Alan Watkins

Alan Watkins (born 1933) is a Welsh-born political columnist for the London newspaper "The Independent on Sunday" who also writes about rugby.

Born in Tycroes, Carmarthenshire, he was educated at Tycroes Primary School, Amman Valley Grammar School and then studied law at Queens' College, Cambridge. [http://www.terrynorm.ic24.net/alan%20watkins.htm Ammanford, Carmarthenshire web site ] ]

He is the author of "A Short Walk Down Fleet Street", "A Slight Case of Libel: Meacher vs Trelford and Others", and "A Conservative Coup". Most of his long career as a commentator was spent at "The Observer" newspaper, but he has also written for "The Sunday Express", "The Spectator", the "New Statesman", the "Sunday Mirror", and the London "Evening Standard".

He is 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 writes 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.

Notes

References

* Watkins, Alan (1991). "A Conservative Coup: The Fall of Margaret Thatcher", London, Duckworth. ISBN 0-7156-2386-9.