Edwin Harris, G.P. He was educated at Tycroes Primary School and Amman Valley Grammar School before studying law at Queens' College, Cambridge. After National Service he was called to the Bar.
Much of his long career as a commentator on politics was spent at The Observer newspaper, but he also wrote for The Sunday Express, The Spectator, the New Statesman, the Sunday Mirror, and the London Evening Standard.
He was noted for coining the political phrase "the men in grey suits", indicating a delegation of senior party figures who come to tell a party leader that it is time to go. But as he wrote in a footnote in A Conservative Coup:
The original phrase was 'the men in suits'. It was used, for example, by the present writer in the Observer, 6 May 1990. During and before the 39 hours it became transformed into 'the men in grey suits', which stuck. As Lord Whitelaw observed on television, it was an inaccurate phrase, because on the day in question, 21 November, his interviewer could see that he was wearing a blue suit. And, indeed, the typical Conservative grandee tends to wear a dark blue or black suit, with chalk- or pin-stripes, what may be called a White's Club suit. The original phrase 'the men in suits' is the more accurate.

He coined and popularised a number of phrases that have passed into common journalistic parlance.
At the end of each year he wrote a piece called "Master Alan Watkins' Almanack", written in the style of a 17th-century seer and making tentative, and slightly tongue-in-cheek, predictions for the year ahead.

Death

Watkins was in failing health for several weeks prior to his death at his London home on 8 May 2010 from renal failure. He was 77.

Publications

Books