Alan Rhun Watkins (3 April 1933 – 8 May 2010)^[1] was for over 50 years a British political columnist in various London-based magazines and newspapers. He also wrote about wine and rugby.

Born in Tycroes, Carmarthenshire, to David John Watkins (1894–1980), a teacher (sometime headmaster at Llanedi School, near Tycroes), from a mining family, and Violet, also a teacher, daughter of Dr Edwin Harris, G.P.^[2][3] He was educated at Tycroes Primary School and Amman Valley Grammar School before studying law at Queens' College, Cambridge.^[4] After National Service he was called to the Bar.^[2]

Much of his long career as a commentator on politics was spent at The Observer newspaper (1976–93), but he also wrote for The Sunday Express (1959–64),^[2] The Spectator (1964–67), the New Statesman (1967–76), 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 (such as the Conservative Party's 1922 Committee)^[5] who come to tell a party leader that it is time to go. But as he wrote in a footnote in A Conservative Coup:

He coined and popularised a number of phrases that have passed into common journalistic parlance (including "chattering classes";^[7] although he fleshed out the archetypal "young fogey" in The Spectator in 1984, Watkins noted that he had adopted the phrase from the journalist Terence Kilmartin, who had used it in reference to the academic John Casey; Watkins stated that the phrase originated with Dornford Yates in 1928).^[8]

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.^[7][9]

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.^[10]